 Good morning, and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series, where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show as we are doing today. And it will be available on our website in our archives for you to watch at your convenience. And I'll show you at the end of today's show. I'll show you where you can access all of our recordings. Both our live show and recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share, spread the news with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries. We similar to your state library. So we provide services to all types of libraries in the state. Public, academic, K-12, corrections, museums, archives, historical societies, anything and everything. So we will have shows on Encompass Live, excuse me, that could be for any type of library. We really are only criteria, really, is it something to do with libraries? Something cool libraries are doing. We do interviews, many training sessions, demos of services and products, all sorts of things. We have Nebraska Library Commission staff that come on and do presentations sometimes for programs and services we're offering through the commission. But we also bring on guest speakers, which we have this morning. And so we have today is Erica Rogers. Good morning, Erica. Good morning. And she is from our Hastings, Nebraska Public Library. And she's going to talk to us about some cool things she did with their programming kits and how you can do it too. So I will hand it over to you, Erica, to take it away and tell us all about it. Well, hello. As she said, my name is Erica Rogers, and I'm with the Hastings Public Library. And today I'm going to be just talking about what we did with programming kits, especially when COVID hit and then how we're continuing to use those strategies and things like that even now as we're moving forward. So we're going to start with, of course, let's see, here we go. So we all remember when COVID hit in 2020, it was kind of a scary time. We had to close our doors. We had to kind of figure out what we were going to do to still serve our communities because people still needed programming, possibly even more. Because at that time, people were being isolated and a lot of people were afraid to leave their houses and things like that. And so coming up with programming would be a way to kind of help ease those nerves a little bit and try to reach people and not make them feel quite so alone. So we came up with programming kits. And these were kits that you could take home. Our idea was that these kits would provide all the materials that they would need in order to do the program. And then they would get to keep the leftovers. That way, we didn't have to worry about the germs that were coming back. They didn't have to worry about the germs of the person who used it before them. And it was just a little bit more of a piece of mind. But this is kind of an easy thing to think about. But then the social aspect is where we really struggled. Because, again, people were being isolated at this point and we were really worried about those people that were living alone and not getting out and talking to people. So the solution that we came up with was Zoom. We gave people a couple of different options when we sent out the kit. The picture you see is the sheet that we handed out with all of our kits that were sent out. We gave them the option of a Zoom meeting, which is where we would go live and send them the link and we would do the project together. That way, they could talk to each other. We left the mics open and we treated it just like we would an in-person class. So they could talk to each other. They could ask us questions. And it kind of built as much of that feeling of being together as you could at that point in time. But we also then offered a video tutorial. So if the Zoom meeting didn't work or they were too busy or wanted to just do it at a later time, this video tutorial was the one that we recorded that they could watch at any point in time. It went through the project and... I'll talk about that, I guess, in just a little bit. But... So what I'm going to be talking about next is like how to adapt the program. So you have the program concept and you decided that you want to do it as a take-home kit. How do you do that? The first thing you do is look at the supplies. This is something that I do even with in-person programming. But when you're thinking about sending kids home where you don't want to receive the stuff back, you have to think about the type of things that you want to send out to people. You want to buy in bulk, but you also need to have like a certain amount. So one of the things that I would suggest is to start by looking at what you have. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. So even if it doesn't match the Inspiration Project 100% because you have a lot of yarn on hand and they suggested using strips of paper or something like that, you can definitely adapt and use what you have. Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, there's so many different kind of crafts and leftover things around. Exactly. So it's kind of fun to be like, oh, okay, well, what can we use instead? And a lot of that comes into play with like this stuff. So again, like at this time, we were talking about sending stuff home that we didn't want back. So the big thing that we had to think about was what kind of containers do you want to send this stuff out in? You know, paint and glue, they're wet, they're sticky. You want to make sure that they have lids that are secure. You got to think about what kind of glue you want. Is it going to be hot glue? Is it going to be crafting glue, Elmer's glue, super glue? And so again, that would be a point where you would look at the project and be like, well, this is calling for a hot glue gun. What can we use instead? And we have this giant tub of glue because we used to do all of these projects. So instead of buying like little glue containers, you could then portion it out into, we use little makeup containers that you can buy. Yeah, as far as paint goes, we found that you could buy the paint strips that for like the little paint by numbers and things like that. And then you could cut those down to fit the number of paint colors that you offered them. So then that would be another thing is, what colors do you want to send out to them? The paint strips held 10 different colors, but did you want to send out 10 different colors of paint or did you just want to shorten it and give them fewer options? Yeah, and then of course, what are you going to be sending the stuff home in? So at that time, we were just using gallon-sized plastic bags. They were easy, they were semi-affordable. You could buy them in bulk and then it also again reduced that germ factor there and everything fit nice and inside. We also used paper lunch sacks or just again, leftover things from other programs that we had had. And so yeah, we got creative definitely a little bit. So depending on what size of a library you are, some suggestions for places that you can buy these materials because you can do as much as you can with the stuff that you have, but then you still have to supplement. So hopefully you are allowed to do some online shopping. That's really what saved us because especially when we were closed, we couldn't go out to the stores, but we don't have in our town, we don't have big stores like Hobby Lobby and craft stores like that. So we buy a lot of stuff off of Amazon and that's kind of a go-to for a lot of people right now. But also the Dollar Tree, they have really upped their craft game over the last year or two and they have a lot of stuff and it's usually pretty cheap. The downside is you do have to buy in bulk quantities. Usually it's a 12, but if you're buying for a program you're probably doing around 10 people anyway. So it's usually it works out just about okay. But they will do both in-person and they will ship to your library as well. Walmart, Hobby Lobby, Michaels, those are all places that have online ordering as well. And again, you can get it set up so that they'll send it directly to your library and then you don't have to go shopping for those specific things that you need. I know at one point in time paint was really scarce because everybody decided they wanted to go paint. So we had to stop and like search for all of these places and we ended up finding it on Michaels was the only place that had paint. So it was just kind of thinking like just because we don't have access to it where we're located, where are some places that do still have this stuff that will then send it to us. Okay, so you kind of got your project figured out, you've gone through the supplies, figured out what it is that you're gonna need. The next step is making clear instructions. The first thing with making clear instructions is starting with the materials list. So I suggest listing off every single thing that you are including inside the kit and then also including items that they might need from around their house. So for instance, if they need to have scissors and you're not sending them because most people have scissors around their house, I would list that as a material that they need. We did start sending home glue guns. We did ask for those back, we checked them out to people just like we did a book item and then they could return them and we would then quarantine and sanitize them. But we have them just for the programming kits. So it was kind of an experiment. And actually what we found is when we started to asking people if they needed a glue gun, a lot of people already had glue guns at home and we really didn't need to send them home. So that was kind of interesting too. If you just ask people what they need, a lot of them already have your basic supplies. I know I have multiple ones because I keep misplacing them. Exactly, I mean, that's the thing. Do you know where it's at? And do you have glue stick? That might be a different story, but yeah, and then as the kits were going on after a few months of us sending them supplies, a lot of times they would keep the supplies. So you could ask, do you need another set of paint brushes? Do you need another set of this material? And they would often just come back and say, no, I've still got plenty left over from last time. So that was kind of a nice thing too. As far as the instruction sheets themselves go, the key is simplify. So you want these instructions to, these are a guide, these are to help people while they're doing their projects, but you don't wanna overwhelm them. So this is kind of the format that I would use. You can see there to the, I would use bullet points. I would use a table format and lots of pictures. Like I said, you wanna pretend like they're in person and you're talking to them, but they don't have the opportunity to ask questions. So maybe I like to pretend that I'm explaining this to like a first grader. So even though it's an adult that you assume knows all of this stuff, pretend that they don't and go through and just make sure that you go cover everything because they won't be able to ask questions unless they attend that Zoom session. But these instructions sheets have really proved to be useful even when we have gone back to in-person programming. So yeah. Is it the thing that also the instructions, I know this, I remember doing something, some sort of an assignment in elementary school, it was teach someone how to do this thing. And it's one of those kind of tricky things like, how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And if you don't get all the exact instructions in the right and people follow your instructions, literally you've realized you've missed something. So is it something that you could have like one person writes it up and then gives it to another person and says, okay, see if you can follow these, test it out on another staff member, I suppose. Yes, I definitely did that a lot in the beginning. Towards, the more you do it, the more you kind of get it figured out. But yes, it's always a very helpful. If you have the opportunity to let a staff member go through it and try to do it themselves first, it's really helpful. Yeah. And the pictures for me, so I ended up usually making three products by the end of it because I would go through and I'd make the project first myself so that I could figure out how to do it. Then I would make it a second time while writing the instruction so that I could take pictures and snap each step. And then I would have somebody else go through the instructions and see if they could do it. Or when we were creating our videos, I would then be going through it as well. So we usually ended up with a lot of copies of each of these projects. Yeah, very thorough. And speaking of being thorough, the last thing you wanna include in these instructions is a picture of the final product because a lot of times we just didn't think about it. We were like, all right, congratulations, you're done. But then people will be like, well, did I do it right? What's it supposed to look like? So it's very important that at the end that you just include a snapshot of what the inspiration project looks like. And I encourage that this is a picture of one that you have actually done and not the inspiration picture that you pulled off of Pinterest or the blog or wherever because it's not going to look like that in most cases. And so if they can see the homemade look, that it's not totally perfect, that is helpful as well. So then after you make the instructions, we did these video tutorials. And this is just, we again, this is kind of like the third step. So we would go through, we'd write the instructions and then we would make up these video tutorials. And they are very conversational. We really wanted people to feel like they were in the room with us. So we were lucky and we had two staff members that were in most of the videos. So we could kind of bounce off of each other and catch the things that the other person was missing. I do have the link here to one of our video lists. They're super wonderful, I promise. I'll mention here, while you're talking about the links there, people if you want to, you can write that down if you want to, but the slides will be available afterwards with the archive of today's show. So if you don't want to, you don't have to worry about writing all that down, you'll have a link to these and be able to get to it all later. Yes, that's a good point. So again, we really want these to be conversational, really simple. We didn't use any fancy software, we just recorded it with Zoom. We went through several different trial and error type things as we were doing this. We tried just recording the Zoom meetings. That didn't work very well because people then would turn off their cameras and they didn't want to talk and that kind of defeated the whole purpose of trying to make it feel like you were all in the same room together. So, and then also you can't really control what people say. So we only recorded two Zoom sessions before we thought, we're just gonna not do that. So then we went to pre-recording it with Zoom. So we would pretend that it was the Zoom session and we would just walk through it, pretending like we were talking to the people that were in the Zoom session with us. But also then it didn't really need to be that fancy video quality or anything like that. No sound effects or zooming in or things like that. We kind of got creative. But again, I feel like that homemade feel was kind of comforting because it made people feel a little bit more like they're there and not so much like just watching a professional quality video, you know? But we also had just a ton of fun with it too. And that's the important thing. Whenever you're doing programming, you just gotta have fun with it. If you have fun with it, people will have fun with it too. Okay, so that is all of the things that we were doing while we were shut down. And even as we started to reopen, we continued doing a lot of those things. And but now things have kind of gotten back to a relatively normal place again. And so it's like, how does this still apply? And I think it has really helped out a lot just in terms of preparing and planning and helping to just rethink about how we want to do programming. So it really, I still follow all of these guidelines and steps when I am preparing a program. I still like to stop, make a thorough list inventory of our materials, thinking about what we have and things like that. And we actually will usually still make the kits, but instead of sending them home with people, we will then just set them out in the places. We had people register for the classes. So we know how many that we're going to be making. And then we have everything all in the kit. So when they get there, it's a lot easier and it saves time when they get from going and handing out materials or them going and picking things out. I mean, some things you do want them to have options. So like we don't put the paint in there anymore. We let them pick their colors, but it really helps with that time management as far as making sure that you have everything for everybody before the class starts. And the instruction sheets are also still a really great idea because people sometimes don't always catch everything as you're talking. There may be more of a visual learner. So if they have the instruction sheets with them and they don't catch what you say, they can then follow along with the instruction sheet or they can go back to it and refer, especially if you're having a larger class, if you're having a class with more than like 10 or 15 people, it can be really hard to make sure that everybody's on the same page. So those, yeah. So those instruction sheets guys are just a really great tool to have. Yeah, that's a good tip. That's something, and you're always thinking about doing this programming in person. So well, everybody's here in the room, so they'll just see what I'm telling them to do, easy. But yeah, not everyone has different learning styles and that is something that teachers know about all the time, but sometimes with us in libraries, maybe not aware that, yeah, you might need another way of showing someone how to do this. And it might, yeah. Yeah. And then of course, you can still do kits. So we have a couple of clubs, we've called them clubs, but they're just kit programs that we've started. And they're in a similar format. Our spice club has all of this stuff in it and it's really popular. And so we put all of the stuff inside the bags and the difference is that with the spice club kits, we do want the bags back. So we have reusable burlap bags that they get to take at home, they get to use all of the spices and things and then the next month, they get to bring it back. And then we do try to sanitize them before we send them back out again. But it's the same idea because people really like to have something that they can come pick up and take home and do in their own time. And then for the kids, we have a virtual Lego club. And what that one is, is again, we just have little kits with all of the Legos in it. It's kind of like the Lego kits that you can buy for really expensive amounts of money. They're just a little simple. One month it was like making a turtle. And so it has all of the Legos in there, has the instructions and a picture of what it's supposed to look like when they're done. We limit it to, depending on the kit, 10 to 15 kids, and they can just come pick it up and take it home. And they don't have to bring anything back for that one either. But again, it's the Legos then. They get to keep the Legos. Nice. Yeah. So it's a really fun program that they can do. And then they can do it together as a family too. So it's just the idea of the kits opening up a lot of different possibilities. So even though we don't have to do kits anymore, there's still a lot of options and things you can do. It's just another service to offer, yeah. And I think this has come up a lot now due to the pandemic of people have gotten used to these new services that libraries were offering and really enjoyed them. I mean, like the family aspect of it, I hadn't thought about that. Yeah, that oftentimes parents or caregivers will bring the children to the library and say, okay, go there, do your crafty thing, do your thing. I'm gonna go look at books over here or I'll come back and have an hour and pick you up from whatever I'm doing. And they're not there. It's like here it's the thing for the kids. But if the kid's child shouldn't be at home, yeah, the parents or caregivers may be right there and get to be more involved. That's a cool light effect I hadn't even thought about. We had a lot of people that were doing that with our take and make kits through the Pixel Lab. They would send us pictures of them doing it together as a family and say, oh, that was really great. Nice. So yeah, it was just a nice side effect. Yeah, so we do have a question that I wanna jump into right now since we're on this slide here. Someone wants to know, they're very interested in the Spice Club. What is, what is Al about? That sounds very interesting. Like how, what do you get for that? Right, so this is not a program that I do, but what it is, what I can tell you is every month it comes with a different spice and you get a sample of the spice. You get to take home, we put in two to three recipes involving the spice. You get some history on the spice, like where it came from and what it's well known for, some nutritional facts. It all comes together in a little bag. And then yeah, you just get to take it home and do with you all with it. I know we've done like cardamom and that one was really good. It came with, what was it? Cardamom whip cream recipe that was delicious. Wow, yeah, sounds good. A couple months ago, we did star anise and that was kind of a weird one. And so it came with a savory recipe for like pork chops and it was really good. So yeah, it's just kind of a fun thing that maybe you would never like buying a whole jar of star anise who's gonna use that generally, unless it's a regular thing, that's a lot. But having just one or two that's expensive to try out, that's so cool, I love that idea. It's been really popular. We started that in January, so it's been really popular. So really, that's kind of all that I have. So I've just left lots of time for questions. Yeah, okay, awesome. So yeah, if anybody has any other questions, go ahead and type into the question section. If you wanna know anything about any more about any of the kits that Erica did there, how they handled anything, go ahead and do that. We have plenty of time to ask questions, no problem. I'm gonna pop this opener so I can see everything. We didn't have another question that came in. You were talking about, with the SpiceKits actually, sanitizing, you said it was burlap bags. How do you, I guess, sanitize something like that? I know for some things, like those, even before this, they would get washed. And for some things, it's just that we, you'd mentioned the quarantining things, just letting things sit for a certain amount of time so you know that any germs have died. Is there something in particular for like a fabric type thing like that, burlap bags? Yeah, I think we've just been washing them, but you could also use, like, you could just spray them down, like the stuff that you use to spray on your counters and stuff. If you just spray it down, it'll soak into the fabric and do the same thing, and it'll dry. Okay, do you need anything special? No special equipment or anything for that, yeah. I think that's something we've all adapted to, all the COVID things that we do now, we've learned how to do, are now just a regular daily part of life, yeah. And it works, awesome. We get to keep all the containers and stuff. So we don't ask for whatever the spices come in, or the leftovers, or anything like that. It's just the bags. Right, only certain things that you'd wanna reuse, yeah. Okay, oh, so we do have a question. If you wanted, this question is about the Lego Club. I wanted to know, where did you get the kits for the Lego Club? Did you, are those kits that you bought, or did, how did you come up with those? One was a turtle, or? I'm not for sure. That's another one that I'm not personally doing. I know that the Legos come from the Lego company. So I'm not sure if it's on their website, that anybody can go and see the kits, but we do order like the specific colors and things for the kits. Oh, okay. But I think it's a program that they offer. Oh, nice, okay. So it's not like you had, because I know lots of many libraries have had over the years in the past Lego Clubs, where it's just, here's like buckets and buckets of all the Legos we have, go and make something yourself, you know, make up something. And that's what she asks, is the person asking did you make it, or just break down bigger ones and make up the thing? But no, these are actual like mini smaller kits that you can get from Lego themselves that actually have usually all the pieces you need to make the thing. And I don't know, I didn't know that. I think it kind of started off though, with us using the Legos that we had, because I think our first one was like making snowman or something really simple. So I think that was where the concept started, and then it kind of evolved a little bit, because I don't see, yeah, you could definitely just, if you have Legos laying around. Yeah, you can make up anything you want, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But Lego is very good about coming up with ideas of things you can do. And they have kits now too, even some of them are, you can make multiple different things with the same Legos they include in a box. I've seen some of those recently, it's like 20 bucks for a box or something, and it makes two different animals, depending on how you use them. Not two at the same time, you get a pick one, but these Legos could make this animal, or if you take that apart, then it can make this animal. I've seen that, yeah. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Ah, here's a good question. How are these kits funded? Specifically the Lego kits, this other person wants to know. Is this just into your, because you said some of this was things you were doing, some was new, how did you budget for this, or get grants, or how did that all work? Yes, so the Lego kits are coming out of our programming fund. I'm not exactly sure, it's not, we didn't get a special grant or anything for it. I know that we are just trying to do more things like that instead of the big programs, so we're just allocating the money differently. I don't have a better answer for that. Yeah, yeah, no, that's, yeah, you already, I mean, yeah, you already had a budget line, a line for that, for programming, and so you just use it in this new way, yeah. And I do know that when we were coming up with our budgets for this year, you know, the 2022 year, we did, you know, stop and think about things like, we're gonna need money to purchase extra materials for this program, or because we're sending out kits, we're gonna need the money for this. So we just thought about that kind of in advance when we were writing up our budget proposals. Yeah. Okay. Did you ever consider charging for any of it, charging the people who are using the kits? I know some libraries I've seen, sometimes there's a small registration fee for attending the probably crafting event or the program to commercial cost of supplies. Is that something you all have ever done in Hastings? We've done it before, not very often. Most of it, we're very fortunate that our foundation is pretty flexible and we don't use it, but we have before with more expensive projects. I think we did like a clock-making class once, and so it was just like a $5 fee to cover the part of the kits or something like that. We've done tumblers before and they could either purchase one of ours for the class or they could bring in their own type of a thing. Sure, sure. Okay. But primarily we don't charge, we try really hard. Yeah. If you have that foundation to support it, that's key, that's very important, yeah. And I know some libraries also do fundraising for these kinds of things. They say we're doing a kid program coming up, I see it posted on social media, Facebook, whatever saying, if anybody has any empty milk bottles, whatever, we could use them. And we've definitely done that before. Reaching at me like, do you got any old socks? Right, the thing's, I did like five years ago, but I put a cute little sock doppy up and I was like, we're looking for mismatched socks. Yeah, everybody's got those, yeah. We're making dog toys, so. Oh, nice. Cool. Yeah, that was, but yeah, water bottles, a toilet paper tubes, staff, a lot of times we don't have to reach out to the public. We'll just send an email out among staff and be like, hey, can you guys save this up for a while? Yeah. We'll get it that way. Absolutely, cool. I see your camera's been going on and off, that's not a problem if you're having issues with that. Oh, now you're back. Oh, yeah, it was frozen up and then it went off and now you're back. Yes, everything's good. Nope. Oh, sorry about that. Maybe just the system, sometimes it knows that too much going on, whatever, yeah. All right, we have a few more questions here for the tutorials. How long were they usually, the video tutorials? I don't know if you mentioned that. I don't remember for sure. I would say that they were about 10 to 15 minutes. Depending on how fast you went through this stuff. And do you post them, are they up on your website or where do you, how did people get access to those? So if they registered, they got an email link that had both the video and the Zoom link and then we posted them on our YouTube page. Oh, okay. So are they still out there? If somebody wanted to go and look at them? Mm-hmm. That's that link that I put in the Prezi there. Oh, awesome. You are. All right, I'll have to do that. I don't think we ended up saving all of them, but most of them. And we're not still doing the video tutorials. Okay. Wow. Does it just remember for a few? Yeah, you could. I mean, they were a lot of fun to do, but. Yeah, absolutely. Now that people have access to coming in, we're like, well, even if we're sending home a kit, they can call and ask us or, like the Spice Club kits that we are sending aren't really project-based, so they don't really need the video. True, yeah. Take this home, make a recipe, hopefully it comes out edible. Exactly, send us your pictures. Yeah. Okay, so someone also wants to know, and do you have a list of the craft kits you have done that you could share? Or is there somewhere to see them or that you would share with like, I don't know if they want the full information or just. I could. I don't have that put together right now, but I have all of the stuff saved in my work stuff, so it'd be pretty easy for me to do. Maybe email me, have them email me. Does that. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. If anybody wants to, yeah, have any of that reach out to Erica and I think your email address is pretty. What is your email, let's see. E. Rogers at cityofhastings.org. Yeah, so pretty easy. Here I'm going to. Yeah, I'll put something together. I just sent that out in response to that question into the question, so everyone should be able to see that. Just Erica's email address if you want to. I'm also, I think your list is like, I've got a link from the session page to the Hastings Public Library website. That's a way to get in touch with her too. If you don't grab the email from here, not a problem. I did think about that. I did this similar presentation in person at NLA and so I had handouts that I do with people, but I didn't think about that for this one. Yeah, oh yeah, I mentioned at the beginning I forgot, yeah, that this was a session that was originally done, this presentation back in, was it October last year when conference was? October, September? Ah, I forget. Our Nebraska Library Association State Conference. Yeah, this was a presentation done back then that we, I invited Erica to come on and redo here to spread the word even farther to people. And I'm sure things have changed since then of what you're doing. The pandemic just comes close and there's always, yeah, things. Yeah. Hopefully we don't have to go back to 100% virtual again, but it's always nice to have the ideas if you do. Yeah, it's nice to have this in your back pocket for if something else happens. I mean, and this is any other kind of pandemic issue, natural disaster or something. Now we know there's ways we can still provide services to the people, if there's a flood and the library is inaccessible, here's things that we can do, we can shift gears, we know how to do it, we already figured it out. Exactly. Yeah, do it so much easier now. It is something that I've talked about a lot within the last couple of years with lots of libraries doing these kind of virtual things, just other ways of doing things is that accessibility issue, that these virtual or these take-home are so important, I think, to people who never came into the library before or couldn't, some parents or caretakers cannot, don't have the time to drive their child to the library and have them do the event and then drive them home necessarily, but they do have the time to say, hey, here's a Zoom event going on, let's sit there in front of it together and we'll do that and then we're all still at home and didn't have to do that part of it. It's, I've heard the other story times and things too that so many parents are so, thank you so much that you're doing these things. And I'm glad that libraries are still continuing them in some way because it's not just because we're not in a lockdown, there's still our people that need these kinds of services. It's just a new avenue of service for people, for people like that who just can't get to the library, people with social anxiety who wouldn't get out but can do this kind of thing like we're doing here. People who are still immune compromised or disabled or cannot physically get out are now having so much more offered to them. And I think it's great that we've discovered these things and libraries are still continuing them. You've got a whole new audience that discovered. Exactly. One last question here, is there anything, and I know you talked about how you worked all this out, any major pitfalls or lessons learned as you're going through this process? Like, I always try to say, you can learn from failure and it's okay, so what didn't work? Well, like I said, the big one was the Zoom sessions. We really had to trial and error our way through that because when we first started, we tried recording it and it was just not, we had some inappropriate things that were said and then I was like, okay, because we have like a very small knit group of ladies that do these classes. And so in person, they know each other and it's like, oh, hey, you know, it's funny, but when it's being recorded and sent out, I was like, oh. It's nice, they know each other, it's casual, it's friends, that's a whole different thing than, yeah. Yeah, and so that was a big one. Learning the different types of materials that you could send out was just a really big one. Trying to figure out those containers and things like that, like what are we gonna, is this going to be enough paint if we just send out this little paint pod or do we need to find like a film canister or something that, you know, and actually we got to the point where if it was a big project, it was only 50 cents a bottle for paint at Walmart. So sometimes we would just send out the bottle of paint if it was just one color. But lots of trial and error working with craft materials. You're gonna practice on a lot of things before because it's, you know, I'm sure you've done trial and error practicing just doing craft events in the library before, of course, ahead of time. So you know what you're doing before you teach it. But having to send the things home with someone is a whole another type of experimenting. Yeah. Yes. And, you know, like I said, it really helps now because it's really easy to see a project and go, oh yeah, we can do that. We just need to get, you know, some clothes, pins and some paint and some glue and we'll make a snowflake. But this forces you to go through it. And like I said, I ended up doing it at least three times before it was all said and done. So I could really see the things that are going to go wrong and try to solve them or at least be prepared to like give advice like, okay, so when you go to do this part, you're gonna wanna make sure you do this. And don't do this because I did it and it was wrong. It didn't work. And sharing those stories too with people, you know, they need, you know, if they know that you're not perfect, you know, sometimes it goes back to putting your picture versus the inspiration post because seeing that you're struggling or hearing that, you know, really helps them build up their confidence too. Like it's okay that, you know, it looks a little sloppy but that's because that's normal. It's homemade and it's homey, yes. It doesn't need to be perfect. No, no. You want someone to know you made that, but yeah. Okay, well, I have another question here. I was wondering though, did you have a certain day and time for patrons to pick up kits? How did you schedule that? I suppose maybe when you were closed officially, how did you work out that? Yeah, so when we were really, really closed, we had them pick up and we would schedule a date and time, you know, we would call them and ask them, when can you come pick it up? And we would give them two days of options and then they would call us when they were outside and we would go give it to them, which was not ideal. And so then we went to a, well now we're at a locker system, so we were able to then put the kits in the lockers just like we would a whole book and call them and say, well, you've got it in this locker, you have until this date to pick it up. And if, which would usually be, so our programs are on Mondays and so we would put the kits in the lockers on Thursdays to give them Thursday, you know, most of the weekend to be able to pick it up. And then we would leave it there all the way until Tuesday in case they didn't realize that they were missing the class type of a thing. But we also then, we just labeled them and we, when we were open, but still doing the kits, we put them on our whole shelf. And so then they could, yeah, so we would put them up, just hold on a book. That's kind of how we treated the kits was like hold books. However, you would get them out to people, that would be how you would do it with the kits. Yeah, nice. So of course you mentioned the lockers and now people are like, what's that all about? I don't think many libraries have gone to, and it was before pandemic, some of them are doing it, but since during lots of have done it, we did give out grants to some libraries to buy those things and install. So can you quickly explain how that, how your lockers work there at Hastings? Yeah, so we have a set of lockers, they're a little square that stack on top of each other, just kind of like you would see in school and they're outside of our building. And I believe there's 20 to 30 of them, I don't remember. And we have the option when people put a hold on a book that they can pick it up in person or they can pick it up in the locker. And we set the books in the locker, we have padlocks that we change out daily and well, we change out with each reserve. So it's not locker number one doesn't always have this lock. And so then when they have, we call them and tell them that their item is ready to pick up, we give them the locker combination and we give them five days, which is our standard hold pickup time. And they were able to do that without coming into the library. Nice, yeah, it was a very convenient thing that libraries started doing, it's just so creative. It's easier, it's safer for them if they don't wanna come in, but it's also, they don't have to come when the library's open, that's a key too, for people who work the same hours as the library's open so they can't get there when you're open, they can come anytime they want. And that's something, yeah, that was a side effect that we didn't plan on. But yeah, we have a lot of people that you're like, oh, well now I can come when I get off work or the only day I can come is Sunday and that's the day you're closed. So it's been, or families too have really enjoyed it because we don't have time to load up all of the kids and bring them into the library so they can pick it up in the locker and kind of save time, kind of like the grocery store pickup. Exactly, I love that, yeah. Yeah. So this is a question and this is not something I've heard about, but do you don't have any issues with vandalism or break-ins with the lockers that are outside there? Not with the lockers, no. The thing that we tried before that was we had plastic newspaper bins that the schools had used and those didn't have locks on them. And so anybody, we just put like donated books and stuff so people, this is when we were closed, closed. So instead of checking out books, they could just come and grab books, kind of like the free little libraries. And we did have kids that would come and take the stuff and throw it all over the place and vandalize that, but we haven't had any problems now that we've put locks on them. Yeah, these are like secure metal lockers and the padlocks, that's not easy to get into. No, no, yeah. I mean, if they really want to go through all of that effort to steal some library books. Yeah, exactly. It's not like there's something crazy expensive or that they're gonna be able to, you know. And we don't put, we won't put kindles or anything expensive in the lockers. So you still have to come pick up. That makes sense, absolutely, yeah. Cool. I mean, we probably would if we ever got to a shutdown phase again, but. Nice, okay. That's really nifty. Yeah. Someone did ask earlier about the funding of it and you said you all had the programming budget. But I did just want to mention that, yeah, we had many libraries over the last two years applied to us, the library commission for grants. This may be something your states did or your state library or your whoever you might get grants from, there was funding CARES Act money in the first year of the pandemic and then the ARPA American Rescue Plan Act money this year. And many libraries did apply for these kinds of programs, anything virtual, anything Zoom, lockers. So I would definitely recommend looking at grants, seeing what your state library is offering or anything outside the box, other kinds of grants that you can apply for. There's lots of grants for like public entities or municipalities where you would think of, you wouldn't think of a library necessarily because it's like, oh, that's for the city or something. But then they say any city department can apply for some of these kinds of things. So there are definitely grants that you, if anyone doesn't have the funding to do these that I would highly recommend looking into and seeing if there's a way to fund this kind of thing. The kits and the craft things are less expensive but lockers, those can not cheap. I mean, lockers themselves, having them installed, cement poured, whatever it needs to do to make it secure. I know in some places for weather they've built like permanent canopies over them or put them in an area so that there's no, worry about like rain or snow getting into them. They'll definitely look for grants in. Any other, we got a little five minutes left here. Anybody have a last minute desperate questions you want to ask of Erica? Type into the questions section. I did give you her email address as well that erodgers at cityofhastings.org if you do want to reach out to her there. I am going to, well, wait and see if anybody has any other questions. I am going to pull presenter control back to my screen because since I was just talking about it I'm going to show everyone. Okay. This is the session page for today but on our Nebraska Library Commission website I actually have a section here on grants. We have a whole flyout menu here about grants but anyone can go to this. This is not just for Nebraska libraries but I have a grant opportunities for Nebraska libraries link here which is just nlc.nebraska.gov slash grants and I list the kind of grants that we give out but then ideas for other places that libraries can go to for grants and here specifically in Nebraska, Humanities Nebraska, if you have a humanities department here in your state. Nebraska Arts Council Historical Society. We have grants available or we don't offer them. Our state is from our department economic development and the USDA, these are for facilities as you can see but some of them are just anything to charitable organizations. So feel free to look at this page for more ideas for grants then have resources here for other places to find even more grants out there. I just kind of pulled out a few that I know of that I know our libraries in Nebraska have used. So definitely get creative, look at all of these different things and just think about, we are a nonprofit, we are a part of a municipality. Anything that uses that wording we could potentially get a grant for our library. Oh, we do have another question that just popped in, awesome. About the spice kits. You said you did a history of the spice themselves. Do you do that about the meal of the recipe itself too? Like where does this come from or what is it with the actual recipe is all about? Mostly it's just the spice because the recipes we get are usually like often blogs, you know, we're online resources. So there's not a whole ton of information about them. But we do, we'll cite the original source that we got it from. Oh, nice. We can go back and look. Yeah. And we give the nutritional information and things like that. But typically there is, we don't have a whole lot of information about. Okay, so then they did ask about and the health facts about that spice. So you said nutritional information. So you do include that part of it. Yeah. So it's interesting to see the history of a recipe or a blog post that talks all about it. Depends on what you're in the mood for. If you want to read up on it, or if you just like, I just want the recipe. I just want to make this. Just stick down to the recipe part. Yes. It's a lot of fun. I haven't done all of the spices, but as staff, if there's leftovers then we get to... Oh, when they test them out? Sure. Of course. That's the cool thing you have to do. Of course, you got to test out all the recipes. There's not always leftovers, but sometimes. Nice. Nice. All right. Get back to our, there we go. All right. Almost at 11 o'clock. Perfect. Anybody have any other questions? We do not have to cut off right at 11. This will just go as long as people do have anything they want to ask, so go ahead and type in any questions you have and I'll just do my little wrap up here while I'm waiting to see. As I said, we are recording the show right now and it will be available on our archive page. I'm going to go here to our main Encompass Live page. If you use your search engine of choice and just type in Encompass Live, the name of our show, nothing is called that on internet yet. Nobody's allowed to use that name. So you will come up with our pages in your search results. These are upcoming shows, but the link to our archives is right here. Underneath. And the most recent one is at the top of the page. This is last week's show. And so today's will be there as well. By the end of the day tomorrow at the very latest, everything should be up and ready as long as go to webinar and YouTube cooperate with me. Everyone who attended today's show and registered for today's show, even if you didn't attend, will get an email from me letting you know that it's available. We also push out on our very social media. We do have a Facebook page for Encompass Live if you'd like to use Facebook, give us a like over there. You see here we do a reminder. She's a reminder about logging into today's show, a little introducing our presenters. And then I do post on here when the recordings are available. So if you do like to use Facebook, you can do that. We also go out on Twitter and Instagram. And we have a hashtag for the show Encompass Live. So a little abbreviation for the name if you wanna see when anything is announced when everything is ready. While we're here on the archive page, I'll show you there is a search here. I did mention that we do lots of shows and lots of topics for all types of libraries. And so you can search and see if we've ever had a show on a particular topic you might be interested in. When you can do the show, full show archives are just the most recent 12 months if you just want something current. And that is because this is our full archives. I'm not gonna scroll all the way down cause it's a huge, huge page as you can see. This is our full show archives from when Encompass Live premiered which was in January, 2009. So we're going on 12, 13 years worth of shows here. Weekly shows, almost every week of the year. So just pay attention to the original broadcast date of any show. Everything's got a date, so you know when it actually happened. Many of the shows will stand the test of time. Still be good, useful information, but some things will become old outdated. Resources may have changed drastically or might not even exist anymore. Links might not, might be broken. People who presented on a topic might no longer work at that library. So just pay attention to the date. But as librarians, you know, this is something we do. We keep things for historical and archive purposes sometimes and as long as we have a place to host them all we will always have them available here. All right, so got another question that popped up here. Oh, so you said you do the nutritional information. Is that nutritional information about the recipe as a whole? And like at the end of the recipe? Or what about like health facts? Like supplements, certain spices are good for your heart or in an accident, those kinds of things. So both, kind of when we're talking about the history we also talk about the benefits and the health stuff about the actual spice. But then with each recipe, there's also the nutritional information about the recipe. Sure, sure. So a little bulk, perfect. Yeah, exactly what people need. All right, oh, and a good question here which is actually a question for me. Why not if we get a certificate of attendance for attending today? Yes, approximately an hour after we closed down in the show today, everyone will get an email from the GoToWebinar system saying thank you for attending. This email shows as proof of your attendance for attending the show. And there is also a PDF certificate attached to that email. That is if you do need to use it for applying for CE credits, continuing education units, whatever you do in your state. We have them here in Nebraska to our CE coordinator here. You're in CE hours for keeping up certifications as librarians and library boards do. So yes, you will receive something within the next hour letting proof of your attendance that you can use and submit to whoever you need to submit to. We cannot issue a credit for anything outside of Nebraska. If you are from outside of Nebraska, we don't have the authority to give out credits for other states, but we do that certificate and that email that you can then submit to whoever does give you your credits and use it for that. All right, any other questions you wanna ask? We're a little after 11 o'clock here. We got a perfect, 11-04, we've started a little after 10, so perfect hour. I think else you wanna ask it in. Otherwise, you can email Erica. The recordings, you'll all be notified of that and the link of the slides and the video of today's show will be available. All right, we just got some things coming in, awesome. I think we will wrap it up for today's show then. Thank you so much, Erica, for coming on today and talking about this. This is great, lots of tips and tricks and ideas and obviously people are very interested in trying to replicate some of the things you're doing. Well, thanks for having me. It's always fun to talk about library things. Of course, yes, absolutely. All right, so that wrap up for today. Here's our upcoming shows and you can see we've got August and we're starting to get our September dates on here too, so keep an eye on here. Next week, I will be talking about E-Rate. If you're in a public library or a school and want to know about E-Rate, getting discounts on your internet access and your networking equipment. I'm doing a one-hour quick overview of it. We do do fuller workshops later in the fall, later in the year, three-hour longer workshops on E-Rate and special construction and things. But just since that's gonna be a lot later in the year and the process is opened up for the upcoming year, I'm doing a short one-hour just an overview of the basics of E-Rate. So if you've never done it before and you're interested, good show for you. It'll be a very high level, not all the different exact step-by-step but just a high level overview of it. Or if you just need a refresher, if you're getting back into it, if you're a new library director or a new library staff who have never done this, you keep hearing about it and you know what you're supposed to do is a good intro. Like I said, I will have fuller, longer workshops. I am one of my duties here at the library commission that says on here, I am the state E-Rate coordinator for public libraries. So I handle all the training, education, hand-holding whatever our libraries here in Nebraska need to do E-Rate. Other states, every state has their own public library coordinator and a school library coordinator. So you would have your own people that'll help you with it but anyone who wants to is invited to attend that next week. And any of our other shows we have coming up here as well. So thank you everybody for being here. Thank you, Erica, for being here. Good to see you and hopefully we'll see some of you in a future episode of Encompass Live. Bye-bye. Bye.