 I had to fiddle around a little bit with a couple of things, but I think we're good to go now. Hello, I'm Sally Snyder from the Library Commission, and I'd like to welcome you to Encompass Live. We have this every Wednesday, or almost every Wednesday, at 10 o'clock central time, because that's what works for us. If 10 o'clock doesn't work for you, you can get a recording later that you can view and still enjoy whatever it is you wanted to learn. So that's great. I do want to mention that you are welcome to make comments and put them in the chat section, or ask questions. And also, you could raise your hand and ask to have you yourself unmuted so that you also can ask the questions live and with the presenters. I do want to caution you that this is being recorded already. So everything you say will be on the internet forever and ever, as we all know. So just thought I'd let you know that before we get going. I do want to, let's see, there we are. I need to make our presenters, our today, presenters in the system. So I'm going to do that. And at that point, we should see their camera, and we should see whatever it is they want to show us along with giving their presentation. So I'm going to click make presenter. And it should be in just a second. They should be able to make us, there we are. And I will mute myself and turn everything over to our presenters from Iowa. Yay, thank you. Thank you so much. Hi, I am Kelly Forkenbrock, the Public Services Librarian for North Liberty Library. And I am Jenny Garner, and I'm the library director here at the library. And we are ready to present to you policies of yes. I do want to let you know that our third Musketeer, Emily Taber, is not with us today. She's our Family Services Librarian and she had a program, an outreach program. So she was unable to attend. So we're going to try to fill her very talented shoes and do her role as well as ours. So Mike, this is the first time we've done that. So we'll see how it goes. If it gets a little bit clunky, that's why. Oh, you can only see half of me snuggle up next to Kelly. So we're going to just get started. And I wanted to first talk to you a little bit about policies of yes and where that came from, the title policies of yes comes from Shonda Rhimes book, year of yes, but also from her Ted talk. The very act of saying yes is not just life changing. It is life saving. We just loved that quote and we felt that it applied to what we do every day in the library. I really feel a lot of things when people walk in our doors, we never know what they're experiencing and how we might help them. And that we might be the only positive interaction they have during the day. So we are our interjections that we're going to give you here shortly are more confessions than introductions. We wanted to tell you how this journey started for us and invite you to walk along with us a little bit. We are in the beginning of the journey, moving along, but it's a never it's really never ends are this journey of ours. So we're going to keep going. But we're going to do a little skit for you as well before we do our confessions. And it's going to be a little bit weird because Kelly is going to play two roles and she's not going to walk off and on the screen, but we're just going to wing it. This was initially an in-person program. So this gets a lot more energetic when we're on a stage and throwing arms around, but we'll do our best here. Absolutely. So first, we are going to have you kind of witness what our interpretation of what an average library patron exchange can look like in the library. In two different ways. So first, we'll try this first way. So. Hi, did you need to check out today? I did. Thank you. What's your name? My name is Kelly. Great. Kelly, do you have your library cards with you? I don't. But my last name is Fork and Brock. Right. Well, I can look that up for you this time. Oh, and it does look like you have a ten dollar fine that you're going to need to pay before you can check out today. Oh, OK. I really don't have any change. I don't have any money on me right now. If I can check out books right now and come back, would that be OK? Oh, sorry. I'll just take these for you and you can come back when you have some money to pay that. OK, thank you. Sure. Now we're going to rewind. We're going to do it one more time. Hi. Hi there. Are you ready to check out? I am. Fantastic. I hope you find some good materials. Yes. Do you have your library card? I do not. Is it OK if I use my last name? Absolutely. No worries at all. What's your last name? Fork and Brock. All right. And could you just verify your address for me really quick? Sure. It is 168 Main Street. Fantastic. OK. Oh, and it does look like you have a few fines today, but we actually don't charge fines anymore in our library. We got rid of fines, so we're going to erase those from your account. Start fresh today and we'll get you checked out for you and ready to go. Awesome. Thank you so very much. You have a great day. Thank you. So from those two exchanges, it was the same the same conversation, the same circumstances, but as you can see, the approach was very different. We here at North Liberty Library in fact did go fine free right before the pandemic closing in March of 2020. And we have these exchanges every day from folks who forget their library cards to folks who have pending fines and working with them on those issues. But overall, as Jenny said at the top, we try to work within a policy framework of yes, where we use radical trust and inclusive and inclusion to make sure our patrons know that they are wanted here. All right. So we're going to start with our confessions and give you a little bit of the timeline here. Talk about where we came from and where we're going. So how this session came about. So I'm going to confess to you that I always thought that libraries are just naturally inclusive. We just let everybody in. So by doing that, we were just including everybody all the time. Not so. We we found some ways that we were not being inclusive as we started to look at our policies and our procedures and how we delivered our services. Service delivery is super important. And what we discovered was that this is a really good time for us to make some good changes, especially when we had some closure time and then some reentry time sometime for people to come back in. We thought now is the time to make this new welcoming environment even more welcoming because our library has always been pretty friendly. But we wanted to make sure that we were not only friendly, but that we were providing equitable and inclusive services. And then Emily, our cohort, who's not with us today, recently did involved in a thing called Project Ready, which is a cohort out of Colorado. She's been very lucky to be involved in Colorado Libraries for Early Literacy, which originally started in North Carolina. And her confession was just that she didn't quite understand the difference between diversity and inclusion and where that that brought her or brought us. So we wanted to give you some definitions for how we're defining those terms today. There's lots of different ways they can be defined, but this is how we're applying them. So here's our benchmarks. Diversity is defined as a range of human differences. It's our race, ethnicity, gender, all the things that make us make up our our appearances and who we are, but also internally, what's on the inside for us. Equity is defined as fairness and justice in the way people are treated and how they are served. And inclusion is defined as creating a welcoming environment of belonging. So in addition. I still have more. Surely this is also Emily's. So her takeaway from her her project ready is that diversity is only on the surface. It's what we see and mainly in those things. Sometimes diversity is not visible, but it's surface level. Inclusion and belonging go much deeper. They take a deeper dive in for things. Diversity is what you're looking at and what you have, that you're here and there in the space. Inclusion is what you're looking to do, what you do, and that you're feeling valued. Diversity is being given a plate of food. Inclusion is getting to choose what goes on that plate and to take it a step further. Belonging is getting to help create that menu. And that's where we want to be at that place. In practice, we focus our story time and then I think I'm jumping ahead now. Am I jumping ahead? No, programming. All right, so go on. OK, so programming. Sorry, guys, this is how we're winging Emily. In representation in our story times displays and expanding beyond just token diversity. We're trying to make sure that our community members not only see themselves, but also see how other people might live and and are how they are experiencing life. We work with community partners to reach underserved populations across the gamut. Our partners range broadly and they aren't just our typical library partners. We reach far beyond just including like Project Ready in Colorado. She just reached out and said, hey, I know I'm from Iowa. Can I be part of this? And they said, absolutely. And then we find those bridge contacts. They help us understand what programming and community needs are and then how we can take down those barriers, what barriers are existing and how we might take those down because we have to admit that we don't always know those barriers. We assume we do, but we don't always. In my role as a public services librarian, one of the main things that I do is help on board, train and manage our part time staff. And just like at most libraries, our part time staff are usually the main ones on our front lines. They are the folks at our reference desk and they are usually the first faces that our patrons see when they enter the library. In addition to the work that I do here, I'm also in grad school pursuing my masters in library and information and sciences here at the University of Iowa, which is about 15 minutes down the road from us. And one of the discussions that came up during my first year, this just this past year of my studies, was the ability to train our library staff to converse with empathy. And that really hit home for me, given the work that I do in my public services capacity. And I think that that's something that we need to consider when we're building our policies and procedures, we need to consider is our staff adequately trained to have empathetic conversations with our patrons? Or is it transactional? Is it they come in, they check out materials and you send them on your way? Where is that engagement coming in? And how does that color what your policies and procedures look like? So we'll be touching on that a bit today as well, what that empathetic conversation looks like with our patrons and how well we're preparing our library staff to have those conversations. All right, so here's some reflections. Let's talk about our service population just a little bit so you get some background. We are in a community of twenty five or about twenty two thousand, actually, now it says twenty K, but we just keep growing. So that's a guess guesstimate based on our last special census. We also are when I started at the library a long, long, long time ago. Our population was about forty five hundred. So we've grown dramatically in the last twenty twenty some years tripled in size or more well now quadrupled since I moved to North Liberty, so it's just kind of crazy. And we've seen the the population shift to a much more diverse population as well. Primarily, we we see a lot of families. I like to joke that our community is about 50 percent under the age of 10 and the rest of them are pregnant or grandparents coming in to take care of those kiddos. So we see retirees coming back to the community or moving here from other locations to help take care of kids. We see a lot of local professionals because we are located next to three colleges in our neighboring communities. So while we're a small town nationwide, we are kind of a bigger library in Iowa. We're considered a medium sized library in Iowa. So historically, we have had some pretty inconsistent policy, reactive policy, and it was pretty rigid. I became director in 2015 and one of the first things we did was really look at making those policies flexible, creating purpose statements for every policy and being very consistent in how we delivered policies and used our policies. And now we're doing this next step, which is filling the gap by adding a commitment to being inclusive and diverse and belong and sure belonging as we do our policies. When I started, we also created as director, we also created a tagline that's Experience Your Library. It was sort of a branding thing for us. We don't use it as much today, but I love what it says. And what we tell patrons or our staff when they start and what I tell people, staff when I first meet them is that I want every patron who walks through our door to have the experience that they're seeking when they come in. Whatever it is, whether it's just finding a book in the next day, they're back to get a different book. They're seeking a different experience every time they walk through our doors. We want to make sure that they have that experience, that they leave feeling really cared for and that they belong here. And also that we don't know what baggage they're carrying when they walk in. And again, as I said earlier, we might be the only positive interaction they have in a day, so we want to make sure that we are giving them that interaction. So one of the first things we did was create an inclusion commitment. It is not by any means done. What you'll see is a draft and Kelly's going to pull it up just so I can show it to you here. This is what we came up with. And it says Jedi. We actually have switched that. We liked the term Jedi because we thought it was kind of fun and quirky. However, the committee that we have on staff decided that they wanted to be idea instead of Jedi. And so it's now the same same words just mixed up mixed around a little bit. Inclusion, diversity, equity and access. Justice is implied there as well. So at the North Liberty Library, we commit to treating every person with dignity and respect, we strive to create a safe environment where inclusion and belonging are a natural part of our culture. These values are reflected in the policies and in our policies and in our service. So that's what we're working for. That's what we're looking to to do. And I want to give you just an example of that as well while we're on this page. So we have our meeting room use policy here. And I'm not I'm only going to show you one piece of it. And what I want to show you is this bottom piece that we have had this note down here that's in pink. A non-discrimination statement. Now, when we started this, what we had was if you're discriminating against any kind of group or any anybody, you're not welcome at our library. Basically, we said, you can't you can't use our meeting rooms. Our attorney kind of found on that. He said, we couldn't do that. So the next thing we took the next step when he offered this wording for us, which is basically that use is not permitted by groups that practice and profess inclusion. This is what we had, what we wanted to do. Now we've changed it and what it says. And I don't have the updated one to show you. But what it says is that we don't condone discrimination or discriminate against any person on the basis of race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender, identity, housing, status, ability or ethnicity, granting permission to use our meeting rooms does not constitute endorsement of any group or affiliated groups, viewpoints. Iowa civil rights law forbids discrimination on the basis of and then these words again, we want to just make sure that people know that we are not discriminatory. We are not discriminating against anyone. So anyone who uses our rooms, just like you have at the end of your email, some people have, you know, my employer, my views may not be my employer. It's the same thing here. The views of the library don't necessarily reflect the people that come in our doors. As Jenny mentioned, the IDEA inclusion statement is really an acknowledgement of our own barriers, of the barriers that exist within our community. In addition to our IDEA committee, we also have our neighborhood ambassadors who work every day to reach out to our neighbors as proxies to look at those barriers and part of having this kind of part of having this let me go back. Yeah, so part of what we do with the IDEA policy is, you know, the acknowledgement of barriers and also recognizing our own ignorance of the barriers and creating a commitment to reach out to communities to invite their belonging. So it's really twofold. It's the acknowledgement of barriers and then creating the culture of belonging for our patrons. We always want to stress to them that, you know, you belong here. It is not our privilege at the library to welcome you. This is your place. It is it is our honor to have our patrons, not our privilege to have our patrons come in and use their library. And we have several policy examples that we use, and I like to also make and also make a distinction between the difference between policy and procedures. Policy is what we have in words. Those are the the policies that we we have our board look at, that we look at staff to make sure the words and the language are consistent with our mission. But the procedure is the action behind the words. It's how we enact the policy. So policy and procedures, sometimes they can become intermingled, but we here at North Liberty Library are careful to know the difference between the two terms to understand that policy are words and know that is something that can be changed throughout review and throughout internal review. But the procedures, the actions, that is what the patron is going to remember. They're not going to remember the policy that's posted on your website. They're going to remember your actions and how you proceeded with that policy and whether or not you created any an environment of inclusion and belonging when you enacted the policy. So one example of that would be our disruptive behavior flow chart. So here's our disruptive behaviors flow chart. This was created in part by a social work intern that we had here a few summers ago who was very integral in working with our youth and vulnerable adult population and based on their observations of those populations, they created the disruptive behaviors procedure flow chart, which you see here today. Again, it's not focused on just children and vulnerable adults. This is applicable to any and all patrons that enter our doors of all ages and backgrounds, and we made a point at the top to describe what problematic behavior is, because sometimes when we talk about behavior and disruption in the library, there are some gray areas. We were sure to create first to include some examples of what that would be talking loudly, running, making messes, playing musical games too loud. And we use kind of a three strikes rule here with the with our behavior policy with this disruptive behavior flow chart. But again, the the action behind it and the language that we use is so important to creating an environment of inclusion. So our first warning is very much just a calm approach saying, hey, everyone, it sounds like you're having a lot of fun. What's going on? How's acting like you want to be included in it? You know, saying, you know, I know you're having fun. But if we could just keep our voices down, that would be really, really helpful. Thank you. The second staff intervention is still another calm approach. But it does repeat what was said in the first intervention. Hey, guys, your noise level is a little too high. And I know we agreed to lower the volume, but I want you to stay and have fun. But we also want other patrons to enjoy the library too. So in order to let you stay here, I'm asking again if we can just keep our voices quieter. Thank you. When we get into the third intervention, that is when, again, with a calm approach, we then ask the patron to leave for the day. And we make it clear that it's for the day, that it's not punitive for a long amount of time, it's for the day. And we do a staff follow up this last box, which is I think is my favorite part of this behavior flow chart, because at this point we're saying, you know, when they come back in the next day, it's not a confrontation. It's very much a welcome. Hey, I'm glad you're back. How are you today? You know, yesterday, you know, I was sorry that you were asked to leave. Just a reminder that we want you to keep your voice a little lower today. OK, this helps to reestablish a connection and you can continue to build a relationship with the patron while gently reminding them of the expectation. So again, this is empathy at work. This is a policy being used in an empathetic manner that thrives with inclusion and belonging. So we we we work to make all of our policies very much like this disruptive behavior flow chart. All right. So I just want to add in there just a good example is just this week. We had on Monday when I worked the desk, I try to get up there a couple hours a week and on Monday when I was at the desk, the kids were just vibrating with energy, you could just see it. And I think it's just the start of summer. There was a group just here almost all day. We have snack at four, they were waiting on snack. Just so many things happening. They were balloons that they pulled off a shelf that were there for a display. And they were trying to pop them and it just kept going. And I'm like, I know this day is just going to be rough on them today. It's going to be hard. So I, you know, I did a couple of, hey, guys, we need to redirect. And I was busy and it was hard to do when they when they started popping balloons and running through the stacks. I walked over and said, I feel like you guys are wanting to leave for the day. And they're like, no, no, no, no, no. And I said, well, your behavior is not showing me that your behavior is telling me something different. So I need to have you redirect your behavior. I need to get you back to where you were and calmer, a little calmer in the library. Otherwise, sometimes I'll even set them out to run around the building a couple of times, like take two laps, come back when you can calm down a little bit. This is not library behavior. We have a rec center next door in our, in our building. We are, we share a building with a rec center. So the kids will come over here pretty rambunctious and we try to have them go back and forth in our child conduct and child safety policy, which we don't have, we're not going to show you right now for time, but it is included in the link that we'll give you to our drive that has all of these files and things in them. It basically says that any kiddo can come in the library and stay as long as they can conduct themselves according to our conduct policy or conduct code on a regular basis. If a kiddo comes in and they're five, they can stay if they can behave well. If they're nine and they can stay if they behave well. If they're 15, whatever age or adults, same thing. But it's really about conduct. It's not about age for us on the library side. On the rec side, they do things a little differently. So there is some struggle sometimes. We just keep reminding the rec staff, this is a behavior issue, not an age issue. And if they have, if it's a 10 year old who's been asked to not go in the rec center, then they have to stay on the library side or they have to leave for the day because of their conduct. And that's something we try to reiterate over and over. It's all about conduct. And we follow on that policy, probably the most of all of our policies. If they're younger, like a four year old, we will just sometimes send a little letter with whoever's with them. Maybe it's a 10 year old's sibling or whatever, letting them know that they need to come back in six months and try again to see if we can make it work later on. But they don't, if it's taking so much staff time to intervene, then we know we need to try again later. Yes, she's going to move on to the next little part of this, which is our windows, our inclusion of belonging in action. I loved this little pink thing, pink sticking out that we have on there that talks about diversity. This is where we got that you're at the table, you're having that voice and then you're being part of creating the menu. So I wanted to talk a little bit about three things. The first one is our find free. It's not in order here. We know it's all there. I should tell you, I didn't tell you at the beginning, my default thing that I always say when I present is that slides are really something for you to look at. So you don't have to just constantly look at me. We typically do under 10 slides and then what try to give you the content we want in our words. And then at the end we'll provide, like I said, those files for you. So our find free policy was one of the first things we did to try to be more inclusive. We knew that some folks can't pay their fines. They can't afford it. And our goal is for people to be able to check out and use our services. So we moved away from that. But we also have situations where people may have five or ten items that they just don't return. And then we are in a different situation. We do need to charge for those materials. But we work out what we call an account reconciliation. That means that if they have, say, $100 in overdue materials that they don't they've lost them or whatever. We work with them on an agreement of what they think they can afford to pay. It's not what we dictate, but how much do you think you can do a month? And if it's two dollars, that's fine. We'll go with two dollars as long as they give the two dollars and they continue, they can continue to use all the services just as they would. If they can't do that, they can come in and just say, hey, this month isn't going to work for me, and that's OK, too. It's all about follow through and accountability for us. So as long as they're willing to be accountable for eventually paying those off, we're OK. And if it comes down to it, we'll look at whether it's really that big of a deal to let those go. Sometimes it's just the cost of doing business. We want to make sure that we're meeting people where they are, and that's really important to us. So the last thing I want to talk about is our strategic planning. We just came up with our new strategic plan and I'm really, really proud of it. But before I do that, I want to read this statement. It's from our annual report of 2020. And it's I just I it's my statement. I still love it, so I'm just going to share it with you guys. We thrive to be inclusive and equitable. The North Liberty Library values and is committed to serving all members of our community in quiet and in uncertain times. Libraries have long been places to empower people through knowledge and to do so equitably. So as our FY 21 story unfolds and we continue to recreate and reinvent how we serve you, our mission holds true. Your library, a place to be, connect, enrich, create, thrive. And Kelly is going to pull up our strategic plan for you really quickly. I am just going to very quickly show you a little bit of what we've done with our strategic plan and we're going down. She's going to, yeah, right. So we kind of talk about the process first. And then I just want to talk about our defining principles. We chose to call them defining principles rather than what it was the other term we could have used. I think it was I can't remember. Anyway, so defining principles are access, diversity and service. These are things that overarch all that we do. And I won't read everything to you, but I did want to then show you the values that this team chose, our staff team, along with a board member who came in and worked with us during our process and our state library consultant who helped us develop this. So we chose to do almost all of our things, our three values, our things that are overarching exactly what we're talking about today, that piece of belonging. So Civic Commons is the first one, just where people come and meet and interact. And Kelly has a great example of that in a program that she's doing that's been a long, long dream of mine, which is a series of hard conversations or community conversations. She started that during COVID. So the first one was completely virtual. We've now been able to move back to those. And she can talk a little bit more about that, I think, later on. But knowing that we're investing in our community assets and creating places for people to connect of all different ages and all different backgrounds, social responsibility, ensuring that the library, I fully believe that libraries have a role in social responsibility and delivering efforts to support and inform people about critical issues. It's very important in our library that we do that. And our, fortunately, our city is on board for that. They support the things that we do. Our city council and our city administrator have been extremely supportive and then literacy. And literacy doesn't just mean learning how to read. Literacy is all the things for all ages. It's that lifelong learning component, providing free and equal access to everyone in our community and upholding those first amendment expressions. So that's basically our strategic plan in a nutshell. That is also included in our in the thing, the folder that we'll share with you after the fact. And Kelly, if you want to pull back up the slides. And the last thing is I just wanted to tell you a little bit more. The strategic plan is just that deeper dive into meeting people where they are. But I did want to talk to you a little bit about the idea committee. Kelly, are you remember? I am sorry, I don't remember what I was talking about of the idea committee. So we have nineteen staff and I think we have six on that committee. Plus our new city role we have for our city is a program and equity coordinator. And Micah is also Micah is her name. She's also on that committee. But what they do is showcase our our commitment to this offering these inclusive services, working to ensure that we embed inclusion in every aspect of what we do in our operations and service delivery. Both Kelly and Emily are part of that committee. And Kelly is going to tell you just a little bit more about how they started and where they are today. Yeah, absolutely. So we have been making it a point to meet as often as possible. We're we're meeting once to twice a month. We created the statement that we reviewed earlier in the PowerPoint in the slide deck. And we're still striving to create ways to reach out to neighbors and get their thoughts on how we can better serve our patrons in the name of diversity, inclusion and access. So we're still working on that as a work in progress. And a lot of what we do when we come up with our programming really is based on an intersection between partnerships and policy. As Jenny mentioned before, we do have a conversation series. It's called Lighthouse in the Library is partially funded by a grant we received from the American Library Association in 2020. And since then, we've had four conversations ranging from food and wellness inequity to workforce issues. Our last conversation, our last event was 100 percent in person. It was just this past month and it was done in partnership with the University of Iowa and their Cultural Competence Center, where we talked about cultural intelligence and it was a very interactive program. It was two hours and it went by so fast. But yeah, we really do strive to adopt a programming policy that is very inclusive, that includes inclusive partnerships. Some of those partnerships that we have include the United Action for Youth, UAY is an organization here in Johnson County that has helped us with training specifically when it comes to our youth and teen populations. But they've also provided staff training for our library staff. And that's been very, very helpful. Also, another partnership that we use to help strive to that we hope to navigate our policy is our work with social work interns. We, as I mentioned before, the disruptive behavior flow chart that we looked at earlier was created in part through the work of an intern that was here from the university. They also have assisted with our diversity audits. I think we've completed diversity audits for all of our juvenile, all of our juvenile materials. And I think we're getting started with the adult materials now. And these audits again began in 2020 during our closing. It was one of our our pandemic projects, as it were. That again, that action where we're literally taking every single book off of the shelves, giving them a review and determining based on a set of criteria, whether the material aligns with our goals to be inclusive and to encourage belonging with our patrons. And then again, as I mentioned with the idea committee, you know, they help determine our stance on library neutrality. And as you can see, the small little cartoon on the screen, we consider books to not only be windows to different worlds, but also mirrors of our patrons and the best way to make sure that books are indeed mirrors of our patrons is to make sure that we're doing our diversity audits and that our collection is inclusive and diverse. Oh, yes. And then also, you know, we also, when it comes to, you know, when it comes to library neutrality, as Jenny mentioned earlier, we support an exclusive statement that is listed in our meeting room policy. We already show that that and that will be in the meeting policy will be included in the link of documents Jenny mentioned before. But we firmly believe that not all opinions matter. When those opinions discriminate against another group, we do not give them value. In the past, libraries have had to track record, have had to track records of supporting discrimination, have had a track record of supporting discrimination, whether it was actively as under Jim Crow or passively by staying silent on current issues. But here at North Liberty Library, we strive to do better. We are not going to give space to discriminatory groups because we want everyone to feel safe in this space. This goes back to what we, one of our values of creating civic comments to create a space where everyone feels welcome. And I will say the diversity audits are something we probably never could have accomplished without our, without the help of all of our part timers, but also without, without the pandemic. So some good things have come out of that. There's no way we could have handled every book like we did in our collection. It's over 60,000 pieces of material. We haven't touched the adult stuff yet, but all the kids stuff is done. And we get monthly reports as they're continuing that as they order new items for the collection that work continues. I did want to talk just a little bit about policies and why we have policies. This is a little out of order, but I wanted to just bring it up because I think it's really important. Our policies protect not only our public, but they protect our staff. So we use those policies when we do our work every single day, but they're also extraordinarily flexible. We want the decision making power to be in the hands of every staff member from our part timers who work four to eight hours a week to our full timers. It's the primary tool that they can use to do their job effectively and offers the public a set of expectations for the library and ensures that everyone is treated treated with equity. And it also is great customer service. If you have good policy and solid policy, you're going to deliver better customer service if your staff is consistent with it. We do a lot of public education with our policy. If we need to, if we need to use it to explain why we allow kids a little bit of leeway when they're here, we know that poverty is loud. And we want to acknowledge that for some patrons who may not always get that. We're kind of a noisy library. We're here to here to allow everyone's face to do what they need to do. You know, we'll put a kibosh on really loud noise, but we've learned from United Action for Youth that some kids are just, they grow up in an atmosphere that's very loud. They're vying for attention and sometimes their voices are just noisy. So we try to make sure that we do that. We also want to use policy to cover any legal or ethical issues and to lend credibility to what the work we do every day. Some of it's because of our state library standards. We have policy in place just simply that there that's some implications there. It's a mechanism for our administration and our staff to translate those library priorities and our strategic plan into action. And then finally, it's a way to support the staff in the board. If ever there's any event of legal action. We think that policies need to be proactive. So as I mentioned, we started rewriting every single policy we had when I started as director. We got rid of some policies. We really pared them down. Our policy manual is like 30 some pages all together and it's based on our operations and services and it's very community specific. We need to remember that policies fit in a little bit with your community. Not every policy is going to work for every community. Our child safety policy might not work in another in another area. If you've got kiddos being dropped off, just can't take care of themselves or can't if require a constant intervention, it's not going to work for you. And then they're just there to say, I see you and I hear you. And they're in the fabric of everything we do at our library. So our idea committee reviews every policy we have every month and provides input in ways that we can make the policies more equitable and inclusive as well. So that work has just begun. We're not anywhere near where this is just the start. As I mentioned, the start of our journey and it's a it's never done. That work is never done. And I just finally wanted to just read your quote that I found when we were researching this and that is authenticity creates a path for everyone in a direction. If you just slap together buzzwords, there may not be anything to anchor it into or connect it with as possible. You embody your commitment to diversity in your culture rather than in just being a statement, leverage your time, energy and resources to create results. So we are at the end. I feel like a talking head. We've been talking at this screen for a long time and we can't see any of you. I we have a little time left. So if anyone has questions, if you don't, we can show you more things. Thank you. If anyone has questions and wants to type it in the chat. Comments, questions. I don't see anything yet, but you can go ahead and put that in there if they want to show us some more information. This is fascinating. And I am a really admire the efforts that you put in to do this is like you said, I'm going to bounce down just to show it. I'll just kind of give you a little more. We wanted you to know who we are and what our families look like. Because for us, this isn't just library work. It's also personal work. We're members of our communities. We have families who use our resources as well. And use other libraries. And it's important for us that libraries are operating this way because we want our families to all feel welcome in the library, just as we want our patrons to feel welcome. So this is our information. It's where you can contact us if you want to talk more, if you have questions. If you want to know why this is important for any community, we're happy to talk about those things with you. And then just kind of these are a few other resources that we used as we were creating this again. These are all linked, so you'll get a copy of the PowerPoint. It'll be in the resources that we provide. And I think maybe it's not, but I will make sure to give some of you guys the a copy of the drive folder so that everyone has access to all the things that we've been talking about today. I think we'll have a couple of things we need to update before we do that. And I'll make sure that's done because we first did this presentation a year and a half ago. So the work is still going. But this is just some of the things that we use to get where we are. And really, I think I can show we can show you our what did we have? We had one more, I think, thing that we might have wanted to show off. And if we don't, we might be able to just be let you go a few minutes early. We already did. Oh, maybe we did them all. Let's see if there's anything else that you might be interested in seeing. Like I can show you that count reconciliation agreement that we use with our patrons. Does that count? I hopefully that comes up for you guys. Yes. So this is just a basic example of what it looks like when they come in. It's an agreement, not a contract. We know that they may not pay it. And if they don't, then we work with them. You know, we do things like, OK, maybe it's been hard for you to bring back 20 pieces of material, so maybe let's try three instead. And when you bring those back, you can get three more. We just want access for our patrons, whatever that means for them. And, however, we can make that kind of thing. So we we and Kelly's wordsmith and reworked a lot of our these types of documents that we use and to deliver our services. And she trains every staff person on all of these things. She's created a great training platform since she started here. So Kelly, how long have you been here now? It's been three years, three years. Yes, just past this. I think this is my coming up on my third year here in June. Awesome. And we are happy she is here. I'm happy to be here. Yes. We do have a question. Go ahead. No, go ahead. No, you go ahead. I was just going to keep talking. That's fine. Jenny, you said that when you became director, then you started instituting these changes and so I just was curious about that have the ideas been in your head for a while and then you became director or did you pick up things from somewhere else? What what was your drive to make this change? So, you know, I am when I started as director, I had been I've been at the library for 25 years and I've been director for seven of that. Before that, I was assistant director. And before that, I was teen librarian. And before that, I was a library assistant. So I've been in lots of roles here. I have worked, I like to say, I've worked in three libraries and they've all been North Liberty. We started in a very tiny 1200 square foot space. I would live next door to the library and I decided to volunteer. So that was the start. I went over to get a book and my former director said, well, if you want, it's not ready yet, but if you want to go downstairs and process it, I'll catalog it for you. So that was the beginning of my shift. I had always thought libraries are interesting. And in fact, had my former boss, I was going to be a reporter. My former boss at the Des Moines Register, actually, his wife was a librarian and I was like, wow, that sounds like something I'd really like and it just didn't click. So that was the click for me. And then when I started as director, the diversity and equity pieces were, as I mentioned earlier, kind of to me, I just thought we were inclusive by nature. So I didn't do any of that major. I did the major work just to make policies flexible. I'm aware of who just loves policy and I love finding out about policy and creating policy. I'd share my policies sometimes with our city attorney, like the meeting and policy. But I don't always share them with him because I don't want to know. I have other and he likes to make things more complicated than they need to be. And he will admit that, first of all. But the diversity and the equity and the inclusion pieces really for us, I think at home in twenty twenty when when things started spinning out of control in our country and for us, it was the discovery that libraries, yes, they do have a place in social responsibility. We have and we have a role to take. And so then I started thinking about I did a podcast and I was interviewed for a podcast and I started thinking about libraries as. I just lost my train of thought. What's the word I want? Yes, I have a space of no library. So when oh my gosh, you guys, this is terrible. It's usually an individual who is during George Floyd, what when we support the different groups and we're not part of the group, but we support the group. Thank you as allies. My gosh, my brain is what is it? Wednesday, I don't know. I can't use Monday as an excuse. So as allies, libraries as allies, and I started researching it and maybe it's somewhere that organizations can be allies, but I can't find it in my research. I didn't find it, but I thought what better allies than libraries to groups in our communities? It always referred to individuals as allies, not not libraries. But I truly believe we have a role as allies to the groups that are disenfranchised and underserved. So that really started our journey. Journey. And then when we started talking about this actual discussion that we first just spontaneously submitted for the Association for Role and Small Libraries and then it just kind of spun into what we have today. We presented this at ARSL in Reno and we've presented it like four more times since then and excited, very excited news. I was actually someone heard my podcast that I did with a leadership podcast. And I was invited to speak in Australia in October, so I get to go and speak to the Australia Public Libraries this fall. So that's pretty cool. So you get to travel to Australia? I do. They're flying me there. Great. Well, thank you so much for that explanation. And I really appreciate the things that you're talking about as far as allies. I have to agree with you that libraries can be allies, but I don't know. I'm not a good semantics person either. So if they say it just has to be people, then it has to be the librarians, I guess. But. Oh, I'm going to change that. OK, that sounds good to me. Did you have anything else you want to say? We don't have any other questions. So we have some thank yous. So people who are. Again, feel free to read. Yeah, feel free to reach out. I love talking to other librarians about this stuff and I'm passionate about it. So email, call, whatever you want to do. It'll all be and I'll send you guys the link to the drive that you can share with everyone who attended. Thank you so much. And we'll put that on the web page along with the archive of this presentation for people to look at. And then they'll be able to access all of that right there from our web page. All right. Thank you for your presentation. And I didn't miss the third person. I'll don't tell her that. I'm sure she works very hard, but you guys did a great job. Picking up the slack for her. Well, thank you. Thank you for having us and thank you for everyone who's in attendance. Yes. And I just want to say that we do have a place on the Nebraska Library Commission web page. I don't know if I have to take back control or something in order to. I have to. Yeah, we'll stop showing our screen. OK, let's see screen. I'm showing anymore. I'll take a quick look and see what. OK, yes. So here's on our overall Nebraska Library Commission page over here. You can search Encompass Live and this is what will come up. This is the list of upcoming presentations here, including one that's just completing right now. And then down below that is the archived Encompass Live shows. So you can look and see. Well, last week it was the Heartland Honors 911 victims and survivors. So if there's something you want to watch from this list, all of our shows from the very beginning, which was Don't Look It'll Make You Sick, January 7th, 2009, 2009. That was our very first one. And we have been consistently presenting these from very thoughtful, helpful people from all over the country and also some of our staff here at the Library Commission, so it all depends on what it is. And one thing Krista always tells people is now you look here. These are presentations from 2009. Things have changed since 2009. So whatever links they may have or things that they send you to might not exist anymore or might be different. So you have to keep that in mind as you're looking. OK, don't look at the screen for a minute because here we go back right back up again. So you can search everything or you can just say, show me the most recent 12 months. What's in the last 12 months? There's probably something of interest to me in there, too. So then you don't have quite the the time frame issue and also the long list of topics as well, so you can switch to either one. And I just wanted to once again thank our presenters, Jenny and Kelly. So I almost forgot. Thank you again and thank you, everybody who's listening today. Have a great day, everyone. Have a great day, everyone. Thank you and we'll be. I have to find my button sharing. Thank you all and have a great rest of Wednesday. Bye bye.