 Next up on our last lightning round session for the day is Rosella Tesh, who's right here in Nebraska, on the other side of the state of Nebraska, where I am in Shadron, Shadron Public Library, and she's going to talk about this cool collection they have inside their small library. Go ahead, Rosella. Okay, so thank you for having me and welcome to everybody. I will start talking about our location. We are located in northwestern Nebraska and Shadron, it's the city of which we are the public library. The population of Shadron is 3,800. We are the biggest community in a radium of 50 miles. We are a place of open spaces, not industrialization, lots of nature. There are two prevalent ethnic groups in our community, the white and the native American. Some time relationship between the two have been a little bit rocky. We border with the South Dakota and with the Pine Ridge Reservation, which is the reservation of the Lakota Nation. Okay, a little bit about our library. It's known as CPL. Shadron Public Library was founded in 1913. It's a Carnegie building with 5,500 square feet of space divided onto levels. So, we are really tiny. We have a collection for the total of 36,000 items and an early circulation of 55,265. So, Tiny Library, its name and its history, the collection is called IP&A and stands for Indigenous People of North America. The content is books divided in fiction and biographies, CDs, which are musical CDs of a contemporary and traditional Native American music and DVDs. They are feature films and documentaries made by Native American artists. The name was a little bit of a name that we serendipitously found. We already had a certain amount of books and other items in a particular section of the library on the subject of Native American cultures. And we didn't know what to call it. And one day I read an article that was talking about Indigenous People of North American cultures. And so, I thought to that it's exactly what we should call our collection. And so, we began with that. So, here it's a photo of the collection, the book part. It's located close to very beautiful windows, so there is lots of light. And we have a little bit of a reading area with a couch, a sectional black couch and some chairs. The structure of the collection is as follows. So, as I said, we have non-fiction items and they are classified with the Dewey Decimal System. Fiction, biographies, periodicals, and I should say newspapers, music, the CDs, the DVDs. Also, we have a section that are young adult non-fiction, young adult fiction, junior non-fiction, junior fiction and junior biography. So, how all of this came to happen? Here you have another photo of the collection and you can see a little bit better the reading area. Around 2010, we started to group together items of Native American interest. A little bit was due to the ability to find them in the collection a little bit easier when we were looking forward for patterns. And a little bit was while we were cleaning and reorganizing our bookshelves, those books were popping up. And we started to see that in collecting them in the same place, they were starting to give the idea of culture inside a culture that needed to be honored. It was like if the books were talking to us, the material was talking to us. Sorry, I went a little bit too... Okay, fast. Sorry about that. Okay, now, okay. And so, we start to classify under IP&A in 2011. In 2012, we started to add musical CDs. That was due to the influence of one of our staff and she was, she is Native American. And we were talking about the beauty of many of the songs and the music. And so, we decided that it could be something that our patterns would be interested to. In 2013, we have the movies. After the CDs, we thought, oh, well, we should try to find movies and documentaries. And we discovered a new world of cinematography. Very, very interesting, very beautiful, soul searching movies. In 2014, well, we had the movies and another natural growth and development from this collection was why we don't present those movies to the bigger public. And we decided to make a movie festival. The movie festival has gone on for 40 years. And it's called Trading Stories because the aim of this festival is to have people of different cultures to sit down and trade their stories, the different aspects of their culture to confront, compare, and share. In 2016, we started to add the periodicals and the newspapers for our patrons. And in 2018, we did the Young Adult and Junior IP&M collections. Okay, some statistics. Here you can see on the photo, Mr. Michael Murphy is a Native American artist who plays flute. One of the things that flew out of this collection is to offer other programs like dancing, art shows and craft, and also concerts of Native American music. So this little tiny collection has 739 items. The value is $10,771. And the circulation, the total circulation since 2011 has been $3,700. So why to do this collection? Why to go to the travel? First of all, to honor a culture historically important to our city. And here I want to say also that we decide to honor also the culture of the white settlers preparing and implementing a local history collection. So we have a balance for the cultures. Provide a wider, deeper understanding of Native American cultures, of course, promote better relationships between the two ethnic groups, support people to search about their roots, and ties to risk to use and stay at the library longer, and to have an ease of material search and retrieval. Gifts of IP&A. This collection has given lots of things to the library and to the library staff, not only the people that we have been able to meet, to meet through the concerts, through the movie festivals, very interesting artistic people, but also, like I said, the better understanding of the Native American cultures, donations. Many people in the community have donated beautiful, very beautiful, very interesting books to enlarge our IP&A collection. Artwork. Here you have a photo on the side of one of the prints that were donated to the library. Previous to that, our artwork was basically made of discolored prints from an old grant that was providing arts to the library. We have now a beautiful, vibrant piece of art. Also, we have received items like a donation of a drum, several bowls, cashewnuts, and so on. The Trading Story Movie Festival has been one of the products of the collection, and it has brought people to the library that otherwise we would have never seen. Publicity for the library, and I will talk a little bit more about this in a minute, and more patterns. Native American patterns, we are seldom at the library before we start our IP&A collection. We have now a big wide use by the communities in Pine Ridge that come here to do grocery, to do errands, and then stop at the library. They feel comfortable, they feel that their values and culture are respected, and so they come and they use the library, they use the computers, they spend time in the reading room. I wanted to talk a little bit about the publicity. In 2014, one of the opinionists of the Rapid City Journal came to the library because of the Movie Festival. He was very enthusiastic about the movies that he saw, but also he was really impressed by the IP&A collection. When he returned to Rapid City, which is the main city, or biggest city in our region, he went to several library, public libraries, and college libraries around the area to see if anybody else had this type of collection, and to his surprise, he didn't find any. So in this part of the country, we are really unique. For us it was very important to have our work recognized. I think also was a little bit of free publicity, and so we were very excited about that. So what we hope for the future, of course, we want to have more space for the collection, more events, and here on the side you can see an image of a dance building at the Movie Festival. We want also to try to collect artifacts. Unfortunately, from this corner of Nebraska, lots of historical artifacts like piddled work, photography, it's living. Every time there is a change of hands of property from a generation to another, or when people die and don't have anybody to take over their states, stuff is dispersed through auctions, and then it leaves the state. And so we would like to have the capability and the possibility to add those artifacts or some of those artifacts to our collection so to be able to preserve a little bit of history of our corner of Nebraska. And this is it. Okay, all right. Great. Excuse me. Thank you very much, Rosella. Thank you so much for sharing about that really great collection. Next time I'm out in western Nebraska, I'll have to stop by and take a look at it. All right. Thank you. Thank you for loving us.