 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Christa Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Next to me I have Katherine Brockmeyer, one of our staff here. The commissioner is going to be hosting our pale discussion today. Encompass Live is Library Commission's weekly online event, a webinar that we do every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. We do these sessions live and we have a mixture of presentations but we have guest speakers and some commission staff and we have a mixture of all that today because we have Katherine and then we have seven now people who are going to be talking about their experiences and internships. We do a very various mixture of things, presentations, interviews, book of views, little mini web trainings, anything we can think of that might be of interest to Nebraska librarians. So today we have our internship session. This is a grant program we have and I'm going to pass the control over to Katherine and she's going to take over and start us off. Sure. Well good morning. Thank you everyone for attending. The mouse doesn't work. You might have to use the space or arrow keys. There we go. Yes, I'm Katherine Brockmeyer. I'm a research analyst and special projects associate here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Some of the hats that I wear are writing grants helping with conducting evaluations and designing websites and what I've been involved in for the last few years has been the internship grant program to libraries. I've helped with the organization of the grant program and the administration of the grants to the libraries. So I feel I have had an opportunity in the last couple of years to get to know the libraries that have participated in this program and to learn about what they are offering to students and people who are interested in getting their feet wet in libraries to consider as a career. So we thought this would be a good time to share where we're at right now with the current program we have and what steps we will be taking in the next year to continue this program. So today we are going to talk about the current year's internship grant program and going to talk about the objectives of it and then we have brought in supervisors and library directors to talk about their own personal experiences with participating in this grant program and lastly we will talk about the upcoming internship grant opportunities. So the 2010-2011 internship grants, they were funded through a grant from a Nebraska foundation who generously gave $10,000. They do wish to remain anonymous otherwise they would be happy to name them at this time. They have been strong supporters of libraries, have given individual grants to libraries and so we thought that this might be a good fit and we approached them and they indeed for two years now have provided $10,000 grants to the NLA, the Nebraska Library Association is the primary applicant because they are a 501C3 they are a non-profit organization and it was a good fit for them to be the primary applicant considering that these grants go to public libraries in Nebraska and NLC has helped cosponsor this grant application and we've helped with the administration of the grant. These grants are available to accredited public libraries in Nebraska and in this past grant cycle we awarded eight $1,000 grants and four $500 grants to libraries. So 12 libraries total of $10,000. This program ran from June 11th of last year through June 10th of this next year so internships have to wrap up by the end of or by mid June and of the 12 libraries have completed their internships. Here are the libraries that are participating and as you can see it's a wide range of populations and geography wise too. We wanted to make sure that we were hoping to find libraries in rural areas and rural can mean a couple of different things. It can mean proximity to a larger micro-polleton or metropolitan area. It can also mean the size itself so as you can see Norfolk is a micro-polleton community but also you might consider them somewhat rural because they're further away from Lincoln and Omaha and our tiniest community was Emerson and the largest here was Papillion. Here's a map of where they're located as far west as we have Lexington here and we have I don't know Nebraska geography as well. This is terrible of me. When it's your turn you can school me on my geography. Someone tell us some questions. You'll tell me who you are. That's deplorable. I'm sorry. One of the main goals of this grant is that libraries receive financial assistance and guidance to provide internship stipends to students and promising students get involved in real library work that takes advantage of their experience and interests. Basically what we're trying to do is show that how work in libraries can be appealing and how it might be considered as a career and outcomes that we had selected for this grant where the interns will report positive experiences with their work assignments and increased interest in library careers Nebraska library staff will report positive experiences with grant funded internships and that communities will benefit from the internship grant experience. The third one is sometimes the toughest one to prove because we don't know what kind of a lasting impact having an intern in your library will have but it's always good to try to get feedback from your patrons and to see what kind of a what kind of a presence you're making in the community by having an intern in your library. Let us start with David Mixdorf from South Sioux City Public Library. We're going to bring him up first to speak and hear a little bit about their libraries experience with their intern. Okay Dave you should be unmuted. See if you can say hi. Yes you can. Good morning. Good morning. Well starting out this was the second intern that our library has had about three years, four years ago we had the first intern and he's actually working part time at the library now as he's finishing up college and he plans on going into library work as a university study and so and you can actually see that's going to be a perfect fit for him. Today's person or this year's person that we had was a student who's been in the library. She's been part of the teen advisory board. She was just graduating from high school and what when I suggested to our children's library that this gal might be a nice fit for it. We talked together, she was interested in being a school teacher and so this we thought would be kind of a nice little thing because she thought about being a school librarian and one of the nice things that she found is something that I always try to promote. I always tell high school students in the first second year college shoots try and get involved in an area that you're interested in just so you can see what it's like because you don't want to go all through four years of college and realize boy I don't like this at all. Well when she got involved in it she realized she was a little more timid around the kids and what she was kind of expecting and so I think it kind of opened up her eyes on kids. It also as we kept emphasizing plan ahead you know if you got one activity planned have a second and third as a backup just in case something happens. Don't automatically think that you know we're going to have 25 kids today and then one kid shows up or okay last time we only had one kid show up and we have 25 kids show up. So you got to be real flexible. So there was a lot of things that she kind of learned at this experience. Could you tell us a little bit Dave about how you recruited your intern this year? Like I said she was kind of a volunteer for our team advisory program and we had we have probably about seven or eight young people and she was the oldest one. The other ones are pretty much South Mores freshman and when they actually found out about this the ones that were South Mores are like okay how do we get involved in this too? This sounds like something interesting. So we probably in about another year or two we're going to have at least one or two other people that are very interested in it and but this young gal like I said I thought this would be a perfect fit for her because she was thinking of being a school teacher and so I thought well what better way than being part of the youth program and working with our youth director. Great and approximately do you know approximately how many hours she worked? She was we were one of those kind of the part time so she was about if I remember 12 to 15 hours a week and we kind of split it up so that the majority of her time was going to be spent down in the children's area but for several hours each week she spent specialized in another area so for one time period she was in reference one time period she was just back in the circulation area doing that one time she worked with the cataloging and for some odd reason she didn't want to learn the budget and how my part of the job. She wasn't interested in learning how to do the collecting stuff but most of the other areas she did some sort of part in it all the way to preparing magazines, preparing books, you know doing that type of stuff to get them ready to go out on the shelves so we kind of ran her through the whole gamut of everything. Well I'm glad that you brought that up because that is one of the objectives of the grant is that they are introduced to all aspects of the library even if you wanted them to spend the majority of their time on one particular area that they see all facets of library work. Everything that goes on behind the scenes and at the front desk and so it sounds like she had a very good introduction to all aspects of library work. What was some of the feedback that you got from your staff about your intern? Well she was someone that everybody knew I mean she literally grew up at the library so everybody saw her go from the little kind of pig tailed gal up to the young lady that she is nowadays so I mean it was just like having her here like she always was anyway and we don't really have like a volunteer program where we've got people coming in on a weekly basis and doing stuff. The student interns kind of plan different things if we try some sort of special event where we just need extra people, the student interns kind of they come in and assist at that type of stuff so like I said the positive thing is one for her I think it really opened up her eyes what it was like to work with kids. You know how you have to be literally prepared for anything at any time. I don't know if that changed her opinion when she went to college to be a teacher I haven't heard anything like that but it's just one of those good things. Good response back we actually had a piece in the paper you know I heard things for people in the community saying well you hired somebody who was an intern that lived here in town that was kind of a nice thing to do a lot of people in the community knew who she was anyway because she was kind of one of those active individuals in high school so she was pretty well known in the area and little kids really seem to like her. Sounds like it was a very successful venture on both ends for the intern and for your library. Thanks Dave. Does anyone have any questions for Dave at this time? If you have a question you can just type it into the question section or if you have your own mic and you want me to unmute you just say that and we will. While we're doing that I'm going to talk just a little bit about Gail Roberts she's at Blair she was unable to join us today but this is one of the quotes that I got from her in terms evaluation that the experience was definitely worth it I learned a lot more than I'd ever known, have known on my own. This will help me so much as I continue my education in libraries and their work. So I believe she is pursuing an education in library science I'm not sure at what level and Gail just asked me to pass on a few things she said this is our third intern and she said the biggest thing to keep in mind is just to plan to have a really good plan in place for your internship. That's what she wanted me to pass on to the group and we're going to move Diane Johnson up and get some feedback from her now at this point in time and just as a way to introduce Stromsburg Public Library her intern said that she liked helping the patrons especially kids find books they would love to read and that they found they really enjoy withdrawing books. Weeding, yes. And then some comments that came back from the community where the parents really enjoyed the programming from the summer reading program. We do have a question in our question section actually it's more for you I think because it wants to know does the grant have an age limit lower or upper of how old the interns can be? There's no upper age limit we're looking for people who are interested in pursuing a career in libraries if possible or that are pursuing their education. We've had people who are over 30, 40, 50 that are considering entering the library workforce and then the youngest I don't believe we have a minimum age but we are looking for high school, of course high school age and up. Because they're starting to think about what their career might be right, right. Diana's unmuted. Okay Diana thanks for joining us today. Thank you I'm glad to do it. Our intern was in a limit so she would be on the upper, upper age. She has three school age children and she was working part time to get her college degree and she took a couple of library science classes as a part of her curriculum and so we thought she would be an excellent fit for our library as an intern. She was excellent with the public. She really did well. You knew that she liked people. She was good at the circulation desk. She was good at computer searching and much of her time was conducting the summer reading program and many parents told me as you can see from this quote that they really their kids really liked her. She also was kind of in charge of a program for the young adults. That was less successful as far as the numbers go but the ones that came really had a good time and I felt afterwards that I maybe should have given her a little more guidance on this particular aspect. We had a whole new group on the youth advisory board and whereas the previous advisory board had a real good mix. This one was a little different. We had one person on there that was real negative and I think she had a hard time knowing how to handle him and I think she was taking it back. Neither she nor I would have guessed that this person would have been so negative. But I think she enjoyed her experience a lot. She is still taking library science courses. She's doing a practicum this semester in a small college library. So she definitely wants to go into library science but she will just have her associate's degree I think this spring and then she goes to UNO to do the last two years. I did want to mention that I thought the grant application procedure was very easy to understand and to do. I liked the question about the activities, the schedule of activities that forced me to plan a program for the intern and then also to keep looking at this schedule so that I could have. I like the flexibility that we were given to adapt the program to the needs of our library. That's great to hear. Yes. We're happy to provide some guidance and some ideas for what all the orientation to the library might entail and some of the things that you might do. We have a link to another internship program that has gained some nationwide recognition and so you're able to access their curriculum to get some ideas and of course the commission and NLA are also happy to help with the planning of your own curriculum or orientation for your students and today's program is also great because I think that these directors and supervisors are now able to hear from each other what some of their strategies are for conducting an internship especially for people who are considering doing this for the first time. I would certainly be happy to do it again. I think both she and I had a good experience. That is excellent to hear. Thank you, Diana. Does anyone have any questions for Diana? Diana, did you already have her in mind when you applied for this grant? Yes, I did. That's fine. If you already have someone that you have in mind to hire, however you choose to hire, it's up to the individual library how they elect to hire an intern. Some libraries already have someone in mind before they even apply for this for their grant and then others, they haven't hired anyone yet but they have a process that they have in place to advertise the position and then have a competitive hiring process. Whatever works for your library is fine with us. Thank you, Diana. I think we're going to mute you at this time. If you still want to talk while you're still on the phone, just go ahead and raise your hand and Crystal will bring you up. Let's head to Northwark. Good morning. I'll try not to cough my way through this. Hi, Karen. We had a wonderful experience and this year was the first time that we had ever done the internship program and we felt it was very successful. The intern that we had actually contacted us and her school librarian did and recommended this young woman for an internship. So we went through the application process which I have to agree with Diana was very clear and forthright and very helpful and Mary already knew at the time that we got the internship for her that she was going to UNO. She had just graduated from high school last spring. She's been a lifelong library user and her plan was to go to UNO and major in library science and that is what she has done. We tried to as equally as we could divide her time among the different areas of the library. We made sure that she spent time in the circulation area learning about her automated system as far as checking items in and out, assisting patrons, shelving, so forth. We also had her spend time with our reference department on a regular basis. She also spent time in youth services which was wonderful to have her help with the summer reading program. She spent time at technical services just getting an idea of what the cataloging and processing process is like. I think she especially enjoyed her time working with the children the summer reading program and then we also had her spend time with our outreach librarian going out to shut ins and to nursing homes in the area to take books out to library users that cannot come to the library. We also had her spend some time with material selection and we had her work on a special project in our young adult paperback collection helping us do some collection development in that area and I think she especially enjoyed that as well. I also had her spend time with our library director and secretary to get an idea of what kind of a budget we work with, how budgeting is done, what a library director does, what their library secretary does. I think this was wonderful for Mary. I think she felt very positively about the experience and I think it was certainly eye-opening that when you're a library user for years and years you don't really have the whole picture of what a library does, the kind of work and what all goes on behind the scenes. I think she found that very interesting and helpful and I think this whole experience really reconfirmed her choice of profession that she was going into and I think she is doing very well at UNO and plans to eventually get her masters in library science and I kind of suspect she'll want to work with children but I could be wrong. Now about two weeks ago I had a young lady who is currently a student at UNO contact me interested in doing an internship this coming summer and this young lady, I've known since she was a baby, she is from a small community just north of Norfolk but her family homeschooled and so they used our library extensively the whole time she was growing up and she's currently working on a bachelor's degree in history and her intent is when she completes that to go into the master's program, get an MLS at UNO and so I'm hoping that we can get an internship lined up for her this summer. I think she'd be wonderful, I think it would be a fabulous experience for her to get a better idea of what all is involved in a library. I think it was very good for our staff because they had a regular time each week that they spent with her and it really got them to thinking about why did I choose this profession, what is it I really enjoy about it, how can I give this intern a complete picture of what this area of type of library work entails and I think having done this last year that if we get the opportunity to do this again, which I hope we do I think we'll all be more comfortable with it not that we were uncomfortable but we just since we've never done before this was new territory and I think we would do an even better job of it the second time around and I just think too the intern was Mary Winchard she was just a fabulous young lady very quick studies quickly and just did amazing work so we were very lucky to have her and I know the parents and children involved in the reading program and just a regular patrons when she was using the circulation desk all commented that they thought it was really nice to see a young woman getting a chance to try out the profession and do an internship and she worked so well with people it was very nice and I am fully confident that if we can get the funding I mean Emily will be an excellent fit as well I'm just so excited that these two young ladies have made the decision to go into the library profession. I think that's about all I have unless someone has some questions. Does anyone have any questions for Karen? No not for Karen. I have a general question that's in here but it wasn't specific to Karen. Before we get to that thank you Karen. It sounds like everyone from your intern through your staff through your public greatly benefited from you having an intern and having an internship. It was a wonderful experience. I can't stand enough about it. Great. It's good news to hear. Thank you. And the general, Austin and Krista? So from our commission staff here they want to know do some of the libraries actually hire the students or are most using a contract relationship? I don't know if they mean hire for the internship or afterwards though. Well there are two ways that libraries can choose to hire an intern. They can either bring them on as staff or they can contract with them. And Mary Jo probably has a better understanding what the difference between those two things is but I guess there are you know you can either hire as temporary staff or you can hire as contract with your intern. And so that is entirely up to the library which direction they choose. We do not, NLA did not determine and NLC will also not make that determination for the library. And if that's unclear go ahead and shoot out another question on chat and we'll readjust that. Thanks so much Karen. Okay. You're welcome. The host from Rock County Public Library. Up in Bassett. Hi, Evie. Hi. Good morning. Can you hear me? Good morning. Can you hear me just fine? Would you like to share a little bit about your internship this year? Yes I would. We actually have had three internships and we've had a young man and two young ladies and they are all three currently now off in college. The young man we had is going into computer science and so we spent some time working with him on the careers available as a IT tech in libraries and make sure that he understood that and the other two young ladies are going into education. One thing I do want to say that I think it is important that as a library administrator that you make sure the staff is comfortable with the idea of working with the interns and supporting them. As we're preparing for the grant application we use the recommended resources that are on the internship grant website and completing the grant application and preparing for a possible intern position. We always advertise the position and with the complete job description just like any other staff opening. We require a resume submission and then the staff selected the three applicants to interview and as a small world library this can be kind of uncomfortable for staff to select the applicants. We have gone to having two board members select the applicants and interview the applicants. We do this because we feel that since the two staff members may have predisposed opinions of the applicants because of our experience working with students this has worked very well for us and hopefully eliminated any hard feelings the applicants might have towards staff if they weren't chosen for the position. Plus we had a situation last year where one of the applicants was the granddaughter of a generous anonymous donor to our library foundation and her gifts are only known to the staff members and the board members have no clue who that person is and we didn't want that to influence who was chosen and by the way the granddaughter was not chosen as the top applicant by the board so that's worked well for us. As we prepare for this we are a very small world library and we only have two applicants and two staff excuse me and we develop an orientation checklist and the list of things that we want to tell the internist that come on duty and then we also start working right away and we're starting we always do that ahead of time we complete a list of proposed activities we wanted the intern to work on and accomplish during their $100 and we like to give our intern some challenging projects we also do expose them to every aspect of the library field but we also want them to have some projects that they can say I did this and this was mine during the summer and just to give them a broader perspective of the exciting work that could be as a career in the library field some of these successful projects that they worked on included updating the library website retyping and reforming the library policy and last year our intern created a professional Facebook account for us and then she instructed the staff on posting library photos, news, and events and the young man that we had as an intern his main project was searching a gaming project for the library and he set up a community youth committee and to find out what the youth thought we should have as far as games and devices in this project and he lived this committee and then he developed the list of devices and games that he thought we should have and he also determined all the prices for this and set up a gaming budget so when it came time for me to apply for a youth services grant the planning was already done, it was fabulous and just went so smoothly and also we live in a very small rural area and so in our community we feel that students who grow up here are not locally exposed to a library where the two staff persons do everything and none of us are specialized and the only other one would be a school media specialist so we always make sure we spend some time visiting with them on the types of libraries and careers available and I know last summer when our server computer developed a glitch and we were without automation for two days our intern got a really good taste of the importance of technology and the need for technicians and libraries, she just thought two days and manually writing everything down was just awful and couldn't wait for it to be up and running nice and as far as community benefit I can just say that board members and staff come on an interns high level of energy and efficiency, she was just every year I think we thought gee we got the best one yet and one patron stopped in to say goodbye and commented the intern was a bright ray of sunshine for the library because of her friendliness when she worked at the front desk and we've gotten some great comments on our Facebook presence and the staff has found Facebook to be a quick and easy communication tool for the library neither one of us had used it before and it's just so easy to use and comments received included a wonderful addition to your services at the library and it's great to see you on Facebook and our intern also last summer assisted the staff with mailing and completion of a preschool story hour survey and made library bookmarks for all new patrons and newcomers to Rock County for our chamber welcome basket so that was just a nice thing to have done so I would say start making those lists now if you're planning on applying and come up with suggestions for them to do the only issue that we ever had was we had a little problem with one of our interns of how to deal with your peers if they come in and they just want to hang out and visit and so I think if you cover that in the orientation process when they first come on board that just wasn't a problem ever again so that's just something you can deal with and I just would encourage a volunteer library and to try this it's just was a it's been a great experience for us and I can tell you from my own personal story I served as a volunteer library in my little high school when I was back in high school and I never dreamed I would I would work in a library someday well here I am I've been at it for 30 years in the field and I love it so I just encourage you you can make a difference to these students they'll be retiring in a few years and we need more young people in the field and that's what I have to say well thank you so much it sounds like some of your goals are to plant the seed to give them a general orientation and then also to have some special projects that they can own and it sounds like a really great combination for a successful internship yes and this intern we had last year well we've had two of them come back and say they would like to do it again but our policy is kind of that the board kind of feels like we should open it up and let others have the opportunity to but that's a great compliment to you that they want to come back thank you thank you so much any questions no nothing has popped up okay I'll let you know if you do all right thank you let's hear from Mimi and Chris is pulling her up right now we've got a little glitch a little delay on our end here for just a second there we go hi Mimi good morning thank you for having me oh thanks so much for being here sure I can just start right now with my information for you we're a little over a third of the way through our internship grant we had a couple people who came in and asked us about the internship because they knew that we had done one previously so when the opportunity arose to apply for the grant we thought that we were set but by the time we received the grant funds we realized that the people that had talked to us were maybe not the best fit for us so I advertised through the guidance counselor with the local high school and also sent information to central community college instructors of the library and information services AA program I was surprised that we really didn't have any takers so at that point we're not sure how we were going to proceed but then we were fortunate we had a high school student come in and do something else for us here and I realized that she would be a good candidate so I asked her about her plans for after school and she mentioned that she might like to go into social work or become a librarian so at that point I thought okay maybe this is our person so I told her that we had an internship available and if she would like to fill out an application we would consider her for the position and we've after talking with her some more and reviewing her application we decided that she was really going to be a good fit for us so we were really pleased about that and she has done a really good job for us although she's a little shy and consequently has was a little apprehensive at first but so far she's worked at the circulation desk for us is learning about reference resources about covering books and she especially enjoys working with the books that we are reading I think that was a comment from one of the other libraries she was able to sit in on a library board meeting last night she's looking forward to spending some time learning about cataloging procedures and we're hoping that what we're planning on coming up with the opportunity for her to help us with some adult and youth programming and or helping us with an inventory she's mentioned that she is enjoying her time with us and that she's especially enjoys helping people find their materials and putting books away and it's really nice to find somebody that likes putting books away and she enjoys removing the books from our integrated library system and from Cat Express that's the part of weeding that she likes being able to take work at the computer and take the items out of the system so some of the things we've learned along the way don't make the application process too difficult try to make sure that the applicant is really interested in libraries and not just looking at this internship as a job that's something that we've seen in the past make a plan and list of the items that you want to cover and realize that this is an internship we're not necessarily going to be able to cover everything planned but that we will adapt along the way we want to play to the intern strong interests and abilities and encourage such some of the impacts that we're dealing with good impacts of course that she is excellent help for our staff has a very good personality so she works well with the staff and with our patrons she is a Spanish speaker and in our community that is indeed an asset she's we're hoping that when she finishes here that she will volunteer for us or for the high school library she's actually a junior so she may be one of the youngest people that have participated in the program but I think that actually we're giving her some good basic information that I'm hoping will encourage her along the way that was about all I wanted to mention but I will comment on something that was brought up earlier about contracting the intern or I can't remember what the other or just hiring them we contract that makes it easier for our city administrator to deal with that actually then they're just paid a the straight $10 per hour and we don't have to deal with deductions for income taxes and so on so that's kind of the difference between contracting and hiring that's primarily what I wanted to mention we've just really been happy with the young lady who is working with us and needless to say we would do this again and we're trying to work to her strengths and take advantage of the skills that she has at the same time wonderful input thank you so much Mimi certainly does anyone have any questions for me this time mentioned something about with the contract that it's she mentioned the $10 an hour and I want to bring that up real quickly because one of the comments that we have received from especially some of the smaller libraries is if they if you break it out that way and the staff seem to have an understanding that these interns are receiving $10 an hour they may be getting paid more than your permanent staff and so one way to look at it is it's a $1000 stipend and that they're putting in a hundred hours to the math and they'll see it averages out to $10 an hour but you're not held to having them just do 100 hours you're not held to averaging it out to $10 an hour it's completely up to the library how many hours they wish for the interns to complete so I just wanted to throw that out there that seems to be the trend most of these interns do put in an average of 100 hours and so it does average out for them to be $10 an hour but it varies from library to library and it is up to the library's discretion so I just wanted to add that thank you so much Mimi certainly okay we've heard from Diana and now we're going to Amy Amy's from Weeping Water and this is her first year with the internship program hi Amy we're going to unmute you here real quick can you speak now hi can you hear me yes we can thank you okay I just wanted to let you know that this was my first and then we've had and how did that go for me yes it went well I had the school librarian refer her to me and then I applied for the grant she was interested in reading and libraries and was helping out the school library she has done front desk processing books with me shelving books we've done some special projects the young adult section she's been a really good help I did like Evelyn's suggestion where they advertised an interview so maybe some other people will know about it maybe for next time and I do like the flexibility of letting us handle it kind of the way we want to as far as different libraries handle it differently the only problem I may have had is she was real excited about the beginning and has become pretty busy during the school year so I think I would make sure at the beginning that I say she would set some hours as to when they would work because that really has kind of been not real she just kind of comes and goes and I like to do differently next time if I had the chance she's also helped out with the Halloween program that was kind of a nice help to have an extra hand there it's just been a really good great what are some fresh perspectives that she's brought to you into the library well you know it's nice to see we don't have a lot of young adults that come in as she's a senior this year so it's a nice perspective to see what she likes to read what's popular with kids her age maybe help bring in some new young adults to our library great and how are your patrons and your customers responding to her being at your library very well they like to see she's been very friendly and helpful with the patrons she's been very good for us great and so this was your first time to apply I know the application took place last spring but is there anything that you remember about applying for the grant or the resources that we offered anything that helped you along the way it was a great first grant application it was a great process it was questions like Diana had said about what are you going to do with your intern when you do get her or him and that was very helpful in planning how I was going to handle it when they did come so it was a good there's a few bumps along the way but we got it figured out and it was a great process great so you've got one under your belt I do I do thank you so much Amy I assume Mary's left and we're going to hear from Mary at some memorial library in Papillion and we're going to unmute you here in just a second Mary there you are you're ready to go can you be ready to chime in here yeah you're very quiet I don't know if you can get closer to your microphone or turn up there we go that's much better they went out there having trouble you might need to have your volume as well sometimes that's just something we can't control this is our second time having an intern at our library the first time we hosted a high school student and she was very successful I thought although not clearly wanting to go to library school through the internship this year we plan to host two interns we were going to split the grant in half and have two two separate internships and I wrote up a weekly plan of activities that would have an intern shadowing and experiencing the jobs of each member of the staff with an emphasis on customer service but we had a glitch the city HR person told us that we would have to treat this as a new hire and pay for background checks and drug screenings and training and have taxes taken out of our grant so budgets being what they are we decided to and we were allowed to have all of those charges taken out of the thousand dollar grant and we went with one intern instead of two so my one intern is performing 86 hours of internship and it's actually worked out pretty well for us in that she is going through the original ten weeks of very strict weekly plan of activities and then an additional 36 hours of what I'm considering professional training she is actually here with me now experiencing the webinar and getting a taste of what some of the professional duties of a librarian are attending going to some other libraries to visit and see how they work we are also going to spend some time working on budgets and the weeding process some of the actual professional duties that a library director performs so all in all it's been a really good experience for us. Thank you and tell us again a little bit about your intern and their possible career goals. Our intern is a recent college grad who for the nature of the grant is looking where to go next and trying to choose a career path and I'm hoping that this will aid her in that process we used in our grant process we used the local context we have at UNL Dr. Becky Pascoe as referrals for possible applicants and also I sent out notices to the local community college they have a library assistant program and we're trying to target in a lot of cases people that never had an experience so to give them a little bit of an up towards every direction. Great thank you so much Mary does anyone have any questions for Mary? Doesn't look like anything has popped up we have a little notice over here if there was anything new anything new? Well thank you for your insight Mary thanks for sharing what's going on at your library and one of the things Mary mentioned is introducing interns to other libraries if there's a chance to take your intern and introduce them to institutional libraries or also a local college library and have them meet librarians who are in other types of libraries that's certainly an aspect of your internship curriculum that you could explore and so I just wanted to point that one out that was something new that I hadn't heard from the libraries doing before so that's a new twist so that wraps up all of our libraries that are represented today we are at the top of the hour and I have about five more minutes worth of material to discuss here so we're just going to go no problem we can go over a little bit it won't stop us from doing that okay great we're just going to keep going here with of course our thanks to all of these supervisors and directors who have chipped in today to discuss their experience with the internship program your insight has been very valuable I think for each other for NLC staff for NLA and hopefully for those that attend today who are considering hosting an intern at their library that's a good segue into what's coming up here this month we have the new 2011 grant opportunity the Nebraska Library Commission received a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services through the Laura Bush 21st Century Skills grant program that allots funding for us to disperse internship grants to public libraries it's the same program that's been going on for the last three years two years through NLA and then the year before that at least one year before that through a previous IMLS grant program and I do believe NLA is also seeking funding for this year but we certainly do have secured several thousand dollars to go ahead and start to offer the grants again this year so the money has been secured it will be offered the name of our grant is cultivating rural librarians technology skills so there are some things that our grant is focusing on and one of those is the fact that especially in our rural areas which can either be by size or by geography once again and this is not to discount our micropolitan and metropolitan areas it's just one of the focus, a focus of our grant is that in some of these smaller towns that we want to be sure that we are bringing in people into the profession that will be interested in working in the rural parts of Nebraska and another part of this grant focus is on technology skills that our librarians that we have coming up have good tech, strong technology backgrounds that they are, Kristen might actually be able to talk a little bit about that with some of the skills that we hope for librarians to have since she's in tech access services but that is one of that's one of the focus of our grant and that we're hoping that some of these internships will play off of that and work with interns to make sure that they are aware of the role that technology does play in library services. So a little bit about these grants, they will be awarded to accredited public libraries once again they expose interns to library work, they encourage our interns to consider library careers and it does provide funding for new and extra staffers, a lot of libraries are able to provide programming they would otherwise not be able to provide because of the extra hand that they have on board. The application cycle starts just around the corner, we will open up the application process on the 18th of this month and the deadline is a quick turnaround too, it's just a little over a month so you have a chance to gather your information and prepare a grant application. The award announcement will be made then a month later and the reason we're offering this up so quickly and having such a quick turnaround time is some of the feedback we received from some of the libraries is that the process was going on later in the year closer to March April May and that it didn't allow them to be as competitive in hiring especially for the summer because a lot of the people they were interested in hiring were looking for summer jobs and had already taken another job because they wanted to have something set in place before they were done with school out of school and so we've moved this up so that libraries have the opportunity to be more competitive in their hiring, especially if they're interested in hiring for a summer internship. The link to follow will be through our now hiring site, now hiring at your library is followed here from our home page to now hiring at your library down along the left and then you'll go down here to the navigation and click on internships on this page will be available all of the application forms and also an introduction to the grants what the expectations are of the recipients, what the expectations are of the grant program and hopefully some resources to help you in preparation of your application and then resources to help you while you are conducting your internship we don't want it to end where we write the check and that's the end of our relationship with the library we certainly want to be there for the library and the intern to provide as much help as we can in the development of the internship program just through resources or support and also to be a resource back during the internship if the supervisor has some things that they want to explore with their intern these interns are certainly welcome to attend our Encompass Live presentations or any other training that we offer we would certainly encourage that sort of thing and so we would like the relationship to continue throughout the internship and so some of that information will also be posted here once the application process has been completed this will also be a page of resources and so the next steps are for our libraries to start thinking about whether or not they want to have an internship this year and if so what the steps are to apply and preparing their grant application once again you do not already have to have an intern in mind you can apply first for the grant and you know hopefully you receive the grant and then you can put a call out for applications for your internship and so the intern does not already have to be selected in advance. Some libraries just get lucky that they know somebody already. They already have someone in mind so do we have any questions or comments we have some NLC staff that are also on the grant team that maybe they have something that they would like to weigh in. I am not sure who is down there watching but Mary Jo Ryan is the grant coordinator and she has been involved with the internship program from the very start with the previous IMLS grant all the way through the NLA and so she has been involved from the very beginning from the inception of this as well as Laura Johnson and Richard Miller and then also on our staff, on our grant team are Deborah Dragos, Rod Wagner, John Felton and then we are, NLA is in partnership with us on the overall IMLS grant and so they are also involved in the process whether or not they receive their own funding from the foundations that they might be applying to at this time which would provide additional funding but at this time we will, the grant from IMLS has allowed for three years worth of internship funding and so we will be able to offer this we know that we will offer this in 2011, 2012 and 2013 and we certainly are excited at the prospect of seeing this continue of this having a shelf life of at least three years and we hope it will continue after that as well and so it's been great that NLA carried us through the two years the two dry years when we did not have funding from IMLS that we were able to keep the momentum going with this great program. Any other questions? It's nice I think that for because I know the grant application opens up just next week for some libraries that maybe are thinking for the first time ever of this of oh my gosh I can't even I don't know what could I do with an internship, with an intern right now I've got to figure this out now. You've got a couple more years coming up yet that you can think about it so if this is too quick for you that's okay. You've got it for next year and the year after as well so you have time to plan and figure out what you want to do if you think this is too quick yet. That's right, that's right. We'll open it up again in January of each of these years. Yeah, Laura says thanks. You hear some thanks from the crowd. Thanks, Laura. Thanks to IMLS for the funding. That's right. We hear a thanks to IMLS. But anybody have any... Are you done? I think that wraps it up. I just have a couple more slides here just to promote. Don't forget if you've participated, if you've attended today you receive CE credit. If you presented, I think you get double time. Yeah, if you presented today. Ask Laura Johnson. Ask Laura and she'll be able to hook you up with your CE credit for today. If you're curious about the overall IMLS grant program, in December we had an overview of the entire grant program. One thing I want to mention is here we have all of these volunteers who... We're able this year to offer scholarships. There we go. I was trying to click on something else and it accidentally opened that up, but that's okay. This is where the recording is for that session that you were talking about. There you go, thank you. Next sessions that are coming up, I always like to put in my plug for Krista and those who are having sessions come up on InCampus Live. We have about Weeding. And Weeding, actually I was going to mention that about this, that we had a couple of people mention... ... Actually just this morning, I'm not sure if he's got it up there yet or not. He was telling me just yesterday and today he was going back and forth with emails confirming that she was all good to go. Those of you who stop current interns, keep us in mind. These are all recorded and so they're available later. If you're looking to... If you're looking for an hour that you'd like to introduce them to a new topic, go through this. We've discussed Game Night. We discussed Band Book Week. You can just take a look through here and see... There's a resource for you. If you've got an intern who has a penchant for something in particular and you want to help explore that topic with them, we've got these recorded InCampus Live that they can sit down during their working hours, not just from 10 to 11 on a Wednesday morning and they can view this. We'd love to hear back from you if you go ahead and do that. We'd love to hear back from you that you've offered this to your intern and how that went for you. That's the end of our presentation. Thank you very much for attending this morning as we just showed you. This was recorded and this session will be up for anyone who wants to listen to and watch it again. You know someone who wasn't able to attend live. You can let them know that the recording is out there and they can go ahead and watch it later. Thank you very much and hopefully we'll see you next week to learn about Weeding. Thank you and thanks to our presenters once again. Thank you very much. That was great. Lots of good, very useful information I think. I learned a lot about it.