 Good morning, and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am Christa Burns, your host here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is Library Commission's weekly online event where we cover various commission activities or anything that may be of interest to Nebraska librarians. We have presentations by guest speakers and by NLC staff is what we have today. We do these sessions every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. They'll last for about an hour or as long as it takes. And they are all recorded so that you can watch them later if you are not able to attend our live sessions. Today, well, today officially on our schedule, we still have the same topic, but just slightly different version. Today's session is, as you can see here, about doing continuing education, training, and library improvement grants that the Library Commission offers. Originally this is going to be Richard Miller and Laura Johnson from here at the Library Commission, but Richard is not here today, so Laura is taking it on all by herself. Okay, well, thank you, Christa. Go to it. Hi, this is Laura, and we're going to talk today about the Continuing Education and Training Grant and the Library Improvement Grants. These are two of the programs from the Nebraska Library Commission. The Commission has several grant programs, the Continuing Education and Training Grants. We have the Library Improvement Grants, which you may remember as the LSTA grants. They've been renamed. We also have internship grants, scholarships, and youth grants for excellence. We're going to be doing an Encompass Live program on the scholarships on December 22nd, so if you're interested in that, we hope to have a lot of information for you about how the scholarships are going to work next year. There are going to be more internship grants. As you probably know by now, we did get a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services that is going to allow us to have the internship grants and scholarships. So we'll be talking more about that later. The Youth Grants for Excellence have already passed their due date for this year, so we're not going to talk about them today, but they are part of the mix and they're an important program from the Commission. We don't want to slide them. This is kind of the main page, and we'll take you there live so you can see it, about grants. And this just gives you briefly what the grant is and what the big dates are for the grants. But you can get to this page fairly easily. You can always just search grants for a search, and it comes up right on our top. But this is the page to look for, for these grants. To be eligible to get a grant from the Nebraska Library Commission, you do have to be an accredited Nebraska Public Library, and you know whether you've gotten your accreditation or not. Or one of the identified institutional libraries, and there is a list on our website of those libraries, or one of the Nebraska Regional Library Systems, or you can be another organization that's partnered with an eligible institution. But you do have to meet eligibility requirements to even apply for a grant. What are the ones that are identified institutional? The Beatrice facility, the libraries in the prisons, those things. So they're like a special category? It's a special category, and it's not huge. There's probably not more than what it does in maybe 15 places on the list. First I'll talk a little bit about the Continuing Education and Training Grant. These grants run from $250, that's the smallest grant you can get, to $5,000. The applications for them are available now. They're due on December 17th, so you've got them on, which is plenty of time. They'll be awarded on January 21st. We have to have given you the money by June 17th, because our fiscal year ends on the end of June. We ask that the projects be completed by September 30th next year, although if you have something that's going to go over a couple of weeks, just give me a call and we can work that out. And we ask for a final report, and you have to turn in that final report, or you're not in good standing and can't get another grant by October 21st. So that's the dates. The Continuing Education and Training Grant asks for a 25% match. And the way that match is figured is if you're requesting $1,000, then your match is $250, or 25% of that thousand. And your total project budget then would be $1,250. And the purpose of the grant is to help your libraries to improve their services through Continuing Education or Training for their personnel and supporters. So a successful application is going to show how your proposed project is going to support your mission. So it is the education and training is a means to an end, and the end is improved service. So you don't want to say that the purpose of your grant is to provide Continuing Education to staff people. It is, but it's so that those staff people can provide better service, and that's really the goal always. The training these grants don't cover, and it's just fair for us to tell you, that you don't cover a Nebraska regional or statewide professional conference. So going to NLA would not be eligible. It won't cover an event sponsored by the Nebraska Library Commission for the purpose of training. Our basic skills classes, our workshops, you couldn't use Continuing Education and Training grant monies to attend one of those things. It wouldn't cover an event sponsored by the Nebraska regional library system for the purpose of training. So the Spring Colloquium or the Leadership Conference, some of those things, no, you can't use the Continuing Education training for grant for that. The reason is that we feel that these grants really are trying to get, to offer people something beyond the usual, beyond what they could handle on their own. And we all, we make a great effort to keep the costs of the programs that we offer down, and so we feel that in many ways we're already kind of underwriting some of that. So a Continuing Education training grant is to help you do something that would be beyond the usual. This is like, last year we did an Encompass Live about PLA. Yes. That, was it five-way, five librarians? Four. Four librarians who had used Continuing Education grants to travel to the Public Library Association annual conference. So that kind of thing, get out of state, go somewhere you would never have been able to go to before. Some special, go to a special conference, something like that, yes. And that is one of the requirements of the Continuing Education grant, that if you do something special, then you share it. And what we've done, we had them come and speak at Encompass Live, talking about their experiences, and we have one of those coming up. Yes, we do. December 1st, we're having, we're doing it again. Not about PLA this time, though, but a couple other conferences. Yeah, some special conferences, a conference for circulation, and a conference for, I think it was volunteer coordination. The South Dakota Statewide Volunteer Coordinators Conference. Yes. Yeah, so follow up, kind of follow up for this session is we will have a couple of people coming and talking about how they use these grants to actually attend these conferences and what they learned there. Yeah, so that'll be in December 1st. We hope this will be an interesting value-added kind of thing. Okay, now we're going to talk a little bit. We're going to switch gears a little bit and talk about the LIS grants. The LIS grants minimum size is $500, and there is really no maximum. But if your project is going to be, oh, say over $10,000 or in that neighborhood, you'll want to call us and discuss it. The bigger the grant gets, the more likely it is that it would, for instance, be partially funded rather than completely funded or funded over several years, depending on the project. The dates for the LIS grants, the applications are due January 7th, and we'll be announcing the recipients on February 17th. The applications are available on our website now. The LIS grants require a 25% match, and it has to be 10% cash, and they're figured a little bit differently. So this, you start with the total project cost. So if your total project cost $5,000, then the match is 25% of that, or in this case it'd be $1,250, and at least $500, that's 10% of 5,000, of the $1,250 must be cash. So it can't be your time or something. You have to come up with some funds. So your grant request then would be $3,750. So see, that's a little different the way we figure that. More math involved. A little bit more math involved, but these grants tend to be bigger, and so that's kind of how it works out. There are six purposes for LIS grants, and you want to really talk about what purposes you're kind of fulfilling in your grant. The first is expanding services for learning and access to information for all types of libraries, for people of all ages, all formats. So it's expanding your services, or providing something new or more of what you're doing. The second is developing services that provide access to information through local, state, regional, national, and international electronic networks. So this would be databases, that kind of thing. Three, providing electronic and other linkages among and between libraries. Then, I have to go to the second slide here, then developing partnerships with other agencies and community-based organizations. So for instance, if you wanted to have a joint program with a senior center or community center, something like that. The fifth purpose is targeting to individuals of diverse backgrounds, or to individuals with disabilities, or to individuals who need help with literacy or information literacy. So you could have a special program to serve the Hispanic element in your community, or to people who need to learn to read, or to people who say are deaf or blind or have a disability. So that would be five. And six, targeting your services to people having difficulty using a library, or to underserved urban and rural communities, including children from families with incomes below the poverty line, and they do define what they mean by poverty. These are federal, because this grant comes from federal money. So we do have to abide by a number of their rules. This is on the application. You can look these over, but you do want to pay attention to these. We also ask that the grant help fulfill our goals, our LSTA goals for our long-term, our agency's long-term five-year plan. And those are. Goal one is all Nebraskans will have improved access to enhanced library and information services provided and facilitated by qualified library personnel, boards, and supporters with the knowledge, skills, abilities, and attitudes necessary to provide excellent library and information services. So this is making sure that Nebraskans have good service. And goal two is Nebraska libraries will have appropriate technology to access and deliver online library and information services. So appropriate technology can be almost anything, but it does mean that you want to give some thought to how you fit into those goals as well. It's nice that they make it vague enough, the appropriate technology, realizing that there's going to be new things that come up that you would never have been able to predict. Oh, yes. Yes, there's new stuff all the time. You do need to realize that your funds, LIS funds cannot be used for library construction or renovation, and they can't be used for furniture. So that's, you know, you really need to consider that. Okay, now in either grant, I'm giving you some particulars about the CE grants and particulars about the LIS grants. Now we're going to talk about what are we looking for in a grant application. Well, in a nutshell with very broad brush, we're looking for a good idea. Do you have a good idea, something that you want to do? And do you have a workable plan to carry out the idea? And that's really what we're looking for. And yes, we seem to ask a lot of questions about it, but that's because we're trying to get at, okay, we're happy if people are going to experiment to do something innovative. But we want to be sure that they have kind of thought it through because we're going to give them money. And we have to be responsible stewards of the money. How do we define a good idea? Well, we would say that it was innovative. It might even be a little experimental. This doesn't mean it's a wild-eyed, you know, trip into the blue. It just means that this is something new that you'd really like to try, that it will benefit library users. And we can't emphasize this enough. We need to know about how these ideas are going to help library users. And it may be that indeed you're going to offer training to your staff, and it will benefit the staff members. And that's fine. And we want to benefit staff members. But ultimately, it needs to benefit library users as well. And it helps a lot if it's sustainable. The grant will come to an end. How are you going to sustain this? Are you going to be able to keep it going? If you've gotten some equipment, are you going to be able to replace that equipment? That's a big issue when we're talking about, say, computer equipment, and you have to start thinking about, you know, really, you're talking four or five years and you're going to have to replace that equipment. How are you going to do it? So this is what we mean by a good idea. And what makes a plan workable? Well, first you have to have the people. And the people have to have the skills or the knowledge or the time to carry out the plan. This is not, the plan may be that people will get more skills. But are they at a level where they can do what they need to do to achieve the goals? We need stated goals. How is this going to benefit library users? And we need a way to measure how well the goals were achieved. So you have to give some consideration to how we would evaluate this program. What would you say the good things and bad things about it were? Would you say that the goals were achieved? We need to know what your strategies are for achieving the goals. Specifically, what are you going to do? What tasks are there going to be? What projects are there going to be? How is this all going to fit together? We need a timeline, you know, when you're going to start, when you're going to do each thing that you said you're going to do, and when you're going to finish. We need a budget. And we need a fairly detailed budget. We need to know, okay, if you need this many dollars, this many are going to go toward a consultant or a speaker. This many are going to go toward equipment. This much is going to go toward publicity for the event. We really need to know that. And if you talk about, for instance, purchasing a piece of equipment, remember it can't be furniture. We don't just want to know, I want this X59Z. We want to know we need a computer that can do the following things. So we believe that something with these specifications will do that. And it seems to us that the best value is the computer X59Z. And we're going to purchase it from this place because this place has a local service center that can help us install and maintain the equipment. And that's your sustainability built right into it. Yes, it is. So it's not just we need $59 for this. Yeah, you need $59 for that. But why do you need that? What were the things that you needed this piece of equipment to achieve? What were the specifications of this piece of equipment? And why is this particular piece of equipment that meets those specifications the one you want? So that all kind of goes into the budget. Then we want to know that you have support from stakeholders. If your community or your board or other people that you're dealing with are really in, because things don't work very well if you don't have the support from others. So this is kind of what we're looking for. This is what we think will make a plan a workable plan. Now I'm going to show you a couple things. This, of course, is our grants page again. So take a look. And these are links so you can get to the grants applications and information when you need it. Goodness, I think that's the next place we're going. Oh, is that what your next link was? Yeah, that's my next link. So that's fine. This is Nebraska Access. We do have grant resources. And you'll see that we have a number that you can go for more information about grants. This is one of the things we'd like to emphasize with our grants is, you're probably never going to get much more sympathetic readers than we are here at the commission. We really want you to have the money. We want your project to succeed. And we'll be happy to help you do that. You can send us a grant application before you finalize it and we'll read it. Once someone has read it and helped you with a grant application, then they can't sit on the committee that evaluates the applications. So we probably need to get somebody who's not centrally involved with that particular grant. So for instance, Richard really administers the LIS grants. You can talk to him about your grant, but if you really want somebody to read your application, you probably want Sally to read it or me to read it or Catherine to read it. And give you some suggestions about it. Just as if it's a CE grant, you probably want Sally or Catherine or Richard to read it because I centrally administer those. We have plenty of staff we can reach out to at the commission who would have knowledge of what your grant is all about and then read it and see if it needs anything. And we'd be happy to give you some suggestions. And when we give you suggestions, it's not because we're being difficult. It's because we want you, because this is the other thing about our grants is they're a great place to get started doing grant writing. We all know when we did our CE survey last spring, we found out that grant writing was something that people were very concerned about. And you know, the best way to learn about grant writing is to do some grant writing. And this is a wonderful place to get started because you have sympathetic readers. You have people who would give you some help. So we'd really like to encourage you to do this because it's a good way to sort of get into the whole idea of grant writing. And one of the funny things about grant writing is it may not get easier, but as you've done it several times, you find that you have pieces that you will need in most grant applications that you kind of develop and then you can kind of use one on the next grant. So in some ways it gets a little easier, although each grant application needs to be very individual. So anyway, we really want to encourage you to take a serious look at these grants. Okay, so that's the Nebraska Access Grants that we went through. Oh, this is the continuing education. My slides seem to be behind. Oh, there we go. Yeah, just take a second before to bring up the page. Okay. On how to write a grant. So we're just asking because we're asking because we're stewards of the money and how we do it. So it's detailed. And it has a justification for why money needs to go this way. If you have a question about a grant application, ask them. One of the things you really do is sit down and read all the directions, read the whole application. And if you take notes while you do it and if you have any questions, if you're not sure of anything, we have to talk about it with you. As we said, it can be a primary grant. And again, we're threatening this way. We could succeed in anything because we write applications. And maybe we have some insight into this and we can really help you. You do want to do some homework. Wow, this is so easy. But you know, it's one of those things that we all can forget so easily in the heat of trying to get it done is make sure you've got a copy for yourself. You probably want an electronic copy and a hard copy for yourself. It also, if you're submitting it in print, you want to be sure that every single page has your library's name on it and a date and a page number. So that say somebody dropped it happens, you know, they could put it back together. Always protect yourself in the way you present your materials. So those are some of the tips we have. Then we also have some places outside the commission that have some excellent information about grant writing. This one, I just want to take a second. All of these links that Laura's jumping to will be included when we put up the recording of the session. So you don't have to try and write all this down. We'll have links to all of them when that goes up. So you'll just click on go off to find all of these sites. This is the Rural Assistance Center and they have a wonderful thing about grant writing and they give links to other tools. They give links to a lot of places you can get grants. So I think this is a pretty good thing. Of course, the big, big granddaddy thing on writing grants is the Foundation Center. I don't think I have a link here. This, oh, it's coming up in a minute. Yeah, the nonprofit guides. I think this one on grant writing is very nice. And they really explain the parts of a grant. And the parts maybe arrange a little differently. The questions maybe asked a little differently. But the parts are pretty much going to be these parts. And for instance, our LIS grant asks for, it has questions and it asks for a description of the project. Then it asks for how the project relates to our long range plan, those two goals that I read you. It asks for the audience of the project. How you're going to implement the project. That's your strategy. How you're going to evaluate the project. Whether you have the community support so that you're buying. How it's going to be sustainable. How you're going to communicate about the project. Because remember, we just, we have to communicate more than we ever thought we would need to. So often we think, well, it's self-evident that our service is wonderful and people will find it. That's not necessarily so. People are busy. People are confronted with an awful lot of choices to make about how they spend their time and where the places they go. And they don't always notice. So you have to get kind of loud sometimes to make sure people notice you. And then the budget. So those are the elements we ask for in our grant application and they're pretty much the same elements that other grant applications are going to ask for. Okay. And that was it. That was kind of what I had to say today about grant applications. I hope this helps. I hope that if you have any questions, you will contact me or contact Richard Miller, who is the library development director. And I hope that we'll see your grant applications. Homepage for the. Okay. The very first tab all the way to the left. I think that was, yeah, one of those. Yes, here we go. Here again is the main page for these two grants. Now remember the scholarship grants and the internship grants will be talking about on December 22nd. Yes. So, Merry Christmas. Does anybody have any questions? Let's see if you do have any questions from the audience. You can type it into the question section. It doesn't look like anybody is jumping with anything right now. I guess we answered it. We stunned everyone in silence. But you know, you guys know where to find us where to find Laura and Richard call the commission. If you have any questions, do you have any of these grants do and better sooner than later? Yes, because especially the deadline for the one is just coming up next month, December 17th. So, you know, and we'd be thrilled to death. If you if you had a good project, so let us know, let us know what we can do to help. And thank you very much. Great. Thank you very much, Laura. That was very, very informational because I don't know a lot about the grants that we do here. I know we do them. Yeah. And then a lot of people do some cool things with them. But as far as the details of how to do it, I wouldn't have any idea. So I think it's very useful that we have these sessions to tell people about it. So that's it up for today's session. We hope we'll join us next week when we have a couple of hours where he's got he does have an interview for this month. He's got some news for you. Some things in QR codes, Wi-Fi security, and some other news that he wants to get out to you guys. So that will be next week, right the day before Thanksgiving. And what we were mentioning earlier, the fall conference roundup. That's the session where we will have a couple of librarians coming in and talking about how they use these continuing education grants to attend conferences. That's December 1st. And as Laura did mention, there is a session scheduled for December 22nd on the scholarship grants. It just hasn't been put out onto our website yet, but it is definitely scheduled and happening. Yes. So look for the actual registration we get up there on the website. So thank you very much for attending and we will see you next week. Thank you. Bye. Bye.