 All right, good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I'm your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly online event. Yes, we are a webinar. We don't mind if you call us that. We broadcast Encompass Live every week on Wednesday mornings at 10 a.m. central time. But if you are unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show, and it is available on our website, and I'll show you that at the end of today's show. I'll show you where you can get all of our archives. Both our archives and our online live shows are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with any of your friends, neighbors, colleagues, family, anybody who you think may be interested in any of the topics that we have on the show. We are welcome to join us live on Wednesday mornings or check out all of our recordings. Encompass Live has been around since January 2009, so we have quite a few recordings out there now. It's a pretty huge list, hundreds of recordings and PowerPoint presentations and worksheets and handouts and things that you can go and look at. So do keep that in mind when you are looking at any of our recordings, if you do watch any of them. Some of the information may be old, it may be outdated, but just check the date. Everything has got the date of when it was actually broadcast. We're librarians here, so we do archive everything. So it will all stay up there, available to everyone, even if it is at a date for historical purposes. So just keep that in mind. We do a mixture of things here on Encompass Live. Book reviews, interviews, many training sessions, demos of services and products. Really the only criteria we have is that it is something library related, something that libraries are doing, something librarians are doing, something that could be of use to them, something that we think they should be involved in. Some of our topics you may think are a little out of the box, potentially. You might look at some titles of some shows and say, why is this on the show? But trust me, I always make sure everything always comes around to libraries in the end. We do have guest speakers that come on the show sometimes, and we are from around Nebraska or outside of the state. We bring in people on the show remotely, and we also do things that commission staff present on the show for things that the library commission is providing. This morning, I'm your presenter for today, in addition to being the host of Encompass Live. I am also the new library development director here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Previously, as I'm sure many of you, I think everyone on the line would probably know, Richard Miller was the library development director here for a very long time, and he retired earlier this year, and I took on his position here. I myself have been here at the library commission for 16 years, so I'm not new to you guys either. I'm just new in this position. What I'm going to be going over this morning is public library accreditation, the process. On the line, with us also remotely from just the other side of Lincoln, is Scott Childers, who is going to be helping me out a little bit today, potentially. He is the director of our Southeast Library System, our regional library system. Good morning, Scott. Good morning. Good morning. He's been very instrumental in some of the training and strategic planning, and a lot doing with accreditation over the years, and as things have changed, he's been involved in it. He has some good insight on some of the things, so hopefully he'll keep me, make sure I don't say anything wrong, and we get all the information out there that you need to. We'll do our best. Yes. All right. So public library accreditation, this is something that we've been doing here at the Library Commission since the 80s. It's been a long time. It's been an ongoing thing we've done here, and it's changed over the years, in various versions of it, and in 2013 is the most recent change that was made to it, to the process and the program that we have now. So we're in our second round of some libraries going through this process, which is great. We've got, you know, nobody's the total, you know, guinea pig or newbie anymore. This is the second time around for some libraries. We have, let's see here, Public Library, this is the Nebraska Library Commission's website here, and this is what I'm going to use to talk about everything today. I don't have any slides or PowerPoints, so everything that you're going to need or going to want to use for this is built into our website. On the Library Commission's website, there are flyout menus here from our menu, and the second one right from the top is all about accreditation and certification. In order for a library to be accredited, the library itself, both their board and their director have to be certified, and so we've got three different programs for three of those various things to be done. So Board Certification and Librarian Certification feeds into the library itself's accreditation. Richard used to say the way you can tell it, because who could get the words a little confused, people can be certified, not buildings. So certification has to do with the people, and then once you get that done, you're the library accreditation. Now you can also have your board certified and your library director, your librarian certification done, and not do the library accreditation. There's just reasons to keep up with what you're doing, your work anyways, but they do feed into it. So I am going to briefly talk about all these things that are related to being accredited. So under Board Certification here at the top, there's a main about page, a link right to the form itself. There's a manual we've put together for library boards, definitely very useful. I'd definitely take a look at that if you've got board members that are new or maybe something I need to refresh about what do I do as a board member. There's a look up where you can see where your board is at in your certification, and then where you can go to submit your actual Continue Education credits for your board members. I'll just pop over to the board page here. Board Certification, over a three-year period, basically you need to do over a three-year period. You have to have 20 hours of Continuing Education that all of your board members participate in. There's a lot of different ways you can earn this Continuing Education. We've got lists here. You can attend webinars, workshops. There's online courses specifically for trustees, in other words, for board members that you can take online. These are through the American Library Association United for Libraries. The state of Nebraska, we pay for a membership to this so that you can have access to all these courses. All these different ways, and we have links all of them down here as well. All the different ways that you can earn CE. What's great about Board Certification is if you have five members of your library, five board members, and they all sit and watch a one-hour webinar on something, that's five hours of CE. Each person earns an hour for themselves. So really shouldn't take too long to get 20 hours over a three-year period. Keep that up. If you have any questions about Board Certification, Holly Dugan, who is our Continuing Education Coordinator here at the Nebraska Library Commission, she's in charge of that, and she can answer any more detailed questions you have. But there's the basics of your Board Certification. The board manual is here. Really nice manual, various chapters on different sections about being a board member, so definitely take a look at that. And to look up where you are at, where is your board at? Look at the status. Here we have all the different libraries who have gone through this. If they are certified, when they expire. Also here, if you click on your library's name, it actually shows you the specific records about your board, what they have both submitted for certification recently, how many credits they need, what when they're due. So you can see here, Ainsworth, they've got until September to get another 16. Shouldn't be too hard to get those banged out there and who their board members are. So that can keep you, so you can keep yourself right up to speed on what's going on with your board's certification and what they need to do. Let me engage you. So that's your board members. Also, your library director needs to be certified in order to have the library be accredited. Same thing here, we have an about page, the application form to join the program for certification. You can review your records to see where you are in your Continuing Education and how to earn and then how to submit. So there's basic information about the librarian certification. And there are different levels for public librarian certification based on your, the size of your service area. So you've got level, different levels. If you have your degree that put you in different level, we have basic skills courses you can take. That's a whole nother discussion that will get you to different levels. So take through, look at this and see what level you might be at. In total, for you to be a librarian and staff member to be certified, you need to have 45 Continuing Education credits and also in a three-year period. Same period of time, but more credits for the librarians. Ways to earn CE, there we go. You've got webinars, if you're taking actual courses for a library degree or just any academic courses, any online courses. If you actually teach, do presentations like this, that can count to CE. So everything here, also Holly's also in charge of this program. We'll tell you all the different ways that you can earn your Continuing Education credits for your librarian certification. The record of you here, you'd have to have your own login here for that, but this is where you can check yours and you can look up your password if you're not sure what it is. Now for the librarian certification, 45 credits does seem like it could be, that's a lot to get compared to the board certification, but really that's only 15 a year over a three-year period. So that's not too bad. If you can just do 15 hours of something that is listed here, you've got your public librarian certification done. All right, so once you have your board certification, your librarian certification, then you have your library accreditation. The library then can be accredited once you've got those two things done. Now this librarian and board certification can also be in process. All of the deadlines of these, when you're due and everything, they're not necessarily all going to match up because when you started your board certification, when you started your librarian certification, not everything is going to work necessarily, but as long as you're working towards them and we know you're on track and you've been in communication with us that can feed into your accreditation. For the library accreditation, same thing as the other ones. We have an about page, the form itself that you can use, and I'm going to show you a live demo of that with the basic guidelines. Also here, you can look up and see the status of your library to see where you are. And we have a separate whole special page about strategic planning. Strategic planning and strategic plans are a big part of your accreditation that actually feeds into the form itself. Many of the questions you'll be answering on your application form are things that you've already written about or come up with in your strategic plan. It's kind of how it works. You're planning what you're doing and then it fits all into your accreditation form. So we'll just start with the basics of it here, the about page. There we go. Now this talks about what accreditation is and I know some people, your main, your first question may be, and I've got a little cheat sheet here. Why would I want to be accredited? Why would I want to go through all of this work, go through getting my board done and my personal certification done and then everything for this? There are quite a few benefits and advantages for your library being accredited. One being just the bragging rights. There's one you can say we have gone through this process and we have evaluated what we're doing, evaluating what's going on in our community that we'll get into a little more. And you can then tell your mayor, your stakeholders, anyone in the town that this is something that you were done. And here's what it actually gives for you. You can see on the site here minimum standards for library service. We want libraries to be good, to be working, doing a good job in their community. And by going through this and accreditation and thinking about all these things we have on these forums that will help you do that to achieve these certain standards in comparison to other libraries that are similar to you and across the state, you can use this to get more funding for the library potentially by saying we've gone through this, we've been accredited, this is the level we're at. So just that is a good reason. Also, there's money involved, I'll be honest. You are eligible for state aid to public libraries through the library commission. We base that on your accreditation level. You can apply for certain grants that we have here through the library commission. You must be accredited in order to apply for them. A library improvement grants, youth grants for excellence, CE and training grants, all of those you need to be accredited, your library needs to be accredited. Also grants from outside of the library commission, the USDA Department of Agriculture grants and loans for community facilities, those require you to be accredited through us. The CROITS-Bennett donor advice grants, these are grants specifically through the Nebraska Community Foundation, specific for libraries that they require that you're accredited through our program. So there's lots of things you can apply for, lots of grants and programs out there that you'll be able to be eligible for once you get this accreditation done. Depending on where you are in the process, if you've ever been accredited before, if it's new to you, so if it's your first time through or second time, it can seem daunting, definitely. There's a lot of things to think about and a lot of prep work to do, but there's quite a few benefits to it as well. So, and a lot of this prep work is things you can do ongoing throughout the year at your library, keeping up with these things, knowing what you needed to be, things you needed to do to become accredited before the library to become accredited. So accreditation opens up in July of every year. It was at the formant live this July. I, being new to this, I was a little late in getting official notification now to everyone, so just last, or this month, last week I think was, I sent emails to everyone who was eligible. We have 40 libraries who are up for reaccreditation across the state this year. So every library who was accredited before is invited to do it again. And anyone, one of the first things you must also do is you have to have submitted statistics to the public library survey through Bibliostat. If you've done that for your library, that makes you eligible. Those statistics, those things, those reports that you do, they are, we automatically take all those numbers and information you've given us and automatically feed them into your application form to get you started. So right after that, a lot of work that you might think when you look at the form is already done because all those numbers, everything from that, we automatically feed into there and it's already checked off all the boxes for anything related to that. So anybody who has filled out those public libraries surveys each year are also invited to become accredited if they want to. There are this year 60 additional libraries who have submitted the public library, public library survey statistics, but have not done accreditation before. So I also sent them an email inviting them to hopefully join up with us and start the process. So we might get a few more, maybe. There is, as I said, there's various things you have to do. You have to submit the report, the public library survey. There are 12 minimum clarifications that you must meet and we'll look at those in a second here. And you must have a strategic plan. The strategic plan, as I said, also feeds into your application. We'll look at those in detail in a second here, but I wanted to talk about the different levels of accreditation that there are. Those are right here. There are three different levels we have now, Gold, Silver and Bronze. This was our new format for doing this starting in 2013. And you earn points for different things that your library does. The previous system, sometimes some libraries, it was an all or nothing program previously. You either met all the requirements and boom, you were accredited at a certain level. Or if you didn't meet all the requirements, you're out of luck. There was a group of librarians and staff here that worked together to develop this new program, wanted to make it more equitable. There are some libraries doing great in certain areas, which is awesome. And just not as quit as well in other ones, but it doesn't mean they're doing horribly. So they wanted to make it more fair across the board. So now you can learn points in certain areas. If there's something you're not doing so well in, that's okay. You might be doing something better. You check off those boxes, and you'll accrue points until you get either 275 for Bronze, 200 for Silver, and 250 for Gold. And I believe you can actually get up to 275, Scott, if you wanted to do everything. The minimum for Gold is 250, but you can even go higher if you want to. You won't get any more for that, it's just, yeah. Is that correct? 75 is the highest? I'll double check. I think that should be a platinum tier. If you meet all your platinum. Sure, we can add something. Give a little extra star on your certificate because you reached that level. We'll talk about it. So even the smallest library could potentially get up to some of these levels. We've got some small libraries that are up in Silver and Gold. You just never know. You can work on all these different things you can do. And you'll see when we get in there all the different things that you can check and see if you reach the different point numbers. The application itself is organized into five general categories, governance and planning, your resources, services, cooperation, and collaboration, and communication. So you can think about each of them separately as you're going through there. We have a link here to the public library survey. And I mentioned that some of that information is automatically filled into the form, which is great for you. You've already done the survey, which is one of the requirements for being credited at all. And things are automatically fed into there. In addition, for some of the guidelines, we use peer comparisons. We compare you to libraries similar to yours. This is libraries that are within 15% of the legal service population of your library, 15 above or 15 below. So similar size communities to your library is serving. And these are the guidelines that use those comparisons. So basically saying, this is what the same similar community as yours is doing. And here's where you are in these different areas, local income, open hours, expenditure, circulation, et cetera. And we'll see those when we go into the form. It will tell you and you'll see where you fit into there. We do have a link where you can preview the application if you want to. This is just a static application that you can use to see what it looks like. And here we've got some basic instructions at the top, explanation about the levels, and then all the different sections. Like I said, this is just a demo. So you can just see this might be a cheat sheet. You could print out if you wanted to print out this page to keep track of what you need to be doing before you go into the live form if you want to. However, the live form, you can save as you go as well. So if you start working on it and you've just got some of it done, but you don't have all the information you need, or you think you might want to go back and change something, there is an option to save it and come back and finish it later. Also, even if you save and submit the form, you can always go back and change something, too, before the deadline. October 1st is the deadline for when we need you to submit the form and your strategic plan to meet. And then we will, between now and October 1st, if you get up to us beforehand, we start looking at them as soon as you send them in. But even by October 1st, after that, we'd finished up looking at any that came in right on the deadline. We have a question that came in about the peer libraries. Would the peer libraries be the same as for our most recent accreditation process? If you're talking about when you did it last time, it would have been three years ago, but it may or may not be. We rerun the statistics every year. So every time we do it, so we rerun. So if your population has changed potentially, or if libraries that were peers to you has changed their population, you might have some different ones tossed in there. But when you wind your application, you can see, and I'll show you that in a second, who are the ones that are your peers. If there hasn't been any major change in population, most likely it would be, but it's not a guarantee. The 12 minimum qualifications, I'm going to show you that first, because that's the next thing that you need to have. These are the different things. These are the basics. If you don't have all these 12, you just can't start it all. You need to be able to check off all 12 of these boxes when you're live formed before it will let you even continue with the actual form. You have to be legally established under Nebraska State Statutes, so an actual legally established library. You comply with all the library laws, rules and regulations, both Nebraska or federal laws that affect libraries. For example, if Nebraska or the federal, they change the minimum wage level, what the minimum wage is, you need to make sure you pay your staff that minimum wage has been changed, just to keep an eye on those. You have a governing or an advisory board that follows Nebraska's open meetings laws. You have some sort of board that's working with that. As I said earlier, the board and the director are both certified at the proper levels. You have local funding, so you're not just a volunteer or donation organization. You actually are receiving local funding for your city, your village, if you're a county library, that situation. You had to, of course, submit the public library survey through Bibliostat and the supplemental survey. This is something that's different. It used to be you only needed to do. The main public library survey, and then there's a supplemental one with more questions. I believe in the past, you only needed to do the main one. Now you need to submit both of those. There's different additional information, the supplemental survey that helps feed into and pre-populate your accreditation form. During all hours that the library's open, you have to have paid library staff present, so you can't just have volunteers working in the library when it's open. You can have volunteers, of course, but they can be the only ones there. The director is using email and is checked regularly. This is something that, what does the definition of regularly, we decided not to actually define that, but please check your email at least once a week. More would be great. You had something to say, Scott, I see? Yeah, I wanna go back one point with the paid library staff. There is also, this is, I don't know if you wanna rewrite this in the future or not, but this is scheduled to work, all scheduled hours. There are times where the paid staff aren't available, and so volunteer comes in temporarily. And in the past, Richard had said, yeah, that's fine. It's just like, you can't regularly have the library open Saturdays with just volunteer every week, all month. It's those, you can do those quick, hey, all the staff are going away for training to conference or to a workshop. It's all volunteer is holding down the fort. That's fine. Sure, yes, situations on the fly situations are gonna happen, yeah. Yep. Thanks for that, Scott. Let me look at it here. Oh, you have to do the next one, item 10 here, making all your services available without charge to all residents that their taxes go towards running of your library. So circulating things, reference anything that you do at your library has to be available for free. Your basic services, of course, little things like you gotta pay 10 cents a page, you print something out. If you have a makerspace, a 3D printer, they have to pay for materials. Of course, those kind of things are of loud. But your basic services, then just come in the door, check out books, use the computers, use the internet. You can't charge for any of that. Oh, and that's the next one is specifically pulling out internet services. You can not charge for people to use the internet at the library. And you have to submit any report every year to your local government that is made public as well. So these are the basic things, 12 minimum qualifications that you need to be able to check off to even get started in the application form. The last thing you need is the strategic plan. And let's get into that just a little bit. There's a lot to do with strategic planning and it can be one of the more daunting parts of this. However, we do do workshops every year. This year they've done the workshops. Our system, our regional library system directors are very much involved in this in helping the libraries with the training and with working on your strategic plans. So they are your resource for whenever you need anything to know anything about what should I do for strategic planning? They're your first line of defense, I guess we'll say. You can of course ask me because I'm involved in this as well. But they are out there on the ground with you. The strategic plan is potentially a misnomer. This is something we've been throwing around and Scott has come up with Community Needs Response Plan is really what we're talking about with strategic plan. This is wanting you to look outside of the library to what the community needs. It's community-based, what based on what they need, not what the library needs. There are parts in your strategic plan that talk about the library and what the library has. Excuse me, what their strengths are, what they can offer, but you also need to do the other side and look and see what's going on in your community and see how are we going as a community institution? How do we respond to that? A strategic plan, and it also has other definitions, this strategic plan is sometimes very internal. But what we're really talking about here, and we do explain it really well on here, but I think people get caught up in the name, it's really community needs assessment and response. That's what you're talking about. So think about that as the basis of this to start with when you're looking into this. And these are the basic parts that you do need. There's seven elements that go into a strategic plan. They're all listed here. One thing that's important to note and that some of the libraries I've noticed get a little... Oh, I let my sound. I'm back, sorry. I may have hit my microphone by accident. Sorry about that. Strength and weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The ever popular SWAT analysis that many people have done. In this plan, we are having you do the library's strengths and weaknesses, and then the opportunities and threats from outside the library, basically in your community. What's going on in your community that are threats to the community itself or the library or it could be opportunities. The key to this is not always something, when you're gonna do your community assessment, that's a part of this too, assessment of the community needs and analysis of what's going on in the community. You're gonna come up with a lot of things. You're gonna hear a lot of things that have nothing to do with the library, and that's fine. It won't always be something you usually think of a library doing potentially or being involved in, but you may have to think outside the box. You may get, do your city has done a evaluation, has done a forum or has asked for a survey, and so many things are gonna be mentioned, that don't have anything in the library. We need longer hours at the pool. The parks need to be cleaned up better. Of course, things that the library necessarily wouldn't have any, you have nothing to do with whether the pool's open longer, but you could arrange something where library staff will organize some sort of volunteer program to go and do a cleanup of a park. That was something that you could respond to what's going on in the community. So you gotta kind of think outside the box about things like that. Now, if you already have a strategic plan, you do not have to write a brand new one for us. You may already have something like this. Your city may already have something that the library is part of, that they've been doing all of these things. If you already have that one, that's awesome. Just send a copy of it to me and say, here's a part of the library and you're good to go. However, if you don't, then you would need to go into the process and doing it here. We have a lot of resources on our website about how to do a strategic plan. As I said, we've done the workshops. We've had a few online sessions and anything. Yeah, strategic planning in a nutshell is a session that Richard Miller did, in a couple of years ago. It's a really good short one hour presentation that you can watch if you want to see the basics of it. We have these great worksheets, though, that were put together. I'm gonna pop down to those first that you can use to start to do your plan. Basically, if you just fill out all of each of these worksheets, work on each one of them one at a time and then put them onto this summary sheet, you've got a strategic plan you've put together. So we try to give you as much help as possible here to get that done. We also have some examples of some good strategic plans have already been submitted to us that are available here. These libraries that we can offer them up. So if you wanted some examples, they're from different size libraries, different lengths plans. Some plans are 30 pages long, some plans are five pages long, and there's no right or wrong way. It just, as long as you get all of this information into it, you should have something to work with. Also, these plans are not something static and in stone. They are supposed to be something that you can use as you're running your library. So if you write the plan now over the next three years, you refer back to it, seeing what you found out about your community, what were we gonna do to respond to them. Part of the application is you must be reviewing your plan as well, too. I view it on a regular basis. Every year is a good idea. So that's a really quick, like I said, we can do hours on strategic planning itself, but that's just hopefully getting some of the basics out there. Scott, could you add anything to this that might be helpful? Actually, yeah, I'll throw a couple of things in there. For one thing, if you need another person to talk to, talk to your region library system directors, many of us will go to your library, talk with your planning group, your board or whatever to help you kind of get that head start. I know I've helped some of my libraries with some of the specific tasks, like the SWAT, I'll kind of mediate that meeting where they're talking about it. So you've got some more resources on a very personal level with that. I don't know what all the other offices do with this and there's a new one in Western, I'm not sure how Jan's gonna handle that this year, so she is brand new. But talk to us. Again, with this strategic plan too, it's those specific goals to make sure they are approaching one of the needs. That's one thing that I've seen in the, I don't know how many years I've been helping people with this now. They'll say, okay, here's our community needs and then here's what we're doing and they have nothing to do with each other. That's not what this document is doing. Those goals are talking about those needs. It's not everything you're doing is a library, but this is like Krista said earlier, this is how you're responding to community needs. So it's not like, hey, we wanna grow story time just because we want to. This is not the document to do that. That's a great goal, but not in this document. Right. And that's what, actually the first line of this whole page here, what our main goal of the accreditation program is a good library, is a library serving the unique needs of their community. Yeah. And maybe you're like mantra there. That's what our, that's why we're here. Well, and I've seen two communities have the same community need identified, building businesses in the downtown area. But because of the resources that the library have, which is another thing of this plan, you look at what your strengths and weaknesses are, they had very different goals to attack that one need, because they had different strengths. One had a meeting room, one had great collection development budget, two different approaches. So yeah, it's gonna be your plan for your community. It's gonna be very personal, yeah. All right. Okay. All right, so that's the basic is about strategic planning. Like I said, there's a lot that goes into that. Reach out to your system directors, reach out to me, use these worksheets, look at them, they will help you. We've got how-to guys about the worksheets. This is all, you know, as try to put as much out here as we can to help you. So back to accreditation, which it seems like we've gone, I'll talk about all sorts of different things here that are not accreditation, but that's because they all feed into your accreditation application. What do we have here? All right. So the, when you are sent the email, which I just sent out last week to all of you, who are either up for re-accreditation or who are eligible to start it this year. In that email, you are given a username and password. This is the same password, login information that you use for Bibliostat for doing your public library statistics. So you may already know it, but we give it to you anyways. Once you get that, you then go to the accreditation application to start your process. The first thing you have to do is check off all the 12 boxes, saying that you do meet these 12 basic criteria, and then it will let you, you see as soon as I click the last box, it popped up with, yay, you can apply. And then you'll have to log in. Now, hopefully it's over here. I already logged in earlier with one from library. Denise Lover from Wahoo Public Library has graciously agreed to let us use her application for this year that she just did as a demo. So what normally would happen is you would type in your usual ID and password, hit log in, and you'd come into your application. Now, this is a live application. I'm gonna click on some things here. I will not save it and overwrite anything for Denise, but you'll get to see live how this works. Here are the basic instructions right here at the top. Someone did ask about the peer libraries. There's a blue button right here that does tell you, we'll show you who your peer libraries are, and here are the ones for Wahoo, so you can see who we compared you to for all the different sections of the application that do use this information. And you're in the middle and the one's above and below, so that opens up into a new window. I'll also tell you here what are the different levels, so you just a reminder of how many points you have. Throughout the form, there are question marks next to different sections that give you more information. This is awesome. It's a pop-up that will have, it'll bring you right to that particular section you're asking about, but all of the help that we've put together to try and get you, answer any questions, maybe anybody will have as they're going through this form, is here and this pop-up. So if you're in a section and you're concerned, you're not sure what it's asking for, what it needs, or you want maybe some more information here. For example, here's some samples of other policies, library policies. We've got everything you could hopefully need here. So if you do have a question, click there first. You might get your answer right off the bat without having to wait and call or email one of us. Something else that's really slick. This form was created with, of course, input from staff. Our computer team here at Vrmbia set this up. You'll notice here the total points, is floats over here on the right. So as you're going through the form, as you check or uncheck boxes, you'll see what your ongoing point total is. So you can see if you're close to reaching silver or bronze or gold or wherever level you might be reaching for. All right, so first section, governance and planning. You'll see here some things are already pre-populated. All of these green, anything that's checked off in green, this is the 12th minimum qualifications, you did that. But anything, as I said, everything is fed into here from your public library survey. Throughout here, you'll see those are checked in green already for you. And you can see it even says here for them has an active library friends group. And it says basic text here, based on information supplied on the most recent supplemental survey. So it's automatically checked that for them. They didn't even have to do it themselves. Four points for that, have a library from base foundation. It tells you also how many points you can earn for each item. So as you go through here, you'll see the green checks for things that you did meet, that did feeding through from your survey. Red access are things that you did not meet and might be something you need to work on and that you can then change. All the other boxes that are open and just have the black checks, those are things that the library or you would check off yourself as you're going through to let us know what you're doing. So first run off, of course, you have to have a strategic plan. So you check that box and then you have to review it annually and you can say the last time that you did do a review of your plan. So anything within the last three years should counts for it. So if you happen to have done a strategic plan for some reason in 2016 and you're now doing your application, your accreditation in 2017, you're good, that's within the last three years. You don't have to do a brand new thing, a brand new plan or anything right now, it just has to be within three years. It's always something you wanna keep up with though, so do keep an eye on that. Different policies, there's lots of policies you can have at your library and we even have a section here to add other things that we might not have thought of that you have created a policy for that you can earn points for. You can earn one point for each policy. So you can see here at Wahoo, they've got some of them checked off and some of them not. I actually did talk to Denise this morning and she said they're working on getting some more because they noticed they're at 247 points. They only need three more to reach gold. So she's still actually working with her board and staff to see what other things are we doing. Can we add something? I think they're working on a teen board potentially, that would be something to add under others. So a teen advisory board. So theirs will probably change before they submit because she knows that she is just her start and she's gonna have some more things you can add. Technology plan, if you review the technology plan annually. Next section is on resources. How would you have to provide services to your library? And this is where your peer libraries come into play. You can see here it looks at your library, the information that's in your public library survey and then looks at your peers and gives you the average and the median. So you can see where you fall in there and if you automatically do fall, then good to go, it checks it off for you. So they're open hours, local income. This is where it talks with the director certification level. Now this is one thing that she's gonna need to work on. She's supposed to be at level two based on their library service. Yeah, library service area. She's at one right now but this is something she can be working on potentially. As I said, these things can be in process as well, working on your certification for yourself, taking the basic skills classes that we offer for that. Is your, how is your staff that are also certified? In this case, the larger your population, the more of extra staff. Cause it's not just the library director. Anybody can get certification, public librarian certification through us, any of your staff. So in this case, cause the size of their community, they need two. So their director plus one additional, director plus two additional, however it goes. If you have your local ILSs here, collection information, they don't pretty good on theirs here. Lots of green checks on theirs. But you can see some of the ones here that are, they've checked off themselves. Trying to see what we have here. Using online websites to provide information to library users. That's six points. There's a lot of things here that you can just think about that you probably would not have thought had anything to do with applying for this. It's not in our statistical report. So all of these other things here are things that you can do that you can use to add points and get up the bronze, silver and gold depending on which level you are. You do get a different amount and higher level get more state aid. It's a calculation that we do here. Chris? Yes Scott? Those comparison ones, like on your screen now, let's take 205.04. Did you explain the average and median? So how do you get that green check mark versus the red X in those? Did you explain that? Oh I calculated, can you explain that? Okay, so you'll see in those, let's take 2.0504 as an example here. You'll see three numbers down there, your local expenditures, the peer average and peer median. You get that red X if your number is less than both of those other two. You get a green check mark if yours is higher than at least one of the others. Right, that's right, it doesn't have to be both. To get the green. Yeah, because statistically you could be at a disadvantage with average, but hit the median just fine or vice versa. So you get an even greater chance of getting that green check mark. And that's another part of this that I liked when you guys redid it, that making it easier, more fair for anybody who's doing different things to be able to get the accreditation. That you've got a couple of options, a couple of ways of doing it. It doesn't have to be just a one it is or isn't. And those peers that is, as we saw at the top, where you can see who your peer libraries are to see who you are being compared to. For the peer libraries too, I should mention, not depending on where your library is, you may see some peer libraries that are not Nebraska libraries. For some areas and for some sizes, I think it's for both. We just didn't have them in Nebraska, so we have reached out to both Iowa and South Dakota numbers that they publish. Sam Shaw is our data person here. And so sometimes some libraries from those states are brought into the peer comparisons just because we didn't have enough in Nebraska to fill. We wanted at least five above and five below. Some of you will see more depending on where you'll fall, but a minimum of five above and five below for you to be able to be compared to. And when we didn't have them in our own state, we did pull in some from nearby because we figured they're at least close to how we do things here in Nebraska. I'm not sure if we did Kansas or not too. Do you know, Scott? I know... I don't think Kansas was included. I think it is Iowa. I think maybe out west there might be some Wyoming or Colorado pulled into the peer groups. But I'm not sure. Definitely Iowa. Most Nebraska libraries would probably have at least one Iowa library just because of the way of how our population gaps sit between communities. But there might be some Colorado, might be some Wyoming. I don't remember offhand, but no Kansas. As far as I remember. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Sam does this for us every year and he starts with Nebraska and then he does kind of a manual look to see where are we lacking? What do we, who do we need to pull in? So a lot of work goes into this to get this ready to go for you guys. So under part three is services, the services that you offer to your community, outreach programs, how is your attendance at your programs? As you see these things are, it's pulled in from your public library survey. So that's something to think about too. Your survey is going to inform some of these questions. So you need to think about when you're doing that, how is it going to affect your accreditation if you're thinking of going through that. Library programs for each population as specified in your strategic plan. And this is where strategic planning comes in. This isn't the one place, but many questions you'll see here. It says, what does it say you did in your strategic plan? And you just have to check the box and write it in here and explain it more in here what it is. So doing this application itself is probably, the checking of the box is probably the easiest part of it because you do the work on the public library survey. Do you do all the information that you put in your strategic plan? And then all of that just feeds into this and one way or another and you just make sure, yep, we did mention that in the strategic plan. So I'll get my 10 points for that. You'll see so many of these here that do mention in your plan, in your plan. What would you say you were doing from that plan? And you'll see how that makes it, that's what really creates everything that you put into your application. Collaborating with your community. Going outside, attending meetings, participating as a member in certain community organizations if they're available. Denise is actually just talking about, she goes and meets once or twice a year, a week in the morning with, the mayor has coffee with the mayor and whoever their local senator is just to keep up with what's going on and for them to keep them up to speed on what's going on in the library. So making that connection. And then communications. How are you communicating? How are you marketing what you're doing in your library? And do you have all these things on your website? That's one thing too, you can write all these things and have them but put them out there so people know what's going on in your library. And Krista? Yes. I actually had a question about this. Like, let's take 5.01, it's as most of your mission statement and policies on the library website. And let's say the library does not currently have a website, which they could give for free from you guys but that's a whole other episode. Would you count it if they put their mission statement on their Facebook page somehow? Would that count for this one? Or do you want a website for this particular question? Yeah, we had somebody ask about that didn't we recently? I think it should count. I mean, it's out there public as long as they're, I'd wanna make sure that it'd be somewhere where somebody could easily get to it. Meaning, if you know if you have a Facebook page, you put up a post about summer reading program, end of year parties this week. And then that post gradually bumps down as new posts come up. There are other sections in your Facebook page where you can post notes or about the library or things that are more static. Putting it there where somebody could easily get to it and not have to search through and find out, oh well, we posted our mission statement three years ago when we set up the page and it was a post that you'd have to know how to use the page and get it somewhere where it could be as accessible as if it was a traditional, I suppose, we'll say website. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, I think that what you said there, like a battle or something. Yeah. Yeah, like you said, it has to be one of the static parts of it. Otherwise, yeah, it just rolls off and it doesn't do anyway. Any good except for the five minutes you could see it in a Facebook feed. And I know some businesses and organizations sometimes have had, now that Facebook has become so prevalent out there, some places just say, Facebook is our page. We're not gonna get a server somewhere or pay for hosting some place for a website when Facebook has everything we need to do to promote and communicate with everything and that had been the trend. And that's okay. At least you're on the internet somewhere as long as it's all public there. However, having your own website is a good thing as well. As you can see, that's some of the things you can get credit for in here. As Scott mentioned, we have Nebraska libraries on the web here in Nebraska. It's our program where we provide for free to any library, any public library who wants to a website that you can have as your own. You can, in addition, have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, whatever other ways you're wanting to communicate. And sometimes, and I know this is another thing too that can be difficult, the library has a page on the city or county site, which is small, very sparse, the bare minimum kind of thing. But then the city says, well, there you go. You've got a page. It tells the library's hours and location. What more do you need? Well, in nowadays, there's a lot more that some places might wanna have out there. And they might not have the access to update or maintain that page at all. You have to go through whoever is the city or the county's web person to get something updated on there if it's even at all possible to post. So that's something that you have a page, but you don't have the ability to get the things you need to, like this, the policies, the mission statement on there. I'd say if you can tweak something else, like your Facebook page to do that, that would count. And maybe we should talk about adjusting the wording of this potentially, Scott. Maybe, I think we could do a Facebook versus own page debate for a whole hour if we really wanted to. So this might be one of those things that we'll have to see how people are implementing. That'd be my suggestion. Sure, we'll see how it goes on a case-by-case basis and if it becomes something. So this is the thing like I was saying, as I said to you, your strategic plan and things is not set in stone. This too, we are willing to make changes or if people can explain to us. Lots of times we will come back to you, we'll do an evaluation of your strategic plan, look over your application and then come back to you and say, well, how about, can you change this or what about this is different? Or did you even do, can you think about this to make changes to it? So we're willing to do a back and forth with you to make this work as well. It's not, we're not just computers here that we're not thinking about these, we're human beings looking at this on your behalf to make it work. All right, we're almost, we're at 11 o'clock here. Scott, other things you wanted to make sure we bring before I just wrap up about submitting and whatnot, about any other sections on the application form? They'd like you to. No, not that I can think of right now. I'm sure people will have their own individual questions as they go through it and you already said places they can go and get help. So there's plenty of places to get that help. Yeah. And yeah, just reiterate what you said, there's some back and forth between you and the library. So yeah, happy yet. Good luck, have fun. Absolutely. So I did just go through and show you all these. As I said, the total points have been floating over here. It's also at the bottom. I didn't have to check anything. You'll see if I do check a box, it automatically changes the point numbers. So just by posting these reports on its website, while who could have gotten 250, poof, they're gold. She's working on other things though for that. So and as you uncheck things, your points will go down. So it's all a live interactive form here. So as you go, you can see where you're going. And I mentioned earlier, you can save and resume. So you can save it as you're going and come back and finish it up, or you can submit. Even if you do submit, it's not a final thing. You can still always go back in and make changes to it. I can make changes on your behalf too. We can discuss things and work it out as it's going. I'm not gonna save or submit this for Denise, but she can do that. So that is the application form itself. As I said, October 1st is the deadline. So we've got a few months left yet for you to work on your strategic plan, work on this, see anything else you want to do. We do have a question that came up, Scott, that had to do with goals in the strategic plan. So let's see. If you have any other questions, go ahead and type them in. We are at 1103, but I did start a little after 10, so that's okay. We'll stay here, and if you do have any questions, we'll answer them until we get everything answered for you that you need to, so we're not just gonna cut off. Someone wants to know, if I understand Scott correctly, he is saying that the goals in the strategic plan must be directly related to the public comments from surveys or meetings, not goals that we as a staff or board think are important. I think that's exactly right. Well, we're a mixture. It's a mix. Again, this isn't going to be a document that says everything that you're doing. This is a document that says, here's how we're approaching the needs of the community. And so that's one thing to keep in mind. There's lots of great stuff that library could be doing. It just, you don't need to have it in this document. Strategic plan was kind of a bad choice, like we said at the very beginning. But yeah, the goals in this document should address one of the needs that you and your board have decided we are in a place that we could actually do something to help in this. And it doesn't have to be something that you alone are doing. Hey, we're going to partner with the Chamber of Commerce or the school or whatever organizations your library has a great relationship with already. You could say, we're going to partner with the chamber and we're going to use our meeting room to give them a forum to talk about starting your own business. Or, hey, we don't have a meeting room but we're right next to the senior center. So we're going to bring some of our collections over to the senior center because the community need was, we need more leisure activities for the elderly. So you take those list of needs. You're going to throw out stuff. You can't do anything about like street lights or potholes or the dog that keeps barking. You could just say, here's the list of needs. Here are the three needs that we are in a position to help with and here's how we're going to help. That's kind of oversimplification but that's kind of how it goes. Taking needs and turning them into goals. You can't do everything about everything. You have to pick and choose. And if you look at some examples here, you'll see exactly what Scott just described where there's a survey's been done or the city has done something asking the community member citizens, what is the thing that's most important to you first, second, third. And in their plan, they'll say, here's everything they said and here's the 15 things that everybody in the city thinks need to be fixed. And here are the three that we can do something about. So that'll all be in there but then you'll just pull out the ones that relate to the library. So we want to know that we did see what was going on everywhere in the community and then picked the ones that might be something you can do something about. And Chris, I don't know how you feel about this but I've seen some that see one need that the library could take two very different approaches to. And so they didn't even pick three. They picked two community needs but they had three goals all together because they took multiple ways to address it. Yeah, because they had some strengths and relationships that they could really put forward in two very different ways. And so that's one thing to think about. And then there's been some where they combined the needs as people reported them and the board said, well really this is one need and we can take that one need and we could do something towards that. Right, oh sure, yeah, be creative. Just explain it in your plan that this is what we did. We noticed that these four things that people are mentioning actually can all be not fixed but we can deal with them all with just one thing that we do. So it goes the other way. One thing to all of them, yeah. Absolutely be creative. Like I said, there's not really a, as you can see there's not a form for a strategic plan as in fill in all these and you must have this many. There's some worksheets, there's information but it is all flexible too. There is a summary which has just lists the different things that you should end up with but it's also pretty open ended itself. So yeah, be creative. It doesn't say you must have three or four, it just says list them. What did you come up with? Yeah, all right. Any other questions that anybody has for me or Scott about accreditation or strategic planning or even any of the certification programs that we do while we're here? I know some of you who are on the line today are in this re-accreditation year. So I know some of you are working on yours. Some people have submitted, some people are in the middle of it. Anything you wanna ask us about right now before we wrap up? Type into your question section. Anything you, any last minutes, advice or anything you want to say? Scott? Just that, you know, you could do this. The first year that this process started, I was actually leaving a job and we were up for accreditation until I did my strategic plan in a month and a half. I wouldn't suggest planning to do that but you could do it and have some people help you out. You know, have some people help you out. You got support, network here. Krista, of course. This isn't something you have to do yourself as a library director and you don't want to. You're gonna put together a team to do the strategic planning to evaluate it. Also, and this is what Denise had mentioned at their library, Oahu, the city had already just recently, within the last year or so, done a community assessment and a survey of the citizens, asked them what they needed. That's great, just use that. You don't have to go and do your own if it's already been done by someone locally and you've got that information that you can just pull in. That's great, they've done the surveys. She's talking, but she did mention to me she may be doing some other surveys specific to the library. She wants to do something but she's got that basic one that the city happened to have just done recently. Awesome, and that's who you're working with. All right, well, it doesn't look anybody has any desperate questions they need to ask right now so I think we'll wrap it up for about an hour or two this morning. Thank you very much, Scott, for being here and helping me get through all this. This is my first time through it as well, accreditation. I was, as I said, I've been here. I was assisting Richard with it slightly before he retired. This is my first time through on my own. So I really appreciate, so I'll be depending on you, Scott, and the other system directors as well for some input and advice as we go through this. So I'll be going through it with all of you guys if we're doing it potentially the first time. Or the second time, you don't remember what happened the first time. Not much has changed, though. I'll tell you that. We did not change the form up. Not planning on making any major changes. That has been a question as well. On my first go through, of course, I'm gonna see how it goes, see if there's anything that I think could be tweaked a bit as you saw. We discussed a few things here that maybe we would be evaluating. So should be fine at all. All right, so I think we'll just wrap it up then for this morning. Thank you very much. I hope this was helpful. A very quick overview, as I said. We have more in-depth training on strategic planning. You've got your resources. Contact your system directors for assistance. Use all the help guide and information we have, all the resources we have on the website to get yourself started and going with it and go to it. Good luck. So that will wrap it up for this week's Encompass Live. It will be posted onto our website. There we go. Under the archives, which are right here, our upcoming shows are listed here, but our archives are right here. It'll be posted at the top here. I have the recording available and links to the sections on our website, the links to the accreditation page there. And that will be, hopefully later this afternoon I'll have that recording out to all of you who attended, anyone who registered and wasn't able to join us this morning. So I hope you'll join us next week when our topic is, I bet you this actually, United for Libraries, Trustees, Advocates, Friends and Foundations, The Voice for America's Library. So this is actually a good time to have this session as a follow-up to the accreditation because as I said, as you said, the board accreditation, board certification is related to this. Beth Nowalinski is the new executive director for United for Libraries. And she'll be on the show to talk about what they have available. As I said, we have paid for all state of Nebraska, for the state of Nebraska, all library people to have access to their resources. She'll be on her monthly with us. And Steve Laird, who's the president of intro group and the 2017-2018 president of United for Libraries, he's actually based right out of Omaha, will be joining us here as well to join Beth and talk about how you can use the statewide membership we've created, we've paid for for you in United for Libraries to benefit your library and get your board and trustees up to speed on things. So please do sign up for that, sign up for any of our other course sessions we have coming up. I know I've just got August on here, I'm working on confirming some September dates, they'll be up here as soon as I have everything nailed down. Also, income slide is on Facebook, this year you'll get a link to our Facebook page. So if you are a big Facebook user, please do pop over there and give us a like. I post here reminders of when shows are happening, here's your reminder to log in today's show, when the recording's available, when any new things come up, I post on here. So if you are big on Facebook, do give us a like over there. Other than that, that wraps it up today. Thank you very much everyone for attending, thank you very much Scott for helping out today, and we'll see you next time on Encompass Live. Good luck with your accreditation. Bye-bye.