 Good morning everyone. Thank you for joining us today for the Re-envisioning Services Evolving Programming during COVID-19. We're glad to have you here with us and are looking forward to a great day with you here at NUSA for your first session. Yay! My name is Ruth Offie. I'm with the City of Fort Worth Community Engagement Office and I will be your host during this workshop. Before we start, I want to point out all the ways you can share your feedback and ask questions and network with everyone. You don't have to use any of these tools if you don't want to, but if you do, there are all great ways to interact with everyone. First, let's take a look at the right-hand side of the screen at your inbox. When you see a number in green or red pop-up, that means someone at the conference has sent you a message to read and you respond the same way. The next tap-down is the chat room. This is where you can network, say hello to Trevor and Jana that are so happy that you're here today. And introduce yourself, make comments you want everyone to see and share any additional resources about the topic for today's workshop. Right underneath that, you'll see the people tabs and this is everybody who is joining us today. Again, you can click on their name and chat with them privately if they're giving you good comments and feedback, please network. This is what this conference is all about and we want to make sure that you feel bright like if it was in person rather than virtual. And last but not least, I want to introduce Trevor and Jana. They're with the Fort Worth Public Library and I'm going to hand it over to them to introduce themselves. Alright, I'll go to start here. I'm Jana Hill and the Adult Services Manager for the Fort Worth Public Library system. I've been with the City of Fort Worth for just over four years, so kind of new still. And Trevor and I work really closely together. We are a team and so I will pass it over to him now. Yeah, my name is Trevor Notton. I am the Youth Services Manager at the Fort Worth Public Library. I've been here a little over a year, came over from the City of McKinney. All right. All right, good, good morning, Mary Lynn. See we've got some some floor earth friends in the in the audience. All right, I know nine. Trevor and his area codes. I hope he can, I hope he can make a comment and Trevor will tell you your area code. All right, so about the library. So founded in 1901, the Fort Worth Public Library serves the 900,000 residents of the City of Fort Worth with 16 physical locations. You can see them on that map there from a large downtown central library to branches serving neighborhoods, satellite branch located in a community center. We're about to open a new branch, the Rebe Carry Family Library on Fort Worth's east side and La Grande Biblioteca, a new location in La Grande Plaza shopping mall. Many people aren't aware that the library is a city department just like people just like police or water. I didn't know before, before I started working in public libraries. I did not realize that. And therefore we're committed to providing a community service for city residents at the neighborhood level. As with most large library systems, the majority of our employees staff branch libraries with a centralized administration and units that provide system wide services such as it collection management marketing, and in our case public programming. Trevor and I represent the two arms of system wide and therefore city wide public programming in Fort Worth. In recent years, the library is focused on evolving into what we call a programming library, or really a user centered library, where programs for all ages are a core part of our mission. In 2018 we launched a new mission and strategic plan to support the shift and bring the library back out into the community. Let's rewind a bit. So, just before the pandemic. At the beginning of 2020 we were on the cusp of something great. A brand new adult services unit, my unit, had just been established to focus specifically on the needs and interests of our 650,000 residents over the age of 18. We just hired a new youth services manager, Trevor, to take our programming for children and teens to the next level. And we had a great plan for bringing youth services and adult services teams together and developing this awesome new three year plan for expanding programs across the whole city of Fort Worth. And this photo here is very popular third Thursday jazz concert series at the Central Library. You can see there about 500 people there. It was a very, very different world very recently. So my first day of working for the city of Fort Worth was March 16. My orientation was cut short by five hours as I saw in real time that things were changing quickly, minutes a minute hour to hour. I was able to work in the office for two days before we were sent home to work remotely. So in that two days I was able to have meet and greets with my staff, get some initial intel on the processes and procedures in place, but a very surface level discussions in those two days as we were scrambling to figure out what it was going to look like moving forward. It became pretty evident in that short window when I was talking to my team in the building that they were equally relieved that they actually had a manager in place to provide guidance on their future. And that they were craving stability. My team had gone through several managers, different programming focuses and implementation strategies. And there was a disconnect on how the systems team and the branches were going to be working in the future and pretty much immediately. My team was looking for stability, a blueprint and a vision. Also, the way my team was structured when I arrived was kind of a collection of small islands operating independently. We had parts of our team office in different locations somewhere out in community centers. There wasn't a lot of cross collaboration. There was a lack of knowledge of what each staff member was working on and what their teams were working on. We also had a small group of employees that were new to the library world and kind of still learning what constituted a library program. So there was a lot of work to do and the immediacy of our pivot provided the spark needed to streamline that work and we began to navigate into the unknown. Yeah, so as Trevor kind of mentioned, we were on a kind of a slow motion shutdown. First we paused public programming, then we closed to the public and then we sent staff home. The day that staff were sent home was the first day we offered virtual programming for adults. I made a note on here that says this is temporary because we really thought this was going to be about a two week or deal. We didn't know that 14 months, 15 months later we'd still be talking about this. And then in this photo is the library assistant from my adult services team, Maria, teaching her Spanish high school equivalency class online. And that is the first program we took virtual. So community needs. Even though everything about working felt really, really surreal at that point in adult services, we knew that the show had to go on. Our immediate pivot to virtual programming was prompted by our Spanish language high school equivalency students who are studying for their upcoming exams. We knew we had a commitment to support them. Since the GED exam can make such a difference at a person's career outlook, livelihood, it's not really optional. You're there because you need it and you're motivated to complete that process. Prior to the pandemic that had been an in person program held at a neighborhood library in East Fort Worth. And so we couldn't just stop the class because these folks were counting on us. So we knew that our community needed something to do as well now that so many were locked down at home. So on March 24, the same day that we began our virtual high school equivalency class, we also launched this day at home book club, which is a completely asynchronous book club that that lives on Facebook. We don't meet, we don't, there's no obligation to show up at any appointed time we read books together and then and then use Facebook to talk about them. And in this, in this photo here, this is our director on the right, Monica Shore, talking to the host of Good Morning Texas about that book club, which is still very active, still has just under 700 members. And we also began the process of reform, reformatting our existing in person programs like Spanish fundamentals and our Spanish, our Spanish conversation group, but it was not easy. All right, so I mentioned that above all else that my team was looking for stability. And what an interesting time to try to build out a plan to provide stability when I think we can all agree that the last 14 months has been pretty unstable. So I really built everything around being accessible. And saying you're accessible and being accessible are two widely different things. I know that I have I'm sure that some of you in the room have worked for someone that has said, come to me anytime you need me, only to find out when you actually need them and come come to them they're not around. So I needed to make sure that no matter when someone wanted to pull me in for a chat, a video call, phone call to discuss ideas to vent to share anxiety that I was there to listen. Accessibility and active listening help create the foundation for stability. I scheduled daily one on ones with my direct reports and weekly one on ones with their direct reports to make sure that we continue to be aligned and I can provide clarity when I had it. When I didn't have clarity I needed everyone to be comfortable with hearing I don't know, and we're just going to make the best decision at that action point that we could and reevaluate at the next action point. And I think that Janet can agree we just got a series of gatling gun action points one after another and we were just doing our best to make the best decision at that time. We needed to totally change the way we discussed ideas and program proposals. So we developed a regular schedule around tables, where we discussed ideas and proposals. And we found out that we developed a culture of feedback, especially as we entered a world that was new to most of us, we had to start making feedback or regular practice. We needed to stop personalizing it and start embracing it and looking for it. Obviously that is much easier said than done. I can tell you that the first few meetings when my team was taking live fire the feedback was ugly. I could read on their body language in their face that they were having a hard time processing. I let them know wherever they were individually as a related to their comfort and taking and receiving feedback was where they were supposed to be. So differentiating was really important. But we needed to kind of continue to provide that feedback and really get more and more comfortable taking and receiving it. That was the driver to building up the skills necessarily necessary for us to create our online content. We then needed to create a roadmap for our virtual programming that allowed adaptability and tweaks when needed. We needed to remain nimble and flexible. I'm sure everyone here heard those two words constantly over the last 14 months. We really needed to put it into practice. But this allowed us to explore new ideas, try the same program at different times and days, expand our offerings to different target audiences, test out different platforms for presenting our programs. We also needed to assess our individual levels of experience and comfort. I mean, no, everyone in the room is going to be very shocked to hear this, but most of us in the library world did not enter the library field to be on camera and to be broadcast over the internet to be consumed by mass number of people. We are, we are a shy group. So everyone entered at different levels of on camera comfort at different levels of tech skills as related to making video editing video access to recording equipment. We were remote. So we were really dealing with what we had for our personal cells and work laptops again differentiation and embracing that everyone was entering the project at a different spot on the timeline. And that no matter the entry point. That's where they needed to be. We were measuring improvement intervals from that entry point individually, not as a, not as a sweeping hole. Okay. And I don't know if this is the case for you guys, but I'm not seeing everything on our PDF so just know there should have been bullet points on the on the last one and an image on this one. But that's okay, we'll just talk through it. So we realized early on that we would need to approach serving adults. Yeah, adaptability and practice. This, this is really like every day for us. We realized really early on that we'd have to approach serving adults and youth really differently for adults we focused on live interactive programs that gave folks something to do something to get their mind off of what was going on in the world at the time. So we can't forget how, how scary last spring was it was, we keep saying the word unprecedented but really no one was, was prepared to deal with this not just at work but emotionally it was really challenging. So our focus was building a sense of community and combating the sense of isolation so many people were feeling early on in the pandemic. We experimented with topics platforms pre recorded concepts and finally landed on a mix of live virtual lifelong learning. So that's all of our classes and things like that, and literary programs so author visits and book clubs and things via zoom and Instagram and pre recorded music programs and conferences, because we discovered that streaming life music has its own inherent challenges that we really needed to to mitigate by pre recording. And so this photo should be read our music librarian in a conversation with members of a local chamber music group. Just imagine that. So for you services, our initial jump into virtual content were a series of very short three to four minute craft videos and readers advisory videos readers advisory being book recommendations for specific age groups. They were good launching points, but they really didn't capture what the in house in person program experience was. So while these videos were really important for us to build up those skills and that comfort. There wasn't really a direct translation between those quick hit videos and what we were offering before we started working remotely. We also initially focused strictly on pre recorded on demand content. We felt that this allowed families to engage in access our programming around their busy schedules. And that they would live on our social media for new families learning about our virtual offerings they could go back and revisit and watch what they may have missed. So just like anything the more we practiced and the more we met and the more we discussed ideas you will notice this is a big theme for me I'm talking more about the process than the actual program itself. The more comfortable we got with digital content. We reached a point in evolution point to where we started to ask how can we leverage the team's unique passions strengths backgrounds and experience into a larger collaborative projects. The answer was a program that we call learn dream do, and that's essentially a school age variety show. Think Sesame Street 321 contacts. And instead of seasoned on camera professionals a bunch of librarians kind of learning on the fly. Where we focused on a different theme, each episode. To take all the individual shorter quick hit videos that we were previously making and turn those into a cohesive collaborative projects so each week, we'd have a round table. We talked to everyone's contributions we provide feedback on the individual videos discuss upcoming themes things they'd like to do. The answer of learn dream do not only about us to showcase the wide array of talent that we had internally, but it was a natural driver to create and reestablish relationships with city and community partners. They were all new relationships to me which was good kind of revisiting this from a system level, but to have people come on as guests and talk about their field talk about their profession talk about their organization. It was it was a natural fit to strengthen and build those relationships and the more people we talked to and the more people we worked with we realized that, you know, we were all in the same boat we were all trying to adapt to make it work. And we were all kind of learning collectively together in different buildings that on a very similar timeline. So we really developed a evolution of those singular quick hit videos and piece them together with a theme in a larger collaborative into like a 25 minutes Sesame Street type program. We also began to explore live zoom programming. Something that I still miss and I know my staff missed was the lack of was the direct engagement with families meeting a story time or music and movement and having those conversations before and after a program is some of the best experiences you can have working in the library. And while we enjoyed communicating with families through Facebook posts and YouTube comments there's really nothing like that live interaction. So we knew that adult services had already begun and established live programming. So we started to ask them questions about best practices strategies, best days and times and obviously we would tweak those based on success. And then we started to launch weekly family engagement programs and those were kinder prep one on one classes so for and pre K prep classes so for families that are getting their kids ready for one of those two entry points. We had a eight week program that was drop in you didn't need to go to all eight where they could come in and, you know, learn about ways that they can create a reading look in their house to foster a level of literacy at a young age. We also started doing live story times through zoom for toddler and pre K our youth librarians have so much fun doing those. So with these evolutions taking place in the excitement level of the team continuing to rise. I had to hammer home the message that we needed to approach this with patients. It would be fantastic if the very first video that we did get 50,000 views and it got wild engagement and went viral and everyone across the world saw the Fort Worth public library learn dream do apples for president show. But we need to take time to build an audience. And I wanted them to be more concerned with the planning and the collaborative nature of creating the program. Then the number of people who are attending or watching at least initially we needed to build a presence and be consistent and once we found those windows days times. Then we would start to see that growth, but until we really started to solidify those days and times and that presence. The important thing was the creation. If we planned it well, if we thought about community needs. If we were towing that fine line between empathy and honesty when providing feedback, we would. That's the those are the key ingredients to developing an audience and we are starting to see that take shape, probably the last five or six months we are we are seeing a steady increase in programming participation. Well, and I'll say just as an aside for for my preschooler. Those programs have been wonderful during the pandemic and and you can just. I'd love being able to put it on the YouTube playlist and no, no it's quality content coming through my TV. Trusted exciting just great material. So programming partners, because we already had skilled presenters because that's what our our kind our flavor of librarian does we we program so we're we're used to being in front of people and presenting all the time. Because we already have that skill set and educational mindset and newly developed expertise with virtual platforms. We almost immediately started collaborating with other city departments to reach the nearly 7000 employees of the city of Fort Worth and the community at large. So in adult services we partnered with the divide diversity and inclusion department and the city employee Juneteenth committee to create a multi part Juneteenth virtual event to stand in for the in person festival normally held at City Hall. The highlight you see here in the photo was a performance by local musician and music historian brandy pace on African American roots music. That's on our YouTube you should go watch it it's amazing. We also partnered with the departments of neighborhood services economic development and the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce to present during the global entrepreneurship week. We also came to develop virtual story times the staff from the Fort Worth Nature Center and adult services collaborated on historical crafting with the log cabin village that's Fort Worth's local historical park with log cabins brought in from around the area, and preserved with historical interpreters and it's, it's pretty great. So that was part of the parks department. So that was another big internal partner, and then an adult services staff member provided a virtual Spanish fundamentals class, especially for city employees as a professional development opportunity. That was something that was supposed to happen in person and obviously couldn't. But we moved it, we moved it online with the goal of being able to better serve our Spanish speaking communities. Back on partnerships. I really wanted us to constantly be thinking big, big ideas. So we partnered with the University of Maine for a maker one oh one observatory class, we reached out to an astronaut in Houston for Hispanic heritage learn dream do. We just think local we obviously made local and city partnerships work but we we thought on a national scale of what would be an enriching experience who could bring value and knowledge to our programs. It was really a beautiful thing to kind of see take off. So, what are we at now we are at the show must go on so hitting your stride is a really good feeling, because it implies that you're kind of busting your butt, but you don't feel like you are. And to my team's credit, I put a lot on their plate and kept them planning and I kept them filming and I kept them providing feedback at every turn. We hit our stride when we began to expand so not just our expansion of programming offerings but expand who would contribute to our programs. So, obviously my team is a systems team and we work with all of the branches, but we have great staff that were hired to do programming that just weren't able to do it at for the last 14 months and we wanted to figure out and build out a process where they could get trains and they could contribute towards the virtual programming to make it a system wide effort. So, we needed to start incorporating them we knew that they wanted to. So we leveraged out our internal learning process and created a series of onboarding training programs that branch staff could opt into that not only would train them on the ins and outs of creating virtual programs. At the end of that training, they would create their own mini program for the system. So one of these was called Think Outside the Box Thursday. This training was essentially built out so you learn the basics of recording equipment, best practices for recording yourself, how to get the best quality sound, how to upload that file to our communications department. They were assigned a peer within our team for peer-to-peer mentorship. They met regularly to ask questions. They were given feedback on their content and then we asked them to provide feedback to us about the training. So it was always and constantly a two-way thing and the end result was a five to six minute Think Outside the Box art video. And these videos are essentially it starts out with a shape. So like this is not a piece of pizza and then you turn that shape into a different creation. So maybe that piece of pizza turns into a tooth in the mouth of a shark and at the end it's not a piece of pizza. It's a shark, right? So we walk through that creative process and kind of ask kids to kind of use their creativity to kind of think outside the box to create something. And at the end of that training, not only have they worked with systems and developed the relationship and then introduced to the culture of feedback that we were trying to build internally and then system-wide, but they were able to get their entry-level skills into virtual content and have a tangible output at the end of it that they'd be proud of and they could see posted on our channels. We also did something very similar with our storytime training. So from a system-wide level, we needed to establish quality standards across the system. Early literacy tips and book selections and essentially we need to get to a point where a storytime at one branch looks the same as a storytime at the other. I mean the personalities of the people giving them is going to be different, but the elements and the goals need to be consistent. So we created an opt-in at the end of the traditional storytime training for those that wanted to do a virtual storytime training. So it was a reinforcement, again, of the basic tech skills. They were assigned a mentor. They were, again, we modeled the culture of feedback. It was a two-way conversation and they were able to create virtual storytimes for our Let's Create program. Yeah, in adult services, we did some similar things, again, with a slightly different approach where we had branch staff come and basically be embedded in adult services where they would work with us for a few weeks at a time, learn the difference in the branch kind of neighborhood experience versus the experience of working at a system-wide level where we serve everyone in the city and try to really customize programs for all the various audiences we serve. And one of the great benefits of it has been that we've been able to really compliment the skill sets we already had on our team. So some of the staff that have been embedded with us were bilingual and have helped us develop quite a bit more Spanish language programming than we would have been able to do. We have some right now. We'll be rolling out some Spanish language workforce programs and small business programs this summer. I'm really excited about it and we're able to do it because we've been able to tap into that skill set in the branches. So we embraced trial and error throughout this entire process. We found that some of our programs, while they were designed with intent, didn't have the same success as others. We created a library office hour program for families to ask questions about library resources and troubleshoot ebooks and catalog issues, and we just didn't get a ton of engagement. We did get good feedback from those who attended, so we decided to roll elements from the office hours and some other frequently asked questions into other programming plans. But as a standalone, it just didn't work. Live afternoon programming for teens had very little engagement. We initially designed our Maker 101 program, which is a tweening teen take and make kit to have a prerecorded element and then a live follow-up to create that engagement to allow staff to assist with any issues or ask any questions or to show up what they made from their kit. Again, designed with intent, didn't need the community need. In our live programs, we let people in the virtual room. We let them in early to have conversations and leave the room open at the end of the program for follow-up. We are trying to find ways to collect as much qualitative data as possible. Those conversations, my experience working the floor, working a circulation desk, working information desk is that having conversations with patrons, they're going to share so much important qualitative data about what they're looking for, what they'd like to see the library offer. They just need to be intentional and deliberate in identifying it and sharing it with the right person. So for example, I was doing a music and movement class. So that's like a three to five-year-old program where we're just dancing and using manipulatives and it's a 45-minute workout. And at the end of the program, we're cleaning up and I'm talking to some of the families in there and one of the dads says that he was excited that the weather was getting nice. So we had some way to get grilling again, start grilling, but he didn't really know how to make a brisket. He said, I wish that someone would come and show me how to make a proper brisket. So in that one interaction at a three to five-year-old music and movement class, that piece of information was turned into a Pipmaster 101 class a few months later where we had a local Pipmaster at a famous barbecue place here in North Texas. Tender smokehouse came out. We partnered with the green egg and we showed people how to pick, trim, smoke, cut, season their brisket. And we got 65-year-old people and we're talking older men that may have not been in the library since or before that program. So it's just kind of identifying and using their qualitative information. Obviously, we're also tracking attendance data. We are putting together the quantitative and the qualitative to best inform the future plans. And then we also utilize, we have Beamstack, which is kind of a platform for our summer reading. And we create our summer reading to not only track minutes, but to create kind of unique activity challenges that route families to our pre-existing virtual program. One of the programs this summer for teens, it's all about being a maker. And one of those, one of the activities is watch our Maker 101 program virtually share with us one thing that you learned. And then it also directs them to the catalog for extension learning through books and just kind of anything that we can do to kind of pinball people back and forth between resources and programs. And we're just trying to be deliberate about getting that cross-functionality. Yeah, so it's really rewarding for me when I'm doing a live program and somebody asked me in the chat, hey, what's the activity code for this? I need to put it in Beamstack to get my credit, to get my summer reading prize. So I love that kind of indicator that people are finding us that way. And then at the end of summer reading last year, we did an outcomes survey of the adults who had participated in the summer reading program. And we got some really great hard data, but just reinforcement that the way we were structuring those activities was really welcome and appreciated. And even adults like an assignment, and they like to be exposed to new things in their community, whether that's an event they didn't know about, or an exhibition, or geocaching along the river or something like that, or library programs that they might not have found out about otherwise when they see it in that summer reading app. They really like that kind of tour guide through the summer. So why are we talking about this now? So the past 14 months have ultimately given us a really rare opportunity to pause what we were doing and really think about why and how we were doing it. Our teams have learned so much more about the workings of city government as we began working more and more with other city departments. It can be very easy to just know how, you know, be in a position where you really only know how the library functions. But it's been really educational and helpful for us to know how the library fits in the city as part of the bigger municipal government ecosystem. We've also learned a lot about our team member skills and interests, as Trevor has said, and been able to really help them flex their creative muscles. So the photo you see there is our music library and Rita at our, it was a major event that was our virtual New Year's Eve concert event called Amplified New Year's Eve. And one of the exciting things about that was giving people something cool to do on New Year's Eve when a lot of folks didn't feel like they could go out safely. We got to flex a lot of our creative muscles in figuring out what this kind of variety show should look like. We brought artists and bands into the library to perform at night. We made it a whole nighttime extravaganza. And I don't know of any other libraries who've done quite that. And it was definitely a leap for us, but it was a really good one and made us really realize what kind of assets we had in our own staff. So I know in this one Rita really knocked it out of the park. And here she's doing some MCing, which was a little out of her comfort zone, I know, but she did a great job and learned so much about the kind of video production side of virtual programming. And so with changes in our departmental structure, we have a lot better understanding now of not only how youth and adult services complement each other and work together, but how that relationship plays out in the branches and in the community. And maybe most of all, I think, is that we're able to apply the lessons we learned to training branch staff and new hires to be stronger programmers to serve all of our neighbors in Fort Worth. When we're programming out in person in the branches again. So everything we've learned over the last 14 months, and it has been definitely an intense 14 months, we are sharing out with everyone else, all of our trial and error, we are sparing them the errors and just helping them hopefully reap some of those benefits. So the first one is that virtual isn't going to go anywhere. We're going to continue. We're really actually we're going to morph into a hybrid model, and constantly be calibrating what the percentage of virtual to in person looks like. We're trying to meet people where they're at. That's kind of a component of library outreach and by programming virtually we can reach people, whether they live in an area with a service gap, or whether they don't want to go to the library that day because it's raining. I mean, there's a lot of elements at play any given day that can can really sway the amount of people that come to the library to participate in your program. So we don't want to speculate on a wide ranging comfort level of returning to in person programming we want to offer programming in different ways and different platforms for everybody. So we can provide the the skills and learning and resources for for the entire city and surrounding areas. Our culture of feedback is is not going anywhere and this was such a perfect mechanism to build it out. Collectively we have stepped outside our comfort zone to create our virtual programming. We're going to have to step even further outside of it as we create this new morph and we asked the branches to buy into this new way of programming. This new way of thinking about how we program how we discuss our proposals how we think about outcomes and versus outputs how we think about community needs right and this is going to be a drastic change. But we have proof positive that stepping outside your comfort zone and making that change has great rewards. So we'll always have this experience. It also has kind of created peer to peer leaders on me and Jana's team of all the times we've worked with branch staff of developing those relationships and that trust and that support system. I mean that's everything that Jana and my team do is for supporting the branches to give them all the tools and knowledge to have a successful slate of programs. This has set that up it has put it on a T. So that's the next step is kind of creating and cementing and stabilizing that bridge between system and branches. It shows you that the more you talk about your ideas and the more you think about your community and the more feedback that you get it pays off tenfold. The more time you give a program to be discussed instead of planning seven days out if you if you're planning three months out and you're having multiple discussions about an idea that can only strengthen the quality of what you want to do. And you know everything that we do we try to build up programming and offerings to benefit the community and by being having a virtual presence in an in person presence we have different channels and different ways of reaching and having conversations with our families and in our patrons and getting valuable input and data that kind of need us in the right direction. And we'll just revisit and reevaluate at each action point and yeah I mean it's exciting it's it's been a wild 1415 months. Yeah on the on the first point about virtual not going anywhere before COVID it was a virtual programming was a maybe a twinkle in my eye. It was something I had hoped for in the future because I had a little bit of a background in that already. But it seemed I won't say insurmountable but it seemed very challenging and and this for better or worse the pandemic was the catalyst that got all of that moving and I think we're we're certainly at a point with adults where having a more virtual programming presence is an expectation. It's not a luxury anymore it's just part of how we do business. We've always recognized in adult services that we have a little bit of a different situation so for for traversed crew. You know parents are going to bring kids to libraries. They want them to read they want them to participate with things they they want them to do these activities and everybody knows from one from their own childhood. The you know the library is a great place for kids to to come have have a great time and learn and participate. But for adults you have to really give them what they want and need and meet them where they are literally because no one's going to drive them to the library. No one's going to say you need this and drive them there so they have to you know they have to have the motivation and the interest to be able to balance their lives and and make time for whatever is happening at the library. I'm a busy parent life is complicated and I love the shift to virtual there are times I just you just can't leave the house. And it's a I think it's a really great opportunity. I know for our high school equivalency students while they were definitely a little anxious about the transition at first. So many of them are moms of younger children they realized how much easier it was to participate in the virtual class because they didn't have to find childcare. They could just have the kid in the next room you know playing or whatever and do their class and you know achieve make that achievement without having to find childcare multiple days a week. It's a it's a really big difference. So that's definitely a mode will continue in. So I think we are ready for questions and I see we have one and I think I can I can address that if you want me to go ahead Ruth. Yeah go ahead. I think one of us marketing strategies in the city. I know you don't work specifically in that department in that area but if you could share a little bit of what great things library does and that's back to my feet that would be really cool. Yeah, so the first question was do you anticipate permanently keeping some of the virtual offerings like the book club in addition to returning to former plans and job descriptions absolutely. So the book club is not going anywhere. It's called the stay at home book club. Whether anyone staying home or not anymore it's it is thriving. It's very active. It's really popular because we they choose the books so I will be doing this later today every few weeks I put up a poll with five options of books to choose from they pick their book. We all read it together and then we move on to the next one. And I think that's a mode that will work even when people are out and about in the world. And we also have a very popular Tuesday night trivia program that's on zoom. It's a zoom webinar so I can't I'm hosting it I can't see the participants and I think they like that they're they're a little incognito. You don't have to look you don't have to look nice because there's no cameras and no mics but they've developed this really great community just through the chat. We have so many repeat players that they know each other. They know each other by name they talk to each other in the chat and know each other well enough to kind of tease each other which is just not something you see out in library programs that much at least in the city of this size. So that's been amazing. And they ask me if not weekly at least a couple times a month this isn't going away when we're back in person is it. No trivia is staying trivia is staying as long as as you want. And so Trevor do you want to talk about marketing virtual. Yeah so our communications department also went through a transition the last 14 months and we're short staffed and I think that now that we're kind of full getting closer to fully staffed in different departments that we are going to have a bit more of a Citywide promotion for everything that we got cooking right we were kind of not only will be learning how to program and what the audience is we wanted to reach but how we wanted to go about promoting it. I mean obviously the the bread and butter is in house promotion at the libraries and we just weren't open to the public for a large amount of time and we have been playing around with different ways to spread the word. We can for sure get you on a mailing list to keep you updated and anyone else that would like to get on there programming coming up for adults and youth soon that will sometime in the fall that will have in person and virtual. But yeah I mean I think that that has been one of the puzzles we've been trying to put together we've been trying to figure out the most effective way to create awareness and marketing for it. Also understanding that when when someone logs in online they have about two trillion options for content to consume right so it's a it's a difficult marketplace to compete in. So it's kind of a vague answer it's it's it's you can be assured that we are still trying to maximize awareness for what we're doing because because we feel pretty strongly that we're doing some unique and fun things. And in our in our live programs. Something we've we've kind of baked into our our process and adult services is especially live ones like the trivia that are a weekly. You know repeating program. I know my audience in there and I know what's coming up that they're going to be interested in. So while they're logging in to trivia on Tuesday I take a couple minutes while they're getting settled to just talk about the programs that are coming up in the next week that I think they'll be interested in. They're my captive audience and you know it takes a second to get out to get everything set up the way you want it so I might as well take that time with a kind of specially crafted pitch to them. And I know the rest of adult services does the same thing. We really try to to be very conscious of what audience we have in a particular program and really cross promote with them if we know it's a lot of parents we will cross promote youth services programs and vice versa. You know it's definitely a dotted line between between youth and adults so we just try to be really mindful and take all of those opportunities where we can. A couple questions over in the question. When a bug is like that do they purchase their own and then did you provide pick up for low income. See. Trevor did you catch that. Is she asking about for the stay at home book club. I believe so yes. So she's asking if do they have to how do they go about getting their book to participate in the in the club. That's a really good question. So when we started the book club the libraries were were closed. You couldn't get print materials for a very short period of time was the fourth public library reopened nearly a year before other big libraries in Texas. Kind of shockingly but we're proud of that but there was a short period of time where you couldn't get print materials before we had curbside or anything like that. So we make a very conscious effort. I make a very conscious effort. I work with our collection management department who the ones who actually buy the books and make sure that you know we have what we need. All of the books are available electronically so you can get them. I only offer books that you can get in ebook or audio book and or audio book because we have a lot of audio book fans in that book club. And they're all available on overdrive which is our digital library platform and I make sure to choose books that we have unlimited licenses for. So we have so many readers in that group with digital book licensing a lot of the time you can only have one copy or two copies of a particular title. So I only choose titles where I can have an unlimited pool of copies available to meet the needs of that group. So when we do that everybody knows to go download their book. We do have a lot of members who aren't in Fort Worth. We have members across the country. We have members in other countries and they know that their libraries may not have the exact same offerings that we do. Some of them will get it in a print version from their library. I know there are probably some who order from Amazon but they don't tell me. So you know there are lots of options and the ones who aren't in Fort Worth proper with a Fort Worth library card know that their options might be a little different within Fort Worth. But for our own residents we make it as easy as we possibly can. Question was did you provide a pick up for low income families? So pick up for like an outreach opportunity or to pick up books that want to be returns or? It may be pick up for books during the pandemic. So I don't know if you touched on that but if you want to expand. So it may not directly, I'm not sure quite what the question is asking but so I'm going to make a stab at it and if I'm wrong just tell me. So while we were closed for the pandemic and this is the case for at least the large library systems across Texas. We're a fines free library already. So we made sure when we shut things down and when things were really challenging that no books were due while we were shut down. And even beyond that we don't charge library fines except fees for replacements and such like that if books are lost but no late fees anytime. But we also made things not do during the pandemic so there wouldn't be a mad rush to get worried about getting your late books in on time. And I know other other library systems in the state waved waved library fines during that time so people and change due dates so people weren't so worried about getting getting things back in on time if they couldn't make it to the library or didn't feel like they should make it to the library. We got clarification on the question and it was any activities that required specific materials. Yeah so for like the let's create story time kits and the maker one one kits we made those available at all of our branches across the system so 16 branches where you could pick them up curbside or you could pick them up when those branches actually open to the public. I think that last month we distributed about 500 of the story time kits and 200 of the maker one on one kits. Those are obvious everything that we do is built around free and open access and if they weren't able to get in there we designed the kits and in the video we discuss different options for things that they may have around the house. So if you weren't able to get there to pick up the sack we there's a there's a variety of different things you can swap out to still participate and engage with it. So we're really mindful of that this library programs themselves are always free and always open to the public we never charge for library programs. We try to to make the we try to eliminate any burdens to participating. So we do like Trevor says with the sacks we do what we call it in libraries that used to be called make and take where you come to the library make a craft and take it with you. Well we've we've had to flip it as an industry and now it's it's take and make so you take the kit you make it at home we give you instructions and and it's great. So so we do a very similar kind of kit we distribute them to their branches for adults and you can just pick them up so we've done we've done wildflower seeds we'll be doing some bookmarks some some candle crafts and things like that and you get the you get everything you need. In a little pack the most you'll need is maybe some scissors or something really basic and if we you know if we if we get this situation where lots of we have a lot of demand and we run out we were really mindful about structuring and selecting those those activities where if we run out of kits and you want to go get your own it's not going to be an expensive group of supplies your girl probably going to have most of the supplies at home. And if you don't you know any purchase would be really minimal but we really do try to try to cover ourselves with those kits. And so another example is we're kind of transitioning back to in person the summer will be doing outdoor programs so in person but outside one of those is going to be a nature journaling program and I'm very excited about. But I know because I I have an art background art supplies are really expensive. So we're going to be everyone who participates gets a sketchbook. They just need to bring their own pencils or pens which most people are going to have around the house but we'll we'll provide the sketchbook for everybody who attends. So we really do try to balance it out that way and eliminate that barrier. I am not seeing it for questions. So I just want to thank you all for your time this morning and for being here with us at NUSA. We really appreciated this session will be recorded. So if you want to come back and look at it after the conference is over you'll just be able to click on the room and it'll play on demand to get back to the lobby. You can just press at the bottom of the button sorry at the top left corner and you have a few minutes until the next conference starts at 1115 or the next workshop. Thank you again. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you everyone.