 Good morning, and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. Yes, we are a webinar. You can call us that. We will not be offended by it. We own that. We cover a variety of things. Anything that will be of interest to librarians, we try to put on the show. We do the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. And the shows are recorded, though, so if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's just fine. You can always go to our website and look at all of our previous shows and watch the recordings, get the presentation slides, handouts, links, all that information is on there. The show is free and open to anyone to watch, so you don't have to, there's no cost for it. And the recordings are out there freely available for everyone. And we do a mixture of things here. We do presentations, interviews, book reviews, mini training sessions. As I said, anything that we think may be of interest to librarians we have on the show. We have a Library Commission, Nebraska Library Commission staff that will do presentations, and we've been in guest speakers sometimes, which is what we've done this morning. Today on the line with us is Lori Yocum from Wilson Public Library in Cozette, Nebraska. Hi, Lori. Hi. And she's done this really cool program that some of you may have heard of, International Dot Day. And they did a whole series of things at their library in Cozette here in Nebraska. And she's going to share with us how that went and what they did and how they pulled it all off. So I will hand over to you, Lori, to take it away. Thanks, Krista. Good morning, everybody. I know I can't hear you on my side, but I would very much encourage you if you have any questions or comments to let Krista know throughout the presentation. And I've already told her to stop me. And if you don't understand something, I'd be more than willing just to stop my presentation and explain it. Obviously, we're seeing dots at Wilson Public Library. We're still seeing dots from International Dot Day. We did so much that my head is still spinning thinking about it. What you might not know about Cozette, we're located in the middle of Nebraska. If you ever have gone through on I-80, we are in exit 222. We have about 4,000 people in our city, so we're pretty small. We don't have much of a budget. Generally, we have around $1,500 for the year, which includes children, youth, teens, and adults. And you'll see as we go throughout this presentation, we had to be a little creative with what we did. International Dot Day, if you don't know a lot about it, is based on the book The Dot by Peter Reynolds, which is one of my favorite books. And I think about nine or ten years ago, some teachers decided to create International Dot Day as a way of making the book bigger. And as we go through this, we'll talk about that. But clear back over a year ago, back in September, the children's director here at the library, Ann, and you'll probably hear me mention Ann quite a bit this hour. And if I don't, I really should. She actually should be presenting this, but she's in story time right now. Ann came to me and said that she had the possibility of bringing two very well-known authors to COSA. Eric Roman, who is a Caldecott award-winning author, and Candace Fleming. And their pictures are right there for you. And she, unfortunately, couldn't get them for 2012 to 2013. They were both booked. They both live outside of Chicago. And my first question was, that's great. How much are they going to cost? And I about choked on the price, because we don't really have a lot of authors, let alone big-time authors, that come to the middle of Nebraska. First of all, I don't think a lot of people know where we are. And then just the cost of bringing people out. We either have to fly them into Lincoln or Omaha, or fly them into Denver. It's a two-and-a-half-hour drive to COSA from Lincoln, three-and-a-half hours from Omaha, or four-and-a-half from Denver, depending on where the price of the plane ticket. But Ann seriously thought that with the number of schools and libraries in our area, we have five or six towns just within a 20-mile radius of us, that we could bring these authors in and really make it something special. The closest literacy festival, if you will, for kids is in Seward, which is about two hours away from us. It's the Plum Creek Literacy Festival. And they bring in lots and lots of authors, but we just aren't at that point. And Ann thought, wouldn't it be cool if we could get to that point? So I started listening a little closer and said, well, what do you propose? Going back to that choking noise when she told me how much it was going to cost, it was a big old ouch. What the authors charge were $2,000 per day per author. And that $2,000 per day gave us a limit of four presentations per author. We also needed to pay for travel, lodging, and food. So if you are fast at math, you will realize that to bring them in for two days, not including travel, lodging, and food, that would cost our small little library $8,000, which is well outside our programming budget. However, Ann did a lot of talking to me, and she said if we created that literacy festival in our area where we could focus on art and literature, COSAT is known for being home to Robert Henry, who is a very well known American artist, that focusing on that art could really help us that tie into art with the literature. And so we started looking around doing the whole Pinterest thing about what kind of art and literature could be tied into, and that's when we discovered International Dot Day. And I'm just going to show you this little clip about Peter Reynolds. Give me a second. I hope this is going to work. Peter Reynolds is an inspiration. What I want you guys to do is to join this real, I call it the party. We've had authors in the past, and it always helps to inspire the kids to do their very best and to get back to that creative side that we sometimes forget about. I can come to a school and work with kids one-on-one and inspire them to make their own books, make their own artwork, and be proud of their work and to sign it. And I think it's really important that kids sign their work. I feel like my mission is complete. I call it in protestive and challenged. Teachers are trying to encourage kids to be creative, but I think that the model really should be that teachers are being creative and making stuff. Oh gosh, then I didn't do that. I'm sorry. We'll try that again. It was working fine. It was coming through. I should tell everybody that when Kristen I ran through this, my link didn't work really well on Kristen's end. So I have to jump out of my presentation to get to YouTube, and then I clicked something, so I'm wrong. I'm sorry, and now we might not be able to go back and do this again, which I hope is not the case. But anyway, it's thinking. Yeah, the concept of the book from Peter Reynolds is really about being creative, being brave, and most importantly, making your own mark on the world. COSAT has had a rough couple years, our largest employer shut down, and we've just, as a city, kind of been struggling with our identity, if you will. Where are we going? Are we going to survive? You know, a lot of things that are going on across America. And so we really talked about how this theme of making your mark on the world, making COSAT kind of a place to be proud of, could take off. And Kristen, I don't know. Here we go. Let's see if we know. It looks like it's stuck trying to play, but that's OK. And we got the beginning of it, came through, and we will link to all these videos directly in the show notes afterwards, too, for people. So if anyone wants to watch them in full, you have to see the whole thing. Yeah, it's a cool little presentation as far as Peter Reynolds and him talking about the dot and what he was trying to convey throughout writing it. So that's what that is. And we decided to, yeah, we wanted to do something with the dot. So the next thing was, OK, but how can we get that money? We do have a foundation. We do have a Friends of the Library. The Friends of the Library is really, and I would call it a neophyte stage. We've done some fundraising, but it's been pretty small. And so, of course, we started looking at, in January and February of 2013, what types of grants were available for that amount of money? What would we need to do? Specifically, we looked through the Nebraska Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, and I wish Anne were here because I know she, I put her to task with looking at these, and she looked at many, many, many. We called in a local patron who has written a lot of grants for artists in residence programs for our school. And after speaking to her, and she just asked us a lot of questions about our goals. Did we want to do this like as a once-in-a-lifetime deal, or did we want to do this yearly, bi-annually? What was kind of our goal? We kind of thought that, hey, if this took off, yeah, we'd like to do this yearly. She really suggested not writing a grant. And her reasoning was that if we started out by writing a grant versus private fundraising, our donors might be more apt to say, well, you got a grant this year, so we don't need to give you as much money next year. Furthermore, we have a member of our library board who, in his previous life, did lots and lots of fundraising, still does a lot of fundraising for our hospital foundation. And we spoke with him afterwards and said, he looked at that $8,000-plus price tag and said, oh, yeah, we can get this done. So we even said in February, okay, but we're looking at this September. He said, no problem. So at that point, we stepped back from the grant writing, and in hindsight, Ann and I both think that maybe we should have kept going forward with that. But we felt pretty confident in our board member doing private fundraising, and so we stepped back and he decided to head that up for us. Our problem was that by March, we started also doing our local canvassing of businesses for summer reading donations. And the problem was, unbeknownst to the library, unbeknownst to me, the library board member was going into different businesses talking about these author visits that they were going to happen in the summer. And on the other hand, we were sending out letters to these same businesses asking for donations for our summer reading program. So what ended up happening once we found that out that there was an overlap and miscommunication was that we decided it might be in our best interest to come up with a brochure so that the board member could actually hand a brochure to people that he was talking to as far as the September fundraising versus our letter that very clearly stated what we were doing for summer reading. It also gave us an opportunity to have these brochures available at our front desk. So when we were talking about International Dot Day at the front desk, interested people who would say, what is International Dot Day? They could pick up a flyer and they could see who we were trying to bring in. The covers of the books that we had at the library that they could check out of those two authors. And I will tell you at this point that before we could produce this brochure, the Dot artwork was free on Peter Reynolds' Fable Vision site. I think it was Fable Vision site or International Dot Day org site. I can't remember off the top of my head now. But the covers for the books, we had to get approval from Candace and Eric to use those because we were essentially advertising their wares for them. The other thing I wanted to let you know about the... Oh, it's not International Dot Day. It's called the dotclub.org. That's the website that we got Peter Reynolds' artwork from. And on that is a really cool educators guide that just has tons of free stuff about the Dot Day. So if you're interested, I would highly recommend going to the dotclub.org website. But in planning this brochure, we needed something just besides the information that you see right there on the screen. So, if I can get there, this is the front and back of our brochure. And you'll see in the center, we had to come up with activities to do. So people who are donating money could see that it wasn't simply the author's visits that they were donating to, but it was lots of different things going on in September. So instead of the International Dot Day, which is September 15th-ish, depending on your calendar, this year it happened to be on a Sunday and we're not open on a Sunday, we decided to do events all month long. And what we did was we ended up collaborating with a lot of different community organizations to do things together. And if you notice up at the very top here, one thing we did was on our Facebook page, we had a virtual scavenger hunt. And I'll talk about that in a little bit, but that was great fun. We ended up having more people participate in that than we ever guessed we would. But we made connections with the Robert Henry Museum and we made connections with United Way and we made connections with the schools and we made connections with the veterans. So if you look at that, there's not very many days that there wasn't something going on, not only at the library but also in the schools. And if you see, we happened to hook up with the Plum Creek Literacy Festival and this was a very, very nice addition. Candace Fleming happened to give Anne an email as we were planning this because she wanted to come out here and didn't know this at the time, but now we do that she's working on a book about Buffalo Bill. Buffalo Bill is synonymous with North Platte, Nebraska, which happens to be about 45 minutes away from us. So she had an ulterior motive for coming out because she wanted to do some research and it just so happened that we were really close and wanted her to come too. So she was trying to find ways to help us pay for them to come out. And one of the things that she and Eric did was hook up with Plum Creek Literacy Festival in Seward, signed on as presenters out there and kind of negotiated with them that if they would pay half their travel, we would pay the other half. So that helped us on cost. United Way was next and that was just a happy collaboration. We started out trying to feel them out for funds when it became clear that that wasn't going to happen. We turned it into something better. The United Way and our library foundation many years ago had a joint project where they collaboratively gave all the kindergarteners a book at the beginning of the school year. And that interestingly enough was taken over by United Way. The foundation had kind of been cut out of it. But the United Way in May was going to give that up. They just didn't think anybody thought it was a good idea anymore. So I approached them about what the possibility was if we joined forces again and jointly gave out the book, The Dots, to all kindergarten, first and second graders during the month of September. The director of the United Way took it to a board. They were enthusiastically for it. So that was a great collaboration with them too. Then we started talking with the COSAD schools because, again, we wanted to see if there was some type of funding that they could give us. Again, came to find out that no, there wasn't funding that way. But the arts council here in COSAD, the gal that I had talked about at the beginning with fundraising, and she would write grants for the artists and residents programs at the school, she is a main push of our arts council, and she came back with, if we could guarantee that the authors would spend some time in the school system, the arts council would be willing to donate quite a portion of that $8,000, which they did, but that forced us to have a bigger collaboration with the schools. Talked to the superintendent, got him on board, talked to all of the principals, got them on board, talked to the art teacher at the high school and middle school, got them on board, and then we asked the elementary principal to give us three to five teachers who would get excited about that project and, in turn, get other teachers excited about it. And they did. We met with them over the summer. They were very excited. The hard thing, if you will, was they wanted, the elementary teachers wanted these authors all to themselves. They didn't want to share with the middle school. They didn't want to share with the high school. And they really didn't even want to share with the library so much, even though we had to explain to them that the school was giving no funding. We had to do this private funding. So that was a real tightrope walk for us, was planning out how many sessions the authors would be in the school, how many sessions they would be at the library, how many sessions they would do for the public versus having the school actually come to the library. The JCs, I'm not sure if every town has JCs or not. This is an organization of younger adults. I think you have to be under 40 to be a JC. They do a lot of things for our business community, for our town. And in September, they organized a huge fall festival for the town. It's called Hay Days. And this was another happy coincidence. I contacted one of the people who were in JCs and asked if they ever take ideas for a theme because every year when they do the parade, they have a theme for the parade. And she said, well, interestingly enough, meet about that. And I think that was about July. So we threw out the make your mark on COZAD. And she called me back after their meeting and she said they were so excited about it because not only could they do the dots, but they could do graffiti and they could do sidewalk chalk and anything to actually physically make your mark on COZAD, which you don't really want to tell people that they can graffiti the town. But they were very excited about it and that ended up being a fantastic collaboration. Like I said, we collaborated with the Robert Henry Museum, which was big because of the art and literature connection. And then the downtown stores, we also collaborated with them on a read around town. We put pages of the dot up in their windows. And then on Saturday, we invited the public to read around town, read the story as they went from window to window. And hopefully also the windows enticed them to go in and see other things that the businesses offer. I do have the library's Pinterest link on here. I'm going to get out of this presentation and hopefully we'll get back in to show you our dot day board. And what we ended up doing on this was just for our own history, I guess, show you the pins that inspired us to do different activities throughout the month. This pin right here about the Idaho State Capitol, that inspired us to do the virtual scavenger hunt and find dots around our town. We had a different post every day. Hootsuite.com was instrumental in allowing us to take pictures all summer long and then we scheduled them in July to post one a day in September. And then whoever got the location and what the dot actually was right got a little box of dots at the front desk of the library. Our dot bulletin board, we did something very similar where we had kids come in doing activities and making their own dots. One of them was pencil eraser dots, which is right here. One was styrofoam painting cup dots. The kids made their own wringolings, which were jewelry dots. They made paper chains for decorations. They did cork dots. This was an awesome thing. They did Kandinsky plastic cup mobiles. We didn't do the mobiles, but we hung all the dots up, strung them up and hung them in our front window so you could see that. We did the art project with lids. Our children's director Ann made a huge dot and made a welcome out of all the dots. So every time you came into the library, you were greeted with this huge welcome dot. And then again, not only our focus was on dots, but it was really on the subsequent theme of make your mark specifically on COSAT. But in the world as well. If you're interested in this, this just came out this August, and it is a special kit that Peter Reynolds came out with. It has a hardcover copy of the book, The Dot. It has a blank book inside that you can create your own book and then watercolor pencils. And we ended up using that kit in a little different way. And I'm going to talk about that in a second. So now we get to some of the author visits and the activities. Like I said, we did these virtual scavenger hunts. This happens to be a photo of a lot of plastic pipes. So I told you at the beginning that our largest employer closed a couple years ago. Well, our second largest employer creates these plastic pipes. So again, the collaboration with businesses, we really tried to get their name out on Facebook and give them some props for helping us out. We tried to get businesses who donated to us, private donations. Again, we tried to give them some free advertising on our virtual scavenger hunt. There were only a couple days that people did not guess what they were, and they were a little difficult. One was over by our depot, and it was some really ridiculous circle that you'd have to be over there a lot to see what that dot was. But a lot of fun. People were talking about it. So these were pictures that you took around the town that happened to be. Oh, that is a really cool idea. I like that. And then we just had the same rules of the game up every day about once you know what this is, comments, and we'll pick a winner at random, but you had to get it right. There were days that there were three posts. There were days that there were 20. Did somebody have a question about that, Kristen? No, I just was commenting on myself that that was a really cool project. Yeah, it was fun. Like I said, a lot of these were happy accidents, but they all worked out in the end. I talked about collaborating with the Robert Henry Museum. Their director, who actually is a part-time staff member at the library, came over and did an influence on art presentation at the library, so there was no charge. It was a great thing for her because she got to tell her story about the museum. It was a great thing for us because it was a free thing, and obviously, again, tied into that art and literature thing. Talked about the virtual scavenger hunt, other activities that we did. We saluted our Cosette Heroes on September 11th, and I don't know if this link will work. Let's see if it plays for us, though. It's coming through, Lori. Can you turn the volume up a bit? I don't know if you heard that very well, but just yesterday we had our Veterans Day program then, so everything that was in that binder, all that information that we had, we put that into a PowerPoint, and then it was a revolving PowerPoint we played yesterday. The cool thing about this that we did, we sent letters out inviting veterans to come, and where we got the addresses from were the auxiliary, and oh, there were a couple different veterans group organizations that we collaborated with. They gave us the addresses, and we sent that all out, and like I said, the cool thing was we had people who've never been into the library before come to this, so very neat. We also had coffee and dots on September 18th. We just had an open house with coffee, and we partnered with our donut shop downtown. They provided donut holes, so that was kind of a fun twist on the dot theme. And then, of course, we had the authors come, and that was a very well-oiled machine as far as who took them, where, at what time. This picture up here happens to be the author, Eric, is on the left, and the gal on the right is one of our local artists, and we ended up making a collaboration with her, and she was so thrilled to be asked. She was Eric's escort for two days, so she had been an art teacher here in Cozad many years ago, and she has focused her time and energy now on being an artist. She teaches class at MONA, which is the Museum of Nebraska Arts, and that's located in Carney, which is about an hour east of us. Like I said, she was just absolutely thrilled. She knew Eric's work, so she introduced him to the classes. He ended up going to middle school art class and in high school art class, as well as being at the elementary for a couple of classes. He went to the after-school program, which was hooked up. The after-school program was awesome because he got to meet with over 100 kids there, and then he did a presentation at the library, specifically for homeschool kids. We have a group of maybe 30 kids from the Dawson County area, which get together once a month, so he did a presentation for them, and that went over really well. On the flip side, Candace was escorted around by our children's director, Ann, and Candace also went to the middle school. She didn't make it up to the high school, but she went to the middle school and several sections of the elementary, as well as the after-school program. She did a genealogy presentation for us the first night she came in, so that was for adults, and then she also did, she shadowed Ann for a day, and Ann does outreach at a daycare center and our head start. She does storytime to go with them, and Candace happened to do two storytimes with them. So we really got, if you want to say, bang for our buck because the authors were just very excited with what we had set them up to do, and they were kind of willing because the schools weren't on an hour rotation, so they couldn't quite get in for our presentations, that they actually gave us more presentations, but they were on a shorter time schedule. And then our culminating event was an invitation only for private donors. We did actually finally raise enough money. The board member who had started to kind of fizzled out on us, and I didn't really talk about that other than that. We should have stuck with the grant writing possibilities, and we didn't. So I ended up doing a lot of beating on doors, knocking on doors. Maybe beating is too strong to try to make sure we had enough money. We did end up enough money, and what we ended up doing was this invitation-only event for private donors. And they had a chance to meet Candace and Eric on a very intimate level. So at the very start of this, clear back in 2012, September, the overarching theme of make your mark on COSAD gave us pause to think who really has made their mark not only on our library but on our town. And the answer was very clear, and I happen to have my picture with this lady, Catherine Wilson. She and her husband had paid for our new library, and our new library is actually now almost 17 years old, hence the Wilson Public Library in COSAD. But she and her husband not only contributed greatly to our library, but other important buildings in town like the refurbishing of the train depot, which now houses the United Way, which again was a happy coincidence that we collaborated with them. So what we also did was we had a special presentation, not only honoring all the private donors, but Catherine in particular, and what our goal is, is not only to do the dot day event every year, but also to honor somebody who's really made their mark on the library every year. And we ended up getting her daughter involved, who was just so excited about this, and we invited her family, her family did not know that she was going to get this presentation. The other donors did not know that she was going to get this invitation in. In hindsight, I probably could have let them know, and perhaps more people would have come. We had an invitation list of 100 people for this event of private donors, and we ended up with maybe 30 in attendance. However, I think if the other 70 would have known that we were going to be honoring Catherine, they probably would have made much bigger effort to come. We marketed it instead, just as an evening with the authors, complete with coffee and dots, and the dots in this case were sugar cookies provided by local business. We did invite the local newspapers to come, and we gave Catherine, and I don't have a picture of it, I'm sorry, a special dot award. It was actually from Bodville.com, and that's spelled B-A-U-D-V-I-L-L-E dot com, and it's a heavy glass award in the shape of a dot. It has a thumbprint design on the very middle, which the staff helped us choose. We thought that was really appropriate for making your mark on COSAD, and we did a great presentation. The authors both spoke about their collaboration on the book Oh No, which I'm sure many of you have in your children's library, and if you don't, it's a great little book, but they talked about going to Asia and having the different animals really make an impact, and that's when they decided to work together on this book. Eric, interestingly enough, as the illustrator, had many more questions from the author than Candice did about actually writing it, but the two of them, if you have a chance to see them, they played so well off of each other, they were just a wonderful combination to have. Anyway, they did probably a half-hour presentation, and then we stood up and we gave Catherine this award, and her family came in as we were reading the list, and she was in shock, absolute shock. She ended up crying and she's just a neat gal anyway. She told me afterwards that she sat there and kind of wondered as I was talking who in the world was going to get this award. She's just a very humble, modest gal, and she had no idea that we had planned this for over a year for her. We not only gave her the glass trophy, but as you can see in this picture, we gave her her very own copy of the dot book, and if you think back to the beginning of the session where I talked about that set, there was a blank book, we had set the blank book out with the watercolor pictures as a guest book, and so encouraged people to make their own marks, sign the book, draw their own dots, Candace and Eric put different things in there as well, and then we turned around and presented that to Catherine for her keepsakes as well. So that was our culminating event, but that was definitely not the end period. Are we going to do it again? Absolutely. Are we going to do it every year? At this point, I would say probably. With high-class, high-cost authors from far away, maybe by relying solely on private donations, as much as I would love to say, it would be nice to have that unlimited source of money. We pretty much wiped out our foundation, so we definitely have to have a different plan for next year if we do this. As far as collaborating with others, absolutely do it. The more people you can get involved, the more people are talking positively about the library, but you have to be ready to give up control and you have to be ready to fly by the seat of your pants. What I mean by that is we go back to working with United Way. We set up in summer how many books they needed of the dot. They gave me the number they thought they would need. I ordered them. We had the staff put in special book plates saying that those were donated by the library in United Way. We had them all boxed up and put aside by the beginning of August. Didn't even think anything of it because it was the United Way's baby, if you will. The day before they were to hand them out, which was mid-September, they stopped in, picked up the boxes, and I got a call about five o'clock when I was getting ready to leave, saying they were 30 books short. They hadn't called the schools back at the beginning of the year to make sure those numbers were right, so we were 30 books short, and they wanted to know if I could get 30 books by the next day, to which the answer was no. But it ended up that they had them by the next week. So you really have to think about some of those things and just know that you're not going to be able to be in control of them and be able to coast and come up with a backup plan. So that is our international dot. Did anybody have questions on that side, Christa? Nothing has come through while you were talking, but as anybody, if any questions, comments for Lori about the international dot. and all of the great activities that they did in programming, you can type it into the questions section of your interface. If you have a microphone, just let me know, and I can unmute you, and you can ask your question that way. You can type into the questions section and say, I have a microphone, and you can mute me, and we can do that. I'm very impressed with all of the everything that you did. We're still kind of seeing dots. Yes, still in recovery mode. Yes. Sounds like it. And that was great then, but there with surprising your donors with the award, that was, I love that kind of thing when you surprise them and they don't have a clue that it's coming. And you know, one thing I really didn't talk about, Christa, was the JC's. So they ended up, they didn't use make your mark, which is the theme we had presented to them. They ended up using what's your dot for the theme, and there were dots everywhere. I mean, they had a dot your window contest that they took charge of. They actually went out at 5.30 in the morning the day of the parade, and the parade didn't start till 11, and they painted dots all the way down the street. Wow. It was amazing. So International Dot Day has a Facebook page. And the biggest thing to me was they reposted things, which went to an audience of 4,000 followers, which is the size of our town. So suddenly Kozak made their mark all over the world. And that was just a really cool thing. Yeah, I see that they share, anybody who's doing something with a day, they're sharing it on their page out to everyone. Yeah, that's pretty awesome. Let's see here. We don't have any questions, but some comments. Love this. The Dot is one of my favorite books. That's Laura Hess from our Stanton Public Library here in Nebraska. And someone else says, thanks so much for this really interesting presentation, Lots of Food for Thought. It is. And if you look, I was looking on that as this book marking the page for you guys to the International Dot Day. They do have a countdown till next year's International Dot Day. You've got 306 days until International Dot Day 2014. So you start planning now, yeah. When you start looking at those things, you realize that there's a lot more going on than you know. Well, this is over 1 million participants they have, but 84 countries. So they were on this page in some way, people from 84 different countries let them know that they were doing something related to the International Dot Day celebration. Yeah, and if you're a Pinterest person, like I said, we have just a small board out there. But if you search Dot Day on Pinterest, it's almost ridiculous. Yeah, they have one that they link to here from the Dot Club page too. I'm not sure if it's International Dot Day ideas, yeah, from other people, yeah. Basically anything around, that's all the crafts. Yeah, that was awesome. There's so many on your Pinterest page I saw that when you're showing it that there's just so many different things you can do that are dot themed. The different crafts and depending on what the kids age levels are or what they might be interested in doing that it can get very creative, yeah. Right. And actually what we have on our Wilson Public Library is what we ended up doing for this year. My personal Pinterest is really where I put all of the ideas and then when we meet as a staff we sort through what can we really do. Yeah, narrow it down to, yeah. Yeah, because we also don't really want to put something up on the library and have our patrons know ahead of time what we're going to do. We like to keep that element of surprise. Cool. Yeah, and then let it go afterwards. Here's what we did and here's how you can do it if you want to at home or something. Yeah, absolutely. So does anybody have any questions? Does it look like people have questions? They just were very watching the presentation. It looked good, yeah. And, you know, I didn't put it on here, Krista, but people can contact me through our wilsonpubliclibrary.com website. At our delicious account, I've put a link to your library's homepage. Okay. And both the videos that you're showing, the first one and that got cut off. And then the second one from the 1011 News, like I said, the volume, I don't know, for me it was a little low. I had to shut my own volume. I'm not sure how it came through to everyone. But I've linked to it there too, so people have that. So, yeah, so all that contact information people can get to from there. Along with the International Dot Day page, of course, and your Pinterest page and everything. Yeah. They're all on there. Anyway, I'm sure that there's way more, but, you know, you only gave me an hour. An hour to actually hold year's worth of how we did it. Yeah. I think I could have probably just talked an hour on just the events that we did, let alone the planning for those events. Yeah. Well, I think the events were great. There's lots of creativity there. I thought at the beginning, I'm just trying to think back to when you're the, and I think there's something that is very important and useful to a lot of libraries is what you're talking about. $8,000 to pull this off with these authors and what they need to do is, it's scary. I mean, I can't, most of our libraries in the state would be like, yeah, no. I can't even wrap my mind about how to pull that off. But making the connections and the partnerships and looking for, there's money out there, grants, donations. The library commission here, we do continue to educate our children's and training grants that you can get from us. Some monies that come from the federal government to help put on one of these programs. So don't just look at it and say, oh, too much money. We're a small library. We could never figure that out. Just figure it out. Go around and ask and look out there for these things that you can get. And people will love to support the libraries and what they're doing and these kind of things. And the commission here, we love to give away money too as long as we have it. Yeah. And we made some great connections with our newspapers that we didn't have before. We were probably on the front page of two different town's newspapers, maybe five times during the month, at least five times during the month of September. And these are now partnerships you can continue on for future and other projects. I have one town that contacts me all the time saying, what are you guys doing now? What are you doing now? We're taking a break. We're going on vacation. We'll be back in a month. Exactly. Absolutely. All right. Sounds good. Looks like nobody has any while we were chatting here. Just waiting to see if anybody had any urgent last minute questions. It doesn't look like they do. That's fine. So I think we will wrap it up for today. So thank you very much, Lori. This is really cool. I know you were brought in to do this. Richard Miller, our library development director here, tagged you, so to speak, to do this and to present what you had done there. And I'm just very glad that you were willing to do it. Yeah. Thanks for having us. I'm going to pull back control here now. Oh, you're getting us. Someone is typing a standing ovation to everyone involved. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'll relay that to Anne. Yes, definitely. It's too bad that she couldn't be here with us. I know you said she's got her story time to do, but she'll be able to watch her recording afterwards if she wants to. So we will wrap that up for today. That was our seeing dots at Wilson Public Library, and it has been recorded. So the recording will be available later. And like I said, I was adding all of the links to the library commission's delicious page. This is just the one here. And a full link to all of this will be available. And then, Lori, if you send me the link to your presentation, I can add that as well to the recording page. So people do want to look at the slides. You'll be able to do that as well. So that we will wrap it up for this morning. Thank you very much for attending. And I hope you'll join us next week when we will have commission staff here doing a session about, based from our talking book and Braille service. They have some new ways that people can use their books. They've got downloadable app for iPhones and iPads that makes it a lot easier to use. And they're going to just do kind of a general update on what's going on in our talking book and Braille service. Scott Schultz, who's from downstairs here in the library commission, will be on hand with us to do some demo of that. So if you're interested in that, have anybody in your communities that could benefit from this. This is the commission's, Nebraska Library Commission's talking book and Braille service. But it is a program and a service available across the whole country in every state. So checking with that. And that will be our show for next week. And if you are a Facebook user, we are on Facebook and Compass Live has a page where we post all of our updates to shows, when the recordings are available, anything that may be of interest to people. We like any pages that are related to our shows. So you can go here and keep an eye on what we're doing if you are a big Facebook user. And that, thank you very much. And we will hopefully see you next time on Compass Live. Bye-bye.