 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 a Commission's weekly online event. We're a webinar, a webcast, an online show. The terminology is up for debate. Call us whatever you want. We are here live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. But if you are, yes, Central Time. Unable to join us on Wednesdays, we post all of our, we record our show every week and it's posted on our website and I'll show you that at the end of the show so you can see where to go to watch all of our shows, all of our previous ones. We do a mixture of things here, presentations, mini-training sessions, interviews, book reviews. Basically, if it's library related, we'll have it on the show. We do bring in guest speakers sometimes from outside the Library Commission and sometimes we have Library Commission staff. And this morning, we have Library Commission staff and we'll show you that means in a second. Today we're doing a special show about secrets of the NLC website, Nebraska Library Commission website. Laura Johnson is our continuing education coordinator next to me here and she came up with this idea. So I'll go ahead and tell you what we're going to do and I'm going to... Good morning. I'm going to be the ringmaster today. We've got a whole bunch of commission staff here to talk about different pages on our website. We have a huge, huge website and we'd really like to be sure that everybody was kind of fine in some of the cool stuff that's there. I know I've turned corners a couple times and found things I went, oh, isn't that neat? So I thought maybe everybody would like to see a little tour and why not bring a whole bunch of the people who are responsible for the pieces of the website in to talk about it and then you get to see us. You get to meet all of a whole bunch of staffers too. So we're going to start off. We're going to kick off with Scott Schultz. He was the brave one and he's going to show you. What are you going to show Scott? Well, I'm going to show the application for the Talking Book and Braille service. I'm Scott, by the way, I'm the new acting director of the Talking Book and Braille service. You may have seen David Ortley, the director on the last few Encompass programs that we've done on Talking Books and he did retire at the end of August and I have stepped in for the moment. So I think the last Talking Books Encompass thing we did was that thing about moving to the new Space Press Hallway. Still resting up from that, but we're there. Maybe before you get started on this page, you could do a very short thing about what Talking Book and Braille service is and does. Right. Yeah. As far as best kept secrets of the website, I like to think of the Talking Book and Braille service as sort of a best kept secret available to patrons across the state of Nebraska as well. Basically, we provide public library services to anyone with visual impairments or other kinds of print disabilities. They can't hold a book or turn its pages. And the book's generally going back and forth through the mail. We do also have access to a website called Bard, which stands for Braille and Audio Reading Download. That's hosted by the Library of Congress, their division, the National Library Service. And through that, people can download books and play them on a digital cartridge. Or there are also mobile apps now for iOS and Android devices. So there's quite a few ways to access the service. But to use the service, due to copyright, the whole system is sort of a closed situation where people have to fill out an application form, verify that they need to use the service, and then it remains sort of a closed system. So this application form is very, very important because without it, people can't actually access any of the materials that we have. So I guess that's ultimately what I'm going to go through here. If you go to our main page on our website, talking books and Braille is down at the bottom of this left column here. And you'll go to application process. We'll just go to application information here. We do have some new things with our application. The standard individual application form that we've used for years, and we do send this out to people in the mail as well in a print edition, is this PDF file that you'll find here. This is exactly the same as the printed one that we would send out. At the top of page one, you'll put in your contact information. This is where books will be ultimately mailed to you. And then this certification of eligibility portion is very important. This portion generally has to be signed by a doctor. There's some additional information on page five, someone that can verify that you have a print-related disability that necessitates you using the service. However, for any librarians out there who know of someone who needs to use the service, having access to these forms and you can certainly help people to fill them out. In fact, let's go through the form a little bit here and we'll get more into what to do with that in a moment. As the person applies, if it's a child, the parent can put their contact information here. If you do have some hearing loss, in addition to vision loss, we do have some amplification devices that we can send as well, so there's a note about that here. And by law, that's a veteran's preference service, so there is a box to check veteran status there as well. So here it goes over to general applicant agreements. The loan period for materials is six weeks, although if you're using the download side, obviously it's essentially infinite because you can just download it. So the signature of the applicant goes here. At this point, we go through some materials that people need to get and there's variety of checkboxes for interests that people have. Books on cartridge are primarily what we send back and forth through the mail. Some people are interested in BART as well, so there's the second checkbox there is for that. And books recorded on cassette, there are not very many left. We're basically phasing those out and transitioning to the digital books now. I was wondering, there's still some of those around, huh? Very, very few. There's just a few left from the Nebraska recording collection and those are being digitized as well, so ultimately there probably won't be any at all in three or four years, I would guess. Now when you say digital cartridge, what is that for people? Yes, the cartridge is basically the same size as cassette tapes where we send a special player that plays them and essentially the technology behind it is that it's just a flash drive in a special shape. So it contains a digital file that's in a proprietary format that has navigation as well as really good sounding audio and you can also navigate back and forth between chapters, articles within a magazine, that sort of thing. There's some nested navigation depending on the sophistication of the material. So if someone's reading, say, a cookbook, you can navigate from, say, the soup section into individual soup recipes and then into ingredient lists and step-by-step instructions, pretty much whatever is indicated by the material. So those things all get programmed in and then we add those to the books and send those out to people. There's some specialized equipment that most folks don't generally spend a lot of time on that area. We do have these exclusions. One thing about listening to books in audio is that oftentimes, say if you're in a care facility environment, you may not want to have lots of books that have descriptions of sex if you have a roommate or something and listening to them, it's a little different than reading it in print. So some people do like to indicate those various different reading levels and then we go into some fairly detailed sets of subject breakdowns. Our reader advisor staff can go through and kind of pre-select a bunch of books for people based on their interests. There's also some blanks for letting us know about authors that a person is interested in, but a lot of it's done through subjects. And then here is this page five that has some stuff having to do with eligibility. Long story short on this stuff, for the most part it's typically a doctor or nurse that ends up signing that portion of the form which is on page one. And so for librarians who are downloading this form or helping someone to fill out most of it, for the most part they're going to have to still print it at some point and send that to a person. The commission for the blind does have permission to go ahead and verify that stuff for us and they have an online printable form which I'm going to back navigate out of here and go to this page again. So this just above where we were in this PDF version the individual application form that's fillable online has the same information but you can actually type it in. Now if you want to help someone to fill out most of the form just basically excluding that signature area for verifying eligibility you can fill out the whole rest of the form and just print it and then have a doctor sign that and they can deliver it to us that way. Our mailing address is on here I believe at the top here as well as our fax number here you can fax them in at 402-471-6244. The finished application can be scanned and emailed to us at nlc.talkingbook.indreska.gov. And so once you've helped someone fill this out I think this is really helpful in a lot of ways because again if people are struggling with their vision sometimes filling out these forms can be difficult so if you do happen to go there and you want to help someone fill this out you can print out you know the completed form will print with populated with all of the options that that are filled out at the time and then a doctor can sign off on it for the end here and then that can be delivered to us and we'll get them signed up. I just want to mention quickly too because it looks like I'm about ready to pass the conch here. There are several other application forums facilities these are mostly assisted living care facilities senior centers. They can sign up as a facility to receive books if they have say like an activities director that wants to sort of coordinate passing materials out throughout their facility. There are similar forms for them here and there's also a school form down here. The student form is basically an individual application and a school application about that and if you happen to be tuning in to the Encompass Live show from another state if you go down to alternative applications this will take you to the National Library Service which is a branch of the Library of Congress and this is the primary form that they distribute. People in any state can fill one of these out and it will be directed to the appropriate regional library that serves their area. So that's kind of an overview of where all those materials are at and again to use the service people do have to fill out the application form so it's we definitely don't want it to be a secret of the website. Once people fill out this application form will they then be contacted? That's right yeah our reader advisor staff will get the form and give them a call and check in with them about what their basic needs are and make sure that everything on the form matches what they're actually interested in reading and then we'll get them set up with a player that will be mailed to them for free in the mail as well as books and again with those two everything goes back and forth from the mail as free batter for the wine so there's no cost for sending this back and forth so each morning we pull a bunch of books and send them out and then later in the morning we process books that are coming back and get those back on the shelf. About how many books are there to choose from? In-house there's around 30,000 now on BARD there's around 70,000 materials that are accessible those also include braille and other other types of formats and BARD is the downloadable yes anybody can just download them off the internet once they're approved. Right and with BARD I didn't mention BARD in the application form because that's yet another application. The reason for that is that in order to use BARD a person has to have their own computer and high-speed internet access and some computer skills as well because you'll have to be able you need to be able to check your email to deal with account information to download books and unzip them copy them onto their cartridges that sort of thing. Can you say another thing that an activity director or a school library media specialist could do a facility sign up for BARD or does that have to be individual? Generally they want that to be individual yeah that's right so yeah and because it's a little bit more complicated it would in a way would be nice to have that all just part of one form but because we don't really have I mean we're librarians as opposed to tech support people so we can't really help people pass a certain point you know figuring out what's happening with our computer at home so part of the online application form for BARD is just to sort of reinforce that they can deal with the technology involved. But and if people have questions about I mean this is such a great service in a way that libraries can serve people who otherwise would find have difficulty reading but if people have any questions about this they can always just call. Most definitely yeah the 800 number is 800-742-7691 and that will get you to any of the reader's advisors. Locally in Lincoln it's 471-4038. Terrific thank you. Absolutely. Okay who's up next we have Lisa next. Lisa Kelly who's head of our information services. Yes yes and I would like to take you to the reference ILL fly out to point out only two things just two. So we're going to start with books and series database which is growing by the day. How many of you are series readers raise your hand? Hard not to be. Okay now how many of you have to read those books in order? Oh well I like them in order. This is your best friend if you need to read books in order. This database became a project of the Talking Book and Braille and reference service. Talking Book and Braille was keeping paper lists of series and I went to Verne several years ago and said we should automate this so this is a Verne product. So you can search three ways but not combine them as Verne notes here. So I'm going to show you if you read for example the Jan Caron series which you could look at by her name. You'll notice that we've got these series split up in a couple of different ways and the DBs indicate what Scott was talking about the digital format so those so Talking Book readers and we have a lot of Talking Book libraries to the country that use this and so this has been a really valuable resource for them so that people can read their books in orders and they're not all one for the money two for the dough A is for alibi B is for burglar sometimes people make it a little hard so um this is a very long list and if you're a Star Wars reader oh gosh yeah there are way too many of those I know that and so um I just want to say that our staff member Anna Walter really goes to great depths to make sure look 0.5 1 2 3 4 5 you really got great order and then Verne has made it possible say you really like the way she writes you can find all the things she's written and what series they are a part of man this is slick that's smooth as a gravy sandwich so mostly Lisa it's librarians and teachers that are using this but no readers all over um so you this will help you to read everything in order if that's what you need to do and I need to do it so there you go any questions about the books in series so if you search if you know that the book you have is book three of the series but you don't know what the rest is then you can search by the book that's right there we go I'm using the same series over and over again so you would see that it's number two in the series it's part of this series written by that author all clickable yeah and we must thank Verne for that the magic that is verne now this include uh both adult and children yes the whole shooting match so this brings me back to what but what if I can't find it well then let us know and you can contact me and we will go to all the trouble to find out what that series is and we'll put it in recently a gentleman who worked at a bookstore in Missouri found all his favorite series weren't included and for days and days he sent us less and less and less so it's only as good as our users and of course we have also some series that we're more attuned to put in there but that's that's your books and series database available to all regardless of geography so yeah we do have a comment uh Claudette from our Adams middle school library says thank you Lisa for the books and series database it's a great resource obviously the school's useful it's useful at school yeah and you'll notice that I did put customer comments over here because we really do hear from and once from the Nevada State Library who helps their talking book patrons we hear from these folks so thank you for the comments about books and series I love it okay number two the only other thing I'm going to point out here is our book club kits going into terribly different direction here for those of you who belong to a book club want to start a book club I need to emphasize that this is available to librarians only you need to be a Nebraska librarian a Nebraska school librarian you can't just be good book club leader in Elwood Nebraska you need to always work through your librarian or your school librarian when you have a book club in town who wants to use this collection we are happy to have it used but in the rules for use basically the most important one is you need to be a librarian so when you call please identify yourself that way and you're good to go uh I want to point out the many ways you can search our over 1000 titles that we now have available let's say you have an author that you want to search title we have several genres that you can search by a keyword for school teachers we have listed these out by grade level and that is the way to amazon has it listed these you've got 12 members in your book group you need at least 12 you need a large print you need any of these particular formats maybe you just want to look at the whole collection maybe just Nebraska authors fiction nonfiction this is a recent edition holiday books and maybe you think I just want to know what they've added them last month last couple of months so you've got a myriad of ways that you can search this um let's say that you're you want to read something by the author barber king solver here's all the titles we have it tells you how many copies we have when available we include discussion questions you'll notice we also include if the talking book and braille library has that so if you've got a reader in your group that needs to get that they can make their own connection there so you've decided you want to read the bean trees and this is really cool it will remind you how many copies we have once you fill this out it'll remain auto filled out so all you need to do is give us this very very very I can't stress this enough very important information when do you need them and when are you going to talk about them that helps assess for us when we need to mail them out and when they're going to be do there's no standard check out we're going to be flexible and adaptable to you so when your book club leader comes to you and says we need to find multiple copies of a book I would suggest that you let them browse this collection and see what we've got before you go about enter a library loan 10 copies of this because you're going to get 10 copies from 10 libraries and nobody needs to mess with that you just want to get 10 copies in a box and hand them out so you can see we've got a real mixture of classics kids literature all kinds of things any questions about books that's also easier for the library themselves when they have to return them they don't know which 10 libraries to these each go to postage to one and everything goes back to the commission postage to 10 anything I just wanted to mention we always have book club kits for the one book one Nebraska of the year don't we no not until after one book oh one one one yes yes for one book Nebraska but we'll have books in 2016 yes we will we've got right now we've got a bunch of kids we'll have some for next year Richard wants me to say you're responsible for the postage to return them but not to receive them okay you pay postage to return them just like any ILL that you've done exactly any other questions any other questions take as we're going through this is your mind or type in your questions as you're here as they're talking so we can get through everybody and get through all your questions all right nothing came there we go back to the front page terrific thank you and next up is Debra Debra Dragos and can you remember the name of my department I can and the director of technology now so services you're just dropping all of this because you're retiring yeah okay um the things that I am going to talk about today are related just to Nebraska libraries we have a flyout here called the discounts and group purchases the first thing that I'm going to talk about on this isn't exactly a group purchase it's a purchase that it's related to a purchase that we make for um all Nebraska libraries which is Nebraska the databases in Nebraska access and we have like the librarians toolbox which has resources to help you use Nebraska access in your library and to promote it to your patrons okay so we've put up information on authentication options and I'm just going to go into each one of these very briefly you if you have static IPs for example you can set up IP authentication within your library for those libraries that do not have static IP or have patrons who wish to use these databases at home we do send passwords out to you twice a year so all the information on the authentication options is listed here and I'll go back we do have uh help information here if any of you attended the database road shows that Elena Novotny and Susan Nisley did the um fall you will recognize the handouts here that you received from them for those of you who weren't able to make it to a database road show you're certainly welcome to come in and look at any of these handouts now Elena and Susan have said these probably aren't handouts that you would necessarily give directly to a patron but you can certainly um train your other staff members within the library and you can certainly um revise them it into a handout for your patrons if you would like oops okay some libraries uh like if you have your own web page like to put a link to Nebraska access as a whole or sometimes to each database and you can get the information from this website on that now are there wordpress plugins for this it's easy would you have the wordpress if you go on Nebraska libraries on the web or um actually if you if you go through us for your website using wordpress those are actually preloaded yeah that's how I know yes we do have a mailing list for Nebraska access so if if you um are not on this mailing list the Nebraska access for live we do recommend that at least one of the staff in your libraries be signed up for this mailing list so that you find out when things are changing if there is sometimes a database will be down over a certain time period because of maintenance that the vendor is doing or you know some other problem could be going on and this is how we send out that information so you'd want somebody on that mailing list oops sorry there is a list of participating libraries I won't go into that but if you're not sure you can always go in and look and make and verify that you are on that list to get access to these databases if you're not you can go into the registration form and request that you be set up if you're not listed in the participating libraries you do not get a password to get in so you do need to come through us for that we also oh yes and there's no charge for registration no there's no charge for registration just checking the Nebraska access was um the contract allows us to give access to all Nebraska residents um the only limitation is you cannot access it through a corporate library however all um public libraries academic libraries k-12 libraries and most special libraries can um participate in this okay we also have promotion materials such as business cards that can be customized handouts uh both for public libraries and k-12 schools that can be customized um more information this is actually a a link back to whoops the other page that I mentioned earlier and we did have a press release that we created when we went to our new list of databases that became available in uh July as of July 1st so that's the library's toolbox um I'll just mention if you don't remember that it's available under the discounts and group purchases fly out you can type library's toolbox in our search box and it will come up also type in toolbox see if it just comes up with toolbox I think it does is there anything else we call a tool I don't believe so sweet there's a best bet that's best okay okay the other things that I wanted to point out today were the discounts that we have negotiated for Nebraska libraries okay there are three main groupings the books and supplies conferences and database and e-resources I'll go to the conferences first basically there are two that we um have three I guess sorry I keep forgetting the web search university um if you come through us you do get a fairly substantial discount for the computers and libraries internet librarian and web search university conferences this information is updated before each conference um starts actually this one um just took place at the end of last month and so uh this one's no longer valid but we just haven't taken it down because it's only been week or two then it'll read up again it will come up again next year yes okay the other um let's see I'm going to jump to we also have links from each of the pages to the other types of discounts that you can get so I'm going to the discounts on books and supplies next we have worked with various types of vendors uh from library materials and supplies so here you see security tapes RFID tags um and things of that nature uh we have bags for security purposes fabric bags and other things um just a wide variety so Baker and Taylor Ingram gumdrop books book jobbers where you can get library materials um with with discounts you do need to come through this page and find the information on how to get that discount so and I'm Baker and Taylor does not allow us to share the discounts on the website so I'm going to scroll down here a bit sorry you can close your eyes okay we have Ingram uh library services here is an example if you are in a public or academic library and you're looking at buying a hardcover book you can get it for at a 41.5 discount that's a better rate than you can get at your local bookstores and um it's often a better discount than you can get even at Amazon I won't say always but it is often okay so the moral of the story is shop around yes uh huh okay yeah well in the case for us these book these are book jobbers these are people who are in the business of selling books to libraries yeah libraries yes yes okay the other page that I'm go the last page I'm going to go to is the discounts on databases and e-resources we have also worked with many many many many vendors to get discounts sometimes the discounts are based on the number of libraries participating sometimes it's based on um just a flat fee um related to the type of library that is subscribing so for example if we go to Britannica online if that's the database that you're interested in or you're interested sorry you're interested in some of the databases through Britannica online we do always provide a description of the resource so you'll see there are several databases that they offer through us then we provide you with pricing information sometimes such as in this case the discounts and pricing are listed out here other times it does say that you do need to contact us because the vendor does not want to publicize the discount but we always require that they give us a discount before we list the product on this webpage okay so you'll notice that there is pricing based on the type of library and you need to give us if you're a an academic an FTE um if you're a k-12 school how many enrolled students you have the public library the total population that you serve etc okay after the pricing we do give you the subscription terms in some cases it's flexible in this particular case it is set from June 1st through May 31st and it does tell you that there's a deadline which passed because it started this year started June 1st 2015 you can as it say as it says come in later but you'll still be charged the full year's cost they do not prorate okay they do have some print materials that are available it tells you how to place an order it tells you who to contact for tech support how to get usage statistics and then it gives you some uh here we have some additional information on how to actually access each database once you've subscribed and can people get trials okay yes no okay let's go back up to the top and close your eyes again I'm scooting here um also under the discounts and group purchases we have information on trials there are a couple different ways you can do trials sometimes we do statewide trials and we have a page that tells you which trials are going on currently and we set that up with the vendor and provide a password and other information sometimes on this page sometimes just via our mailing list which is the trial mailing list and anyone can sign up for the trial mailing list we send out information whenever there is a statewide trial a lot of the vendors will also allow you to contact them directly to have individual trials so in other words if you were you thought you might be interested in the database they'd let you try it out a little bit yes well I wouldn't buy shoes without trying them out I do it I'll try to hang them out zappos well yeah there is online you know but I hear you yeah so this is great thank you and next we are going to have um craig let's go to talk about WordPress craig's kind of one of our new faces I am thank you for having me introduce oh introduce yourself come on okay tell us hi I'm craig lift drop I'm the new technology innovation librarian here at the commission and my portion of our website is actually devoted to providing websites for Nebraska libraries and this is a service we provide for free no cost to you so you can get there from this page by going to the navigation menu excuse me under library management we've got websites for Nebraska libraries right over here or you can go up to the top and search our site you just put in websites you can click right here and go straight to the link and that link will go to our participation page and this has information about what's involved in getting the website set up what you can expect in terms of time to keep it updated and to add content what we do on our end and then scrolling all the way to the bottom this is a video that goes about 70 minutes as all sorts of detailed information and a very thorough explanation of how the process works once you go through this page I would actually recommend that you look at our participating libraries list we use a platform called wordpress and it allows for a lot of variation in terms of look and navigation so let me just show you some of the sites we have active right now this would be Hooper public library it's got kind of a green theme lots of images navigation here at the top but if we go down to one of our newer members here Palisade it looks completely different and the navigation allows for a little animation here so you've got some movement at the top and down to Stromsburg which again is very visual with the navigation below this big image so there's a lot that you can do in terms of customization with the sites even though it's pretty robust as far as features and appearance and navigation it's very easy to use you basically type in text you move things around by clicking and dragging and I'm always here to help you get started and support you after the fact and you don't really have to know html to do this no you don't have to know very much in terms of code at all it's it's very visual essentially you just click and drag and type things in well that's a long list of libraries that are participating so it must be working pretty well I'd like to think so we're actually hearing about 100 numbers at this point wow wow if you are interested in participating or you have any questions we do have a contact page up here at the top my telephone number is here where you can just fill out this form with your information and any questions you might have and I would go straight to my email so and Craig there's no charge to a library that wants to do this with us right provided your a public library in Nebraska there's no charging involved free website free hosting free everything you don't have to change that header soon more than 50 if we make that hundred mark I've been discussing that so you're gonna be a prize for being the hundredth one okay so there's training on online training we do have training involved we have videos available we also have a document here that has text with screenshots you don't have to sit down and watch the entire video you can go straight to the information you need right that's great all right well thank you no I really a nice service for people okay and next we have Richard the trustee handbook the new trustee handbook actually I was going to talk about accreditation and certification did I get wrong uh-huh okay introduction who are you who are you oh I'm Richard Miller director of library development and Laura and I've had a miscommunication she probably said it correctly and I misunderstood so yes okay well I'll tell you what let's go here to this one and see if we can find what we're talking about there's the library board manual yes this is brand new it's online we will never do it in paper again I was part of the group that did this back in produced it back in 2006 and it was a very painful process Laura Johnson who shortly retired has to receive credit for this I don't really and test the tariff who's on our staff actually put it together this is really excellent it's wonderful there are some pdfs within it itself but I did find out we had a library director called the other day and said I've got three new board members I really need the whole manual they can print it off by going here if they want to they can go to each chapter and print it off or um yeah I guess they have to do chapter by chapter don't they yeah so they can go to a chapter and just hit print and those will print off there will be some white spaces because there's things like a quotes that we pulled out on the side and so forth but it's not bad looking I mentioned earlier that there are some of these that are pdfs like this one in particular is of special interest to most libraries about the responsibility of the library board versus the responsibility of the library director because sometimes they get confused so some of these things we have done we put in pdfs they're really what one of the reasons that Laura really wanted to make this online was because obviously the stuff from 2006 is way out of date because it's on paper now we can update each chapter we in fact I think Laura has recommended that we actually do this on a regular basis in library development of course she won't be here to tell us to do it but we will probably do this look at chapters keep them up to date make sure the links are okay and so forth I don't know what else to say about this except it's really it's really well done and uh there is a sample self-evaluation for boards at the end here which we took from the old board manual it's still good it's a pdf again in case you want to have boards evaluate want to click on that pdf you can print this off or do it during a board meeting as you know our library boards have to accumulate uh 20 hours for every three-year period for the board if the board decided they wanted to use this during a board meeting and then discuss it they could certainly earn c e hours for doing this so there are all kinds of ways of of doing this sort of thing it's really an excellent tool it um it it actually if we can go all the way back up to the top sure you see that you you can see where it's just top yeah um you can navigate from chapter to chapter or each chapter heading is a link so you can move through it the the navigation um so for instance if you wanted to know about board certificate renewal you could just go down and click on that and it would pop to that right away is a keyword searchable there's no search function that might be something there's not a search function within each chapter you can search the page you search yes you can find sure in the page i don't know the questions you get here there was the questions were is a keyword searchable and you can do work you can do a search within each chapter i think that's right yeah it's all online say ctrl f as well f thank you f for fine for fine thank you but it also has some links to additional resources as we said printable forms when they're important okay um yeah thank you laura sorry I didn't read what you sent me okay can I talk briefly about accreditation anyway okay I want to just say briefly that we are wrapping up library accreditation right now we had 88 public libraries who were trying for accreditation it was a huge block of people we have a few stragglers to wrap up but mostly it's done and we will be contacting the libraries that are going to be up for accreditation in 2016 if you'd like to know who that is you can go down here to status look up to find out whether your library is up in 2016 or the year it expires and I recommend strongly to you that right now they're in Ashland and Atkinson and so forth that you work on your strategic plan because it's going to take you a while you have almost a full year strategic plan done so please talk to your system director or to us about getting that done get going on it now we will send a message to all those libraries that are up in 2016 or all those libraries that sent in their annual statistics but currently not accredited thank you thank you for letting me do that okay okay and next we have burn and birds going to talk about search which I think is like really important because it is a big website I'm burned by us computer services director and as others may sort of alluded to I think my topic is the most important one I was part of the team that helped to overhaul our website and we struggled for I don't know how long long time trying to come up with a way to make it as easy as possible to find things because of the huge number of programs and the diversity of things we we looked at all the 50 state library websites we looked at numerous other websites hoping somebody had found a magic bullet away to make these this diversity more accessible and we just didn't find anything that I think everybody struggles with it so we reluctantly settled on the flyout menu approach which is kind of a necessary evil I would say it's not something that people love but it kind of does the job but to address to try to address the weaknesses in that approach we try to make the search robust enough that you can find virtually anything on the website including the services people have talked about today by just typing a quick search in the search box let's see also as we designed the website we tried to put finding aids for things that we thought people would be frequently looking for all clustered up in this top right corner so the search box is there if you can't find what you're looking for you can ask a librarian you can look at the site map if you prefer to browse what's available on the site if you're looking for a book you can search the NLC catalog if you're looking for library staff or libraries you can search the directory if you're looking for training or meetings you can search the calendar so it's kind of all clustered up there the finding aids we've tilted the search after analyzing search logs for continuously we've tilted the search toward people who are a little less precise in their searching which seems to be the norm I think using Google and Bing and things like that that are really good with taking really poor searches and finding what you're looking for has spoiled people to the point where they aren't as careful with searches as they might have been back in the days of dialogue or you know something like that yeah so we've opted to make the search more friendly for imprecise searches but the flip side of that is if you're a careful searcher and a precise searcher you're likely to find stray things that aren't quite on target for what you expected to find and that was a trade-off that we reluctantly decided to make one one special feature in our search site we the site is oriented to librarians it's not oriented to the general public so that allowed us to make certain assumptions when people make it or a search term for example if I were to enter the term Lincoln it assumes that I probably am interested in Lincoln City libraries or the public library in Lincoln it also by chance there's a Lincoln Township public library it finds that also and I might point out that the items at the top of the list that are starred or what we call best bets there it's a mechanism that we've spent a lot of time on to try to make the search bring the most relevant items right up to the top of the list so we've spent a lot of time on that and I think we have somewhere around 4,000 best bet terms currently and that grows all the time I try to regularly watch the search logs see how people are searching the terminology they're using what they're not finding and we try to make adjustments continually for for that sort of thing so that's why I like it's great about this it's not just all automated computers behind the scenes deciding what gets the most clicks there's actual human beings people looking at and saying ah this is what they really are looking yeah and you know Google has buildings full of people doing that we have my spare time when I can squeeze it in so considering that I think it works reasonably well one example of where this can really be helpful is libraries that have memorial names like if you were looking for the library in Alma its name is Housh Memorial Public Library so you can instead of having to remember or type that you can just type Alma and once in a while if it's a common misspelling we try to make adjustments for that within the search also our search engine we use an engine called zoom which I'm really impressed with it does a lot of things really well it's fairly it's affordable it's within our price range and there is a free version that's available for smaller sites so if you're in the market for a search engine that's one you might want to look at we looked at dozens of them and many were way out of our price range but zoom I I'm pretty happy with there are few limitations that that I suppose you give just about any product but overall I think it does a pretty good job it does support the standard search mechanism such as phrase searching you can enclose a term in quotes and get it only get hits that contain that precise phrase as I was putting notes together for this little presentation I of course found all sorts of things that I hadn't noticed previously that should have been adjusted and changed and I made one change yesterday just because of that the default description here is I don't remember what term they used here but the descriptions they used were find any words find all words and I really had to look at that and think what do they mean by that so I realized it's probably confusing to everybody so I changed it yesterday to use terminology Boolean terminology that I think librarians are accustomed to using so of course open to open to feedback about that you can use wild cards the search engine does can't can't think of the term they use now but it will search variations on a word plurals if you put in book it'll search for booking books and probably booking so it does handle some of that sort of stuff automatically one of the big limitations probably the big limitation that we've run into is with the best bets they can only be done in such a way that a single word is a bet serves as a best bet so if you happen to enter a search term that contains more than one best bet you make it a long list of hits and not all may be totally relevant to what you searched so I picked an example just to illustrate youth grants but you got a drop down that you would have been allowed to right to decide that's what I want to show you next youth the youth grants returns relevant hits youth grants for excellence but it's not the very top hit and this mentions youth grants and this talks about youth grants this one not so much but it does use the term grants so that's why I showed up the way the strategy that we've come up with to deal with that is this drop down drop down list so if you select youth grants from that you'll get a much more targeted result so I'd encourage you to use the drop downs it isn't just a convenience it actually does enhance the search terms the search to excuse me search does include the blog and the calendar so if you're searching for training on something you should be able to find it from this search as well and I want to just take a quick minute to talk about a couple of other things the calendar has its own search engine you can obviously list all events you can search by location if you want to find something that's close to you you can do keyword searches and one feat I I need to work on the help a little bit on both this and the main search but one little known ability of this search is to search both forward and backward if you search by default you're searching only for current events but and I can't show you this in Firefox it only works in Internet Explorer but if you enter a search because Firefox doesn't support right clicks and that's how we have this implemented so that's on my to-do list to try to figure out a work around for that but if this was formerly an in-house ability only so it's kind of hasn't fully blossomed into a public search but if you right click on the search box it'll search backward and that may be handy if you attended an event and want to look up a speaker's name or something like that is that a lot yeah oh and list serves that's that's one other thing I just wanted to mention as as you probably know we host a number of lists or mailing lists I guess I should say oops I didn't think so hmm never run into that before there is an archive of everything that's been posted to any of the lists or since day one and you can put in a keyword by default you're searching all of them but you can select a specific one if you're interested in that and we do have those that are lists have archives and parentheses following the name are archives of the old system configuration they're not obviously not being updated now but for the older things that's one place you can look by default you're searching by keyword you can also search by date and you have to use a very specific format three letters of the month followed by the year and that will limit your search to just items from from that much so if you know you've got a message and you foolishly discarded it from your email inbox and now you need to know you can go to the archive and find it yes yes and it really is a valuable resource that yeah probably a lot of people aren't aware is out there okay so I think given the time constraints I could talk another hour well thank you bird I really that helps a lot of people to use this website people in the room just learn yes we did yeah just let me know yeah we're officially 11 o'clock but we'll go to the end until we get everybody both speaking you get all of our secrets out there yes not a problem probably maybe 10 more minutes guys yeah okay and next up we have Mary Joe hello everyone I'm Mary Joe Ryan I'm the communications coordinator for the Nebraska Library Commission let me go back to the front page here I'm going to talk about two things of that are very important that you may not know about both of them are covered here under this category jobs careers now hiring one of them is the upcoming internship grants that are due December 17th and if you notice we do have a little reminders sticky note here I mean if you wanted to you could actually get there by going right here from the reminder but I'm going to just take you there through the the flyout it does say jobs careers now hiring library jobs and look at that internships you could have also done what Vern did you could have just typed internships up here in search our site let's go this way and here you have all the information about the internship grant program I know that some of you didn't even know we had an internship grant program this year because we haven't had it for a couple of years a lot of people have contacted me and said when are we going to be able to hire internships again and now is when you can do that let me just move down here and show you that there is quite a bit of information here the application cycle will be open until December 17th that's your deadline the award will be announced February 8th there'll be an encompass live right here on Wednesday morning February 17th I hope more people do know about it last week's encompass live was about it was about Mary Joe and Joanne McManus on last week so and this round of internships do have to be completed by November 30th we show you where the application is oh by the way a reminder that it's only accredited Nebraska public libraries that can apply but that you will receive special consideration if you're in a partnership with other libraries so if you have a school library and a public library applies and it's a partnership application form is right down here somewhere oh well first of all here you have questions you can contact Joanne McManus who's the manager of the program and it was it see I can I think it's up here the other way all right you guys I'm gonna show you this control F application there we are questions for inquiries oh yeah but this is the actual form the application form here so anyway it's on here and you can see actually who else is good involved okay so I know we're in a hurry we'll go back no we won't we'll go here back again to say you want to either apply for a job in a brass library you want to list a job we want to be sure to show you how to do that it's very simple again jobs careers now hiring and you go over here to Nebraska regional jobs and this page is the job and career resources page the way this is set up is that you can advertise a job opening by and post it by doing this link here or you can view some job openings you can either view all the job openings that we know about in Nebraska and contiguous states or you can view by location if really all you're interested in is Nebraska you can click here and get that or by keyword if all you're interested in is a cataloging position then you would probably put a keyword of technical services or cataloging in here but let's just assume that you really want to look at all of them and here they are if you want them by state you just click in this thing that says state and there we are you can see there's a couple of Colorado jobs a few Iowa Kansas Missouri and lots of openings in Nebraska get out there and play for some jobs folks say for example you want to apply for this love library learning commons manager job you just click on it and here's all the information that we have about that job so again this is a service that is I think really useful the way it's set up it's good for our job hunters and it's good for our libraries that are posting jobs so it's got really two target markets as you can probably tell most of what you find on the Nebraska library commission webpage is really designed for Nebraska librarians and we try to provide services through this web page and resources and information but this by the way the jobs actually could be used by other people as you can see yeah state that's all that I can let's talk about submitting a job notice to us to get it on there how does how does it someone get a their job listed on here when oh sure uh jobs advertise a job opening in your library fill in this form there you go and I think sometimes if people don't have found the form they might send an email to our reference desk and it gets it gets submitted that way too but you can do it you just fill this in I love it has spell check right down there yeah I know isn't that nice thank you Vern for putting spell check in and it will be submitted to staff here who will double check it and approve it that's what I was wondering about yeah be listed in some moments that you posted but we'll get it posted the first time we're back here and taking a look at emails they do get reviewed before they get added yeah that's a good point you guys and go straight up on to that and the person that you list is contact for the job will be listed when it's about to expire when it expires Vern has created some great messaging so it will let you know still want to list it are you good to let it go so this is really a great recruitment tool it is absolutely and as you can see other states are using it too and we're happy about works out that way although we don't really want them stealing our good library okay thank you Mary Joe okay last but certainly not least is Sally Snyder I was gonna say saving the best for last okay that sounds kind of obnoxious to show you what I want to talk about I'm Sally Snyder I'm the children and young adult library services coordinator for Nebraska and I want to show you one thing that there's only one way that I know up to find this and this is my it's right now my handouts page anybody if they decide they want to can join me on the handouts page because I'm just going to type in handouts up here in that great search area and click and look Nebraska Library Commission handouts and if you click at this almost always comes up first but it's not a best bet yet yeah so fix that for me thank you burn but it almost always comes up first every once in a while maybe Nebraska access or somebody beats and right now like I said these are only my handouts that I've created for conferences and summer reading program workshops and so I have my handouts for our conference last month best new children's books these are all PDFs so if you click on that here is the handout as I as I had it for that session and if we just back up one you can see that I have gotten this one with the blurbs as I call them so it still is just the handout page with my comments about the book popped in there so that makes it at least twice as long as but if you're looking through and you don't have to you can print it out or you can just look through and say what did she say about Junus Jar I want to remember that before I order it you can look and see there it is right there I'm going to be getting sorry the teen books up pretty soon and the summer reading program list up as well I'm something I wanted to mention is that when we started this page it was in 2008 and Janet and I have been talking about archiving some of these like maybe going up to just to have these go into a secret file where no one can find them but Janet so if you really want to find out what I talked about in 2008 you can email me and we can get it but I don't really see a reason because these are mostly timely things that I'm talking about and I don't think that 2008 list is really going to help anybody much anymore unless you want to go back and see what you ordered of what I talked about which I don't think anybody has time for that so if you are adamantly against me archiving anything send me an email but I'm just letting you know right now that that will probably be happening early next year that will take some of these off of there because I think really the best books of 2011 might not be your most helpful document and because I'm here I'm in control of things for the moment I'm going to type in performers see you didn't know I was going to do this look it's a best bet if you type there you go presenters or performers you can get the Nebraska library performers database right now this is all performers basically for families or teens or children they're all three and if you're if you say man I really want to hire a magician for our summer reading program you can type in something like magic and go and then anything any of the entries we have in here that say something about magic or magicians will pop up so you can look through there and see who's recommended it you can see that this was recommended by the Eastern library system at the time they were having sessions of performers who were giving demonstrations so that's why their name is up there mostly there are they are recommended by particular libraries in Nebraska nobody can get on this list until a public library in Nebraska recommends them for the library system because I don't want an influx of performers from wherever saying put me on your list and none of us have an idea if they're really very good or not and then you can see children and families as checked here but not so much teens for the clowns you can search by a particular individual if they know if you know their name and you can search or you can just look at the whole list let's just go see who all's on here and then you can see they start of course with the amazing people with a and then on down and all kinds of performers this database is not that large yet and I would encourage librarians who have enjoyed a performer or or there are some like the Falknell Forest Raptor Recovery program was in here any kind of presenter or performer that your your children teens and families have enjoyed you can actually add them to this database yourself now I'm gonna have to scroll down again I'm trying to remember what no I think I go back here see I didn't practice this here you go libraries submit performers you would recommend and you put them on there and you tell me about tell us about them a little description are they are they people who are enacting a historic event by talking about it or are they a storyteller give us what information whatever contact information you have and then any comments do you might have like our kids were enthralled or the families really enjoyed this and mark whether you think it's teens children or families and when you submit that it will go to me and to Janet we'll look through and kind of double check some things before it actually ends up on the database so that again is a little delay for you but I really appreciate it if you decide to add somebody to the database okay yes just Nebraska librarians because only Nebraska librarians and when we put your library name up there is recommending it is not your individual name it's just the name of your library recommends this this performer and somebody might contact you and say can you tell me more about it tell me more about what this performer presented and hopefully you'll still remember that performer it's a great way for people to share information about programs they can get in their library so I think that's everybody today isn't it we probably still have a few secrets left you know but we hope that you enjoyed this today and we hope that you found some things that you didn't know about because I think we all learned a little something here and we had fun doing this so thank you everybody and we'll see you next week yeah all right thank you very much everyone for sticking around all the way to the end everybody who logged in is still here well you guys obviously hear our speakers I mean our our listeners so thank you very much and I'll just use this as well to show you and compass live so that will wrap it up for this week's show it is oh we have other staff just sorry we have staff in another room here we'll watch the show and Janet who is there says staff here in the room even learned a secret so whoever's watching also learned something too we learned some of us here learn some things we didn't know as well that's great so it was a success good somebody learned something we know it's a success yeah so that will wrap it up for this week's show it will be on our website later today in the recording section which you scroll down just beneath our upcoming shows is a list of all of our archives we put them on here and the videos are put on the our YouTube account if there's PowerPoints which there isn't today but if there was we have slide share and any links I've collected all of the secret websites the links for everything everybody talked about so they'll be all there together in a group for you to get to all those hidden places that we showed you today and that next week's show hopefully join us for is inspire your community with an innovation lab Maurice Coleman is librarian in Maryland a friend of mine he had they have a lab there one of these maker space type things but they do lots of different things there Hartford County Maryland Public Library Innovation Lab and he's gonna talk about that with us next week to tell you about how they actually got it up to speed and you can see they used an underused space they had and how they actually got the thing up and running the monetary and how it was all you know came about and everything so you can see how you might get some ideas to create your own in your own library so please do sign up and join us for that or any of our other shows also if you are on Facebook and come as well as also on Facebook we have a page there I send reminders out here as you can see login for today's show when the recordings are available so if you're big on Facebook definitely do go over there and follow us on Facebook other than that then that wraps up for today thank you everyone for being here thank you thank you bye check out our website