 All right, so welcome to our lightning round sessions here on Big Talk from Small Libraries. First up, we have Amber Alexander. Good afternoon, Amber. Hello. She's a library director at an, oh I didn't see it, the Presque Isle District Library. Presque Isle District Library. Oh, yes. And then population served is because they are a district, they're a full population for the whole district is 14,878. Is that the correct most recent number? That's it. Yep. Yes. Until the point that says, can we get a new number? Yes. And she's going to talk about their library at the theater program, which sounds really fun if you ask me. So go ahead and take it away, Amber. Thank you. Okay. Well, my program is Library at the Theater. I've been director here for three years and I started December of 2015 and the first thing I did was take on a theater. A little bit about our district. Again, we're a class four library with population of 14,078. Our square mile age is 2,573. It's a smaller county, but we have a lot of loving people here in our community. We do have two townships center, Outline Border, and we were established as a district library back in 1992. We have five branches. They are Roger City, Grand Lake, which is over here, Pozen, Millersburg, and Onoway in the state of Michigan. And you can see kind of where we're at on the Mitten. Onoway, we only own actually three buildings. The other three we rent. But the Onoway location which we rent is actually in the basement of old historic courthouse. And you take it on a theater, you know, it sounded really easy. The Roger City Theater, the history of it, was a theater constructed in 1937. It's a classic single screen, small town, movie, palace, and architectural style. And it's a downtown landmark. People have remembered it for decades. It's always been a love of the whole area. And a retired attorney decided to purchase it when the owner wanted to retire and he had a love of music and performing art. So he removed some of the seating and created stage in there and set up theatrical lighting and utility improvements. And in 2004, they started having live production. And in 2009, the exterior was renovated. I'll show you pictures of that in a minute. And they also had a Kickstarter campaign started in 2013 to upgrade the digital projection system, which it is a huge cost. And it was very nice to have that kind of taking care of before we took on the theater. So the community really supported the theater. And, you know, just you have to drive 40 minutes away just to go with the movies. And either north or south of us, the Sheboygan or Alpina. So they really wanted to keep this theater open and available to the community. And here's our marquee. It's the original marquee. The lights are still shining. He had everything, anything broken on there has been replaced and fixed. And all we have to do is change the light bulbs and hopefully no more, it'll last us a lifetime. And here's a before and picture of it, early 1940s. There was actually two businesses on each side. But when it was restored, the one side remains a business, which is on the parking lot side. But the other side he renovated and the inside was able to provide handicap accessible bathrooms for the theater. And here's the inside of our theater, 280 seats. It's handicap accessible. There's even a ramp on the left to the stage going up to the stage. The older seating you see on either side and in the middle is the newer seating with cup holders. Again, that was all community funded before the library took it on. And on the left you'll see a little guy sitting there and his name is Art. And he is our permanent guest from the previous owner. And he serves as a photo opportunity for many guests. A lot of people, when they come to theaters, they'll get their picture taken with Art. The Roger City Community Theater is an organization, nonprofit, that shows about six plays a year at the theater. And they have, they include the summer youth theaters. They have casting ages from six to 94. They perform six musicals a year. But they actually rent the space from us. And by doing that, they've helped us sustain that building moving forward. Because if they weren't able to do that, we would have rented issues in operating the building. And right here, this is one of their recent plays, which was, it brought in people from the region and even people from out of our region coming out to see this. It was the Shrek musical. And there I am with Shrek and Donkey. And we have Lord Farquaad and the Marinettes that played with someone there. And that was a really fun show. For staffing, it was difficult to find a person to take on the challenging of managing in the beginning because it was all new for us as a library. And the previous owner, it was a hobby. So he didn't really have anything written down, procedure-wise moving forward. So it was difficult to get that going. The first one, the Kleiner offer. And so we went and the second one didn't work out. Wasn't very passionate about his job and his role in the community. But the previous owner had a transition plan. So he worked with us. So when those happened, he was able to step up and continue doing what he did before until we could find somebody that really wanted this job and this position. And then we landed a wonderful manager. And he didn't mind taking on new roles and offer creative ideas for new programming and procedures. And actually that's him here playing Lord Farquaad. And he's actually six foot tall and he had to play that on his knees, on knee pads the whole time. So it was fun. And this, he was new to our community and knew as a manager and the community really loved seeing him do not only the business of the managing the theater but also working with the community theater and being a part of that. Some of the hurdles we came with was we had to create new job descriptions. We had to come up with what if the manager is sick? What do we do? Who's going to be back up for them? So we have several library and our staff that know what to do. And he's also set up a lot of procedures moving forward. So we have like a theater Bible that we can use to reference for any movie showings or anything like that. We also had to come up with new policies to include the theater just like our conference room policies. And if there would be any cost for non-profits, there's no cost to non-profits. But if you're a for-profit there would be cost for that involved. We had to contract with film companies and use a broker to get some of the first run films. We only stick with really high first run films that are going to do that people really want to see. And those are the ones we show. We had to learn how to ingest films. We had to learn how to use the digital projection system and just overall theater operation protocols. There were maintenance issues in the sense of the boilers were out of date and needed updating and advertising. We had to upgrade our advertising budget and just educating the public on the transition. They were so used to looking for a spot for all those movies and stuff. And we had to change it up a little bit because we're a library, we're non-profit, and we're trying to not have such a huge advertising bill. So just be able to put that out publicly on Facebook and on a website for free and making sure that they know that they can go to those areas to see what's up and coming. Taxes was also an issue. And we are still working with the city on getting the taxes taken off that and that should be actually done this month. And we also had to learn new concessions and stuff. So that was with the inventory involved with that. So that was all new for us. This provided an opportunity though. We've been able to engage with our community. These are the organizations we were able to engage with. We had a townhouse survey with the city of Rogers City. Rogers City elementary schools have come and watched educational films. So as the middle of high school, Thunderbury Marine Sanctuary has film festivals that we have here. And people come from our region to watch. The Great Lakes Lore Maritime Museum has a bell ringing for the Bradley that sank on Lake Michigan, which many of the survivors, there's only two survivors, but many people that died on it, were from Rogers City. And we actually have a film, the library created from that, that we were able to play with the bell ringing. Presbyteral Historical Museum, Friends of Rogers City Library, the DDA, and the Zonta Group who is bringing in the FBI agents to talk to locals, high schoolers, the girls about human trafficking. So these are some more of our programs. Again, we play first run films. We have Homespun, which is local folk artists having their music and things played. And the community really loves those. Film festivals, we just had an Audrey Hepburn film festival. We've had an Alfred Hitchcock, John Wayne. So we continue, these movies are free. So people can come and make a donation and we have the concessions open and they can come and enjoy some free movies over the weekend. We have a lot of musicians and bands that have come. The Akiak River Boys, Blacksorn, Charlie Don't Surf, ML Liebler, Peter Bergen, Swing Band Classic, the whole gamut we've had come and play at our theater. We've had free family movies. The one that we just did over Christmas was Polar Express. And we had, we sponsored with the City on that and we provided, the City helped provide hot chocolate cookies. We had Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus come after the film and we had bells where the kids could ring and then brought out Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus and they got to watch the film. It was a great experience for the whole community and they really loved it. And we also had a TEDx there as well. And I will just play just the first little bit here because it shows a little bit of our theater. Which in my estimation is the greatest of the great. I'm surprised that this does seem more fitting of an ocean or a sea rather than a weird lake. People who live on the shore or who work on the water, Lake Huron is like a slightly moody friend. And I think we take a lot of pride in knowing the lake. It's moved. I'm going to tell you there is a vast undiscovered country with broad plains, towering cliffs, majestic waterfalls that exist just beyond your shoreline. So that was John O'Shea and he is an anthropologist and was able to discover that there is a whole ancient civilization of caribou hunters under Lake Huron that thrived beneath Lake Huron at the last ice age 9,000 years ago. So he actually discusses that and that's available on YouTube for anybody that would like to watch it. Some of our future projects for this is renovating where the scoop shop was. There was a scoop shop on the side that our previous owner had. He's no longer there and frankly we're not in the business to sell ice cream. So we will be adding a special library up in that area and a seating area where coffee is available and also campaigning for providing a competition for an art mural along the side of the building on the parking lot side so that it creates more of a downtown appeal and it fits with what the city of Roger City wants to accomplish for the downtown area. Some of the box office wisdom. Definitely had to keep a gross mindset on this. Libraries are ever changing in their role. Libraries are not just about books and it fits our mission. The Preskill District Library provides literary and educational materials and services that include artistic, cultural, and educational programs. We need the needs and interests of our patrons and the general public. And my husband, he's a marine and you know it provides adapt and overcome and we've definitely pulled that off with this. It's definitely a shining star in our community and they really love that the library was able to keep the theater open for our community. So if you have any questions you can always reach out to me. There's my website, my emails there and it was fun. We always have fun creating our programs and events around the theater and working with people to just help educate and keep the cultural and prosperity of our community continuing forward. Great, thank you so much Amber. That is that was like I said that's I think it's a fun program you got there and great keeping that theater going. All right.