 Good morning, and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar show, where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's okay. We do record the show as we are doing right now, today, and so you can watch the show later at your convenience. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open for anyone to watch, so please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the shows that we have on Encompass Live. So those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries in Nebraska. So that'd be similar to your state library, and we provide services and programs and things to all types of libraries in Nebraska. So you will find shows on Encompass Live for all types of libraries. Public, academic, K-12, corrections, museums, archives, anything and everything. Really our only criteria is that it's something to do with libraries, something libraries are doing, something they think they could be doing. We have Nebraska Library Commission staff that come on and do shows sometimes talking about things, soft services and programs we're offering here through the Commission. But we bring in guest speakers as well, and that's what we have today. Let's read over here. Today we have joining us from, as you can see on the slide, see the slide here, from the Omaha Public Library, the team who does their booktrap, booktrap podcast. And so I'm just going to hand over to all of you all to introduce yourself and share what you've been doing with your new podcast. And it was a free. You still hang on. I lost the screen. Yeah, we're seeing the first slide of your presentation. Yes. I don't see it. Oh, hang on. Sorry. No, that's okay. You can try and share. Now I see it. Okay. Hi, everybody. We are the booktrap podcast team from Omaha Public Library. Today we're going to talk about building a reading community through podcasting. I'm Erin Dewar. I'm the readers and writers librarian for OPL, and I work at our Vincent branch. I'm Michelle Carlson. I'm the book club librarian for OPL, and I work at the W. Clark Swanson branch. Hello, my name is David Dick. I'm an adult services specialist, and you can find me at the Abraham's branch. Hey, I'm Anna Wilcoxson. I work at the South Omaha library as the diversity and inclusion librarian for OPL. And we have a fifth member of this team. She recently got promoted, so she's not here today, but Ellie Roberts is OPL's new outreach librarian, and she's an important part of our team. But since she's not here, we're giving her this entire slide to herself. So what we're going to talk about today, I'm going to go over a little bit just background about the podcast, how to make a podcast in 10 days, lessons learned, podcasting as an RA tool, future plans that we have and how to take this further and where you can find us on the internet. Some quick facts about us. We describe ourselves as a weekly podcast from Omaha Public Library that explores topics related to our community, libraries and the joy of reading. Listening in as a team of OPL staff offers up reading suggestions, chats with guests, and occasionally geeks out about books, information and pop culture. So we are in our third season. We are very close to hitting 16,000 downloads in that time. On Friday, we'll publish our 95th full length episode. And in those episodes, we have mentioned somewhere around 2,679 titles or resources. And of those around 780 or more have been more like full length book talks. So, there's a lot of info out on the internet about how to make a podcast, all the research and stuff you need to do. So we're not going to go super in depth to those kinds of questions, but we do want to cover them briefly so you understand what this project kind of looked like and how to make a podcast in 10 days might sound like hyperbole, but that is really what we did. Would we recommend it? Honestly, maybe kind of, yes, but we'll talk about the pros and cons of that kind of timeline and what that looks like. So our podcast is a product of the early days of the pandemic. I'm sure like many of you, we close our doors on March 15th of 2020 due to safety concerns of COVID-19. And a lot of us spent that first week at home not working. And then we were asked to report remotely on March 23rd the next week. And that first week of our pandemic work was spent setting up remote working expectations and making sure everybody had laptops and computers, whatever we needed to do to work from home. So at the end of that first week, we were tasked with staff kind of at large, we're tasked with coming up with ideas for projects that would help us connect to our patrons who are now at home that we weren't going to see for a while. What could we do that would add value to their experiences happening right now? So I think we sent out an email like on a Friday. What are your ideas? We came back the next week. Podcast was, I think, at the top of that list of a couple of their things. We got basically like we wrote up a small proposal. We got almost like a immediate yes, go ahead. The next day we started purchasing equipment. I think early the next week we had already figured out our hosting site purchase. We set a name. We'd gotten music for our theme music. We'd cut it. And then on April 9th, we recorded our first episode. So a lot of this is figuring out like what we could have, what we already had that we could use. What kind of skills did we already have? And things like we were already using Zoom. So that's easy, right? Or David is a band. So he gave us music for free. So things like that are very helpful. So what that research kind of looked like during that time period was figuring out things like our equipment, what technology will you need? So laptops, microphones, headphones, recording. What are your options? Can you use something you already own? We were already on Zoom. So that was easy. Is there a free option? Is there something else out there? We have now switched to Riverside, which is more podcast specific. And there are a lot of benefits to that. Who's going to do editing, which is a big part of it? Is there something that's free that you can use or paid? Do you need something easy or do you have some skills in this area that you can utilize here and who's going to do it? It'll probably be a big chunk of your your time for this project. And then you'll need a hosting site. So explore your options. What's your budget? How many hours do you need a month? What analytics do you need? We started on Buzzsprout and we are still on Buzzsprout and I feel pretty good about some of the analytics that we get on that backside. So the other part of that research is just figuring out who you are as a podcast. So what's your niche, essentially? So we went out, thought about a lot of podcasts that we were already listening to, but also did research into what kind of library podcasts were out there. And we found a lot of library podcasts that were focused for library specific or for other librarians. So when we were thinking about our audience, we very clearly wanted to make sure that we were focusing on patrons first or just the reading community at large. They don't have to be OPL patrons at all. But that was our main focus. So the questions we're asking ourselves is what is the vibe, which is a word that I feel like we use a lot. We always we probably started out a little more formal just because we didn't really know what we were doing or who we were yet. But we always wanted this show to be pretty casual. So hopefully it feels like you're hanging out with friends talking about books. And then what is the format? If you listen to a lot of podcasts, it feels like there's some pretty basic formats that are used. We use like a loose three act structure. We open with intros, what's coming up at the library and ice breaker. Sometimes we use that time to interview another staff member or an outside guest. And then the bulk of our episodes are usually discussions either around a specific topic or kind of a roundup of book talks based around a theme or genre. And then we close every episode with a query of the week, which is just a question that we ask each other. We try to put it out on the internet and get listener answers as well. That just kind of sometimes goes along with the theme or it could just be something completely random. And so the final part in all of that kind of research phase was making sure we're getting approval. This will look entirely different for every organization. Since we have multiple departments in organization, it was very likely that you will forget that someone needs to be involved in this process. So for us, this is what that looked like. Our adult services manager was in charge of making sure we're getting those purchasing things done, helping us decide what team members are on this team, the time of time commitment, everybody can put forward to it, and just a general idea of what we're going to be talking about. We have a marketing department, so they were there to help us create a logo, prove our name, they're in charge of all of our promotion on social media and on the website. And then also they're in charge of anything that goes out under the OPL head basically. So anything that gets on the internet, they have to go through, has to get their approval. And then admin is there just for kind of the big high-level stuff, our name, content, and just kind of the commitment that we're making to this organization overall. So if tinnish days sound like an escalated timeline, you are right. This is not our normal pace of creation, but this was the gift that the pandemic gave us. In those early days, it took away all of our barriers that usually slow down this kind of productivity or creation. So our timeline from approval, or from idea to approval was very teeny tiny. And now Michelle is going to talk about what we learned during our early days and going forward. So as Elle Woods famously said, what, like it's hard, like doing all this and making a podcast during a pandemic when you're not even in your library branch and all that kind of stuff. So in the past nearly three years that we've been working on this, we have learned quite a bit. And so I'm going to talk you through some of those things that we have learned. So first was about the sustainability of this project. How do we keep doing this week to week without just flat out exhausting ourselves? And so part of that was that we talked to each other every single day or excuse me, after every single episode, we have what we sometimes call our mini therapy sessions, where we check in with each other, not just about like the podcast itself, but within the world and how we are doing. So building that team is part of how we were able to kind of keep this going also. We also track our stats the way that Aaron was. We have Buzzsprout to give us that like hard data, but we also keep what we call titles featured master list. So that's how and we have a little checkbox if we actually book talked it or if we just mentioned it. And then we have the resource list that comes out with every single episode also. That's part of our Biblio Commons online catalog so that people can kind of go back and look at those things. And then those are all linked and we can get stats on those clicks and all that kind of thing too. And in the beginning, Aaron was doing all of these things. So one way that we also figured out how to make it work was by splitting up those tasks. And so Anna makes our resource list now. I help enter our stats and stuff. And so we're all just, you know, in it together in that way. And then Aaron talked about technology and technology as we know, especially in the library world is always evolving. And so as she had mentioned, you know, we used to use Zoom, but then we're able to switch to Riverside when we realize the quality of our broadcast and all that. That we have the capacity budget and all that to increase it in that way. Some of our equipment has needed upgrades as well over the time. Some of us needed new cords and all that new ring lights and that kind of thing. And so, you know, keeping in touch with the budget and our admin on those types of things, which then leads me also to support as Aaron had also had all those check marks of where we got approval from. We need that approval, unfortunately, maybe as we keep going, you know, because things change every year to year. And so we're blessed with that continued support from our admin and our branch managers, because this does require, you know, not being on desk to record and some of that other planning and that kind of thing. So you need that continued support to keep it going. And then we are librarians and we're talking about books, but we all know that we don't get paid to read books. And so balancing that professional law and not getting burnt out on reading while having to talk about what we are reading or and all those books and all those different resources and stuff. And so that's a constant lesson. I don't know if any of us have a way that we've really nailed that yet, but we're aware of it. And that's step one, right. All right. The other big lesson was just planning in general. So when we first started, we were going literally week to week. Sorry, my room has a light sensor and it's all the way over there. So we were going week to week with a brand new episode and it was a little exhausting. And so we decided for season two, specifically that we would do record three episodes or three weeks and then take a week off. So instead of like at the end of our recording where we were trying to plan the whole rest of the season. We have once a month a planning meeting for a full hour that we have to talk to each other about the big ideas plan like the next quarter of themes. Talk about what guests we might want or just all those types of ideas and that I think has really helped us keep our vision, the vibe of the podcast fresh and again, sustainable. We have then our episode outlines. So part of our planning is that we have in a Google Doc, a live Google Doc that we can all, you know, be editing whenever we need to one for each episode that has where we can list our titles because sometimes we read the same books and so we want to make sure we're not going to talk about the same books. Or like just also kind of make sure that we're not talking about the same kind of books and that kind of thing within the genres or, or whatever that week's topic was. And so, in that we might write out our full book talk we might just take bullet points. We'll note the other like links of articles that we're going to be talking about to share with each other. So with OPL we have Slack. So we have our own private Slack channel for the five of us to be able to communicate about all of this and are kind of then whenever we're working kind of in touch with you, touch with each other and planning. The last big lesson was the tone that vibe as we like to talk about. And so part of that was with building our team. Some of us hadn't actually worked together before. So we were all part of the team called the well read collective. And so within that we've, you know, worked a little bit together on genre studies and that kind of thing some outreach events but we otherwise spending a week together and talking about books directly is very different. And so it was getting to know each other, our personalities are pacing and that kind of thing which also can be hard online. So that was just kind of a lesson as we kept going through with book talking David's going to talk more about the book talking but one of the lessons was just our own comfort level with where we're at with that skill. And finding our way the one that fits and works for us, you know, working through our pacing our vocal ticks and all that kind of stuff. And then personally I know one struggle I have is talking about a book before I've actually finished it or read it by the time that we're recording and just always that like, do I do it do I find something else and that kind of thing and so getting comfortable with that talking that through with the team. And so that comes to our group norms and our shared expectations that we have while we're recording. So, one of the things that we worked on so we aren't interrupting or talking over each other because, you know, even with the best internet, nothing is like super simultaneous so we raise our hands. And we see each other's little boxes and we see like, Oh, after Erin's done with her book talk Michelle wants to say something so I'm going to pause and stuff and so to give that space for the next person to talk and share their, their thoughts. And so, and then within that is our own self awareness also of working through, you know, how we're not one dominating a conversation, and making sure that we're sharing, you know, kind of the airtime, and that space itself. And then there's the personal versus professional. So, podcasting feels like a very, I know I listen to like, at least 15 podcasts a week, myself. And so, you know, and one thing I love about them is the way that you're actually getting to know those people. And so it's our own balance that we are doing this so as a representative of Omaha Public Library and so in a professional capacity and so trying to balance that as well as like, you know, wanting to build relationships with listeners and each other by sharing some details about our lives but not everything. And then also it's the what is too much. And so if you if anybody has listened. Sometimes we have said a swear word. And so balancing that, you know, we don't have the, is it the FCC, the, you know, the one that could find you like swear on live television or whatever and so. But our marketing department has kind of given us the scope and expectations of that kind of thing for not being, we're not an explicit podcast, but you know some titles, you know, some of them have swear words in them now. And so how can you talk about that without saying it and that kind of thing so there's a balance there. And so those are kind of the big lessons that we learned along the way and so, yeah, we'll go into now we're going to do our little mid presentation query the presentation this one is for the panelists and so, because I think you'd love to hear them from them individually about the lessons that they've learned so friends, what do you know now that you didn't know before. My biggest lesson I think is that effort on the front end will pay off in the back end. I think, like, getting zoom was a great thing to start with but like getting a software that was made for podcasting, you know, it saves me like 50% on editing time. And so make if you can make those little jumps of sometimes that's a financial investment but sometimes it's just finding out a like more streamlined process is totally worth it. Awesome. David. I learned. Well I knew before that I talked really fast but I know what my voice sounds like sped up to double speed so I learned to slow down some. I think I am learning and still learning this, but to be a little like to worry a little less about perfection. I think like having to do things quickly and kind of like the quasi casual format of the podcast makes me feel a little bit better about not being so hard on myself if I like, I don't know, say something or I don't know forget something or maybe I didn't have a time to read something as deeply as I wanted to just being a little more okay with not doing things like perfect 100% like a plus work, but a minus work is still what I hope for. No worse than that. And then for me I was definitely going back to that professional law of getting back to the joy of reading and not feeling like it's just my job to read. We do have our book club episodes which are super fine so that we are talking about a shared book but that's still in some ways a book assignment. I think I've done a better job of finding books that fit within our theme that I already want to read. And so then it's not, you know, laborious of like, oh yeah, I have to read that book for the podcasts this week so I can talk about it adequately. I do actually one more thing I guess I don't know if it's maybe a lesson but I do think that like being a part of this team and talking about books so regularly has really broadened my personal reading scope which has been a really like lovely side effect of this like I definitely like my own vibe I guess for the kind of books that I gravitate towards but just knowing about a greater number of books and more details really made me interested in reading more broadly which has really been a lovely side effect of this podcast. Cool. And with that, we're going to go to David. Alright, so speaking of swearing here is our first our first beep of the podcast. So many books. Thank you, Michelle. I'm going to talk about podcasting as a readers advisory tool. And I'm going to go over readers advisory immersion therapy which is basically what this is podcasting as a library commercial, and just some of the challenges of podcasting versus more traditional book talking and readers advisory. I'm going to talk about immersion therapy, getting to know you. This is a great way to learn how you book talk, because you're doing it so much. You're really getting to learn your own quirks and your ticks, but also your style and approach. I started to be able to keep track of things that I know appeal to me a lot better than just saying oh I liked that, just by seeing everything in a spreadsheet after I talked about some very similar titles over the course of a month. You'll also be greatly aware when you hit a slump and kind of learn how to talk about when you're in a slump talk about something maybe you read a year ago, just by looking over your Goodreads review or just even what you rated it as, as well as your quirks and habits as a reader. I, like having the pie graph and story graph which I started because of this podcast just seeing like I knew I liked horror but seeing just like how much of that graph it took up was something I would have no idea about if it wasn't for this podcast. And we also will vary really wildly about how in depth there are work or our notes are and for me that could be how much I love the book but it can also just be like how up for improvisation I am that week. Some weeks I can just go off the cuff and keep going other weeks it was busy at the desk and I really need those notes to go off of because I'm having a hard time talking about about books just unprepared so that is what you'll learn about yourself. And this really is a library commercial. It's not just for OPL. Yeah, we talk a lot about our own library here but this we have pretty. We have like one of the great thing about the analytics is we found out a lot about the size of our audience and we have some international listeners to and we have a lot of listeners in the south like around Georgia and Tennessee. And so it's a really useful tool for raising visibility of the library when people talk about we're hoping we're doing a small part when people talk about the needs of the library in the current age that we can demonstrate everything a library can do and it's a great way to do virtual programming on the regular rather than just as a couple times a year event. And it is a great way like in the balancing of the person on the professional to show us both as reading experts, you can really know what we're talking about and really knowing how we can delve into books and describe how things appeal to people and being able to sell books, sell the idea of books to our audience, if it's what they want to read, but also be able to describe what the appeal is so that the people who might not like a particular book for example I just finished tinder is the flesh loved it five out of five stars made me feel awful. So, like how to talk about a book that might be controversial that regard, or you know that not everyone might like in a way that gets the people who love it, you know that they can find it, but the people who might not love it will know that we talk about it if it's not for them. And also just to show that librarians are cool people to hang around with and to dispel some of the stereotypes that we just want people to be quiet and we're just sit around and read and do nothing else. Yeah, that's we do we share the mission of the library in that regard. We can use it to promote our events and our services. Every episode we've talked about earlier we talked about what's coming up at our library. That's a brief part. And, but it's, I think it's important part, because even for people who are outside our service area it shows the kind of things that can be at a library and what we're capable of. Right now we are going to be promoting our Omaha read since that just got announced. We saw that. Yeah. And so we'll be able to, we've had a special mini episode about the Omaha read book. Well, we've had like a full length episode about it too before. And so just being able to Yeah, being able to show what we can do. And then sometimes we have behind the scenes episodes so if people really want to get into the inside baseball and see how libraries tick. We can talk about things like this is how we choose books to purchase. This is what our day to day looks like. This is. Yeah, this is, these are some tips for getting a hold of what you want to get a hold of and all of that are annual reading challenge is a huge part of the content we create we do several episodes throughout the year around and we do a lot of things. We don't hit all 12 but we especially make sure we hit the 12 that might be harder to get, like a lot of people don't know what micro histories are I didn't know what micro histories are until we started doing well it got announced on the reading challenge but there's like oh yeah I read a lot of those. But yeah so we do a lot about reading challenge me even do a special episode called the reading challenge help desk where we take submitted and we have people say hey I'm having a hard time with the micro history here's a book I love what should I read, which that's a lot of fun because it gives us. It gives us the feeling of like our outreach events like at the night market where we can kind of tailor our responses based off of an interaction. So, even though it's not a live interaction it's a lot of fun. And this work requires us touching in with other departments a lot like directly guests we have to reach out to guests and then we have to figure out how they can get equipment to record with us, and how they can work around their schedules because we have our time blocked off but that's not necessarily going to work for anyone we might want as a guest because you know we record during the time that we're open so people need to be able to take an hour plus off desk, and then also meet with us in advance to kind of plan out the episode and make sure that we're all on the same page before going in. And yeah there's behind the scenes work with other departments which we've kind of already talked about just like making sure we get things approved, working with working with marketing and all that. We also like during the reading challenge help desk a lot of people like to do reading challenges with their kids and the reading challenge is kind of seen as an adult program. So one of the reading challenge entries is read a book mentioned on the podcast and most of us talk about adult books there's a few kids books here and there, but one thing we do during the reading challenge help desk because we have youth services right us out of few brief book talks that we read for them, and then that's a book mentioned on the book drop for people to read with their kids. And sometimes we have to work with collection development quite a bit like sometimes we want to really talk about a book that the library hasn't purchased. So we have to email them and say, hey, could you please please please buy this book it really fits the theme of this episode and I really want to talk about it. And that's, that's a lot of fun like our preview episodes to sometimes we have to touch base with collection development, make sure that they're going to purchase a book that hasn't appeared in the catalog yet, which can be a lot of fun. And yeah, so it's more than just the team it's, it's the whole system. So before we go on though, you're going to have to explain what is a micro history. Oh, a micro history is history about a very specific topic. For example, the one that I am going to talk about at our upcoming event the book bash and I have talked about on the podcast before is called sell out. It is the history of all the punk and hardcore bands that signed to major labels between like 1994 and 2007. And so it like each chapter goes into a different band so you know like, if you want to hear about how Green Day sold to a major label and couldn't get gigs in the cool band anymore. You have a chapter on that you have a chapter on like Jimmy world blink 182 just going through that and so it's just a very like hyper focused history of like a very particular topic. There are micro histories of all kind, one that I am saving for the podcast episode on them is called cannibalism a perfect, perfectly natural history. So if you want to hear about that tune into the podcast. I just segue quite that way but we have a lot about food like in our collection as well. A lot of micro history so like books about like the history of butter or salt or milk like the kind of like yeah so. And you can argue cannibalism a perfectly natural history. It's under a micro history. I think in book talk book or book groups and book club seems to go together or my mother's book group that she's in. They actually sell. We are a reading and eating group. Sometimes eating comes takes priority depending on what we're, but yeah. The personal book club is reading and eating group like we find something that is themed around around the book so like sometimes it's Italian food sometimes it's Indian you know but anyway back on. Now I'm going to talk like a lot of this ended up being some of the some of the challenges are some of the harder things you need to adjust to for a podcast versus traditional readers advisory and not trying to be negative here but I do think these things are important to keep in mind if you want to do something so try not to think of these as negatives just things that are different that you need to accommodate for one is that it's an audio only format like when we have to do a book talk for someone just like grabbing a book out of the stacks or if we're at an outreach event and we're up in front of people or if we are at something like the night market. You're with the person and so you get the face to face interaction for the podcast it's audio only so there are components you need to be ready to work around for that, like for instance you can't show the cover. You kind of can if they look at the resources list but I tend to listen to podcasts while doing other things like doing chores or working on some of my off desk things that work or cooking or playing video games. So that visual component isn't there for me even if there is an online resource list so that's just something to keep in mind. And then part of it is learning how to talk about illustrations. For me this is a really big challenge because I'm a big graphic novels reader. And this is especially hard for graphic novels because the pictures aren't just in it they are an important part of it. And there can be experiments with format so for example on the book bash coming up, which is a virtual event where they'll be cameras I'm talking about red Rosa which is a graphic biography of Rosa Luxemburg who was a Jewish Polish socialist between the World Wars, but it's there are parts where the layout is really experimental like showing a time when she was in jail during World War one. And so I'm going to need to hold up the book and talk about the way the panels are laid out. And when I talked about it on the podcast. I have to learn how to start using appeal terms and just work around that. So that's just one thing to keep in mind. Another thing that is huge is it's a one way interaction like even when you're doing a book talk for an for a live audience where you can see them. You're able to get you know like the visual affirmations you can tell people are checking out that kind of thing. Yeah we're having a conversation with each other and we can tell if what we're talking isn't clicking with our co hosts but we're also talking to like hundreds of people and other places. And we can't pivot if something isn't working. You know like at the desk if someone says they like a certain genre and you start talking about what you liked in that genre and you see their eyes start to glaze over. And say, well but we also have this, not an option at all so you just have to deliver it like it's working and that can be kind of hard sometimes. And you also have to make peace with the. You can edit out some of them, you can't edit out all of them. And so like you have to like getting to know your vocal ticks is part of it and the one way. And then you also have to be wary a lot of insider lingo, like our audience isn't primarily librarians so if we off the cuff say thing looks like ILL. People don't necessarily know that is we have to say, and you can also get this on interlibrary loan and maybe even describe what that is. So you don't. I'm going to make this isn't a podcast for live by librarians for librarians it's a podcast by librarians for the general public and so it's really one thing to keep in mind and sometimes it's something you have to fix in the edit. But then we've been talking about engaging with listeners so I want to talk about something that is used a lot as a negative term online which is the parasocial relationship, people will feel like they know you. Well, we've had some fans and critics some people really don't like like the arms and meeting fans is a lot of fun and as a library outreach event. We definitely want to be engaging fans especially locally, but it can be kind of awkward I've met a few fans and they've been like, I love the podcast and then like for a second it's like, yeah. I'm a musician but the thing about the local punk scene as we all know each other so like when you meet a fan and that it's okay and then a month later, you're jamming on misfit songs in their basement but like for the podcast, it can be just kind of disarming at first You have to learn how to just kind of smile and nod when you get a compliment or a criticism from someone who's otherwise a stranger and unlike a lot of parasocial relationships like you will never meet your favorite internationally known But if you live in Omaha you will hopefully come to one of our branches and get to know us so this isn't the same amount of negative parasocial relationship that can be with other things so it's just something to keep in mind and engaging with it is a great way to Build an audience and engage with people and engage with our patrons and a more personal way than we might otherwise Except that local celebrities that you have now Local micro celebrity And now I am going to kick things off to Anna Yeah hi all right so I'm going to talk about the future of the book drop podcast so we think about this I think fairly regularly kind of where we where we want to go as we continue moving forward with this project There are a few big kind of buckets of things that we've talked about As far as our future goals are concerned I think the first one and maybe our top priority perhaps is to begin transcription this is something we've talked about for a while and I'd really love to start doing The first obvious benefit of transcription is accessibility If we can provide a non audio alternative for our content not only helps folks that are deaf for hard of hearing but also people for whom English is not their first language Of course for a public library we're all about access so anytime we can make something more broadly available that's going to be a win for us There's also a lot of marketing benefits to transcription slash the SEO on the screen stands for search engine optimization. I'm guessing that's I think that's fairly common. A common thing that people know about now. It's matching your keywords to Google's algorithm so you can max out your your search results to the best of your ability. So we have our podcast content content transcribed this gives Google a whole lot more words to to search through so that means more opportunities for our content to end up in various search engine results. This also has benefits for other marketing purposes if we have chunks of our podcast already nicely typed out and available. So it's easy to pull like an interesting quote for an article or some other marketing tool or to pull out like an interview. If you want to make that available someplace else so it just makes that content. Really accessible and easy to use for other purposes, which is great kind of maximizes our content there and another benefit of transcription is that we don't have to do it ourselves. I don't think we would ever do it probably we're all I think pretty much max out or near max out our capacity for work. So yeah finding the time to do transcription would be really challenging it's a time consuming and tedious tasks so luckily there are a lot of options out there we haven't chosen a particular company yet but we do have a few options that are low cost. We also provide like tiered levels of service so we would need something really basic for our podcast transcription so we could probably get in at like the lowest level of whatever tier that company would offer and be just fine with that going forward. Another thing we have talked about is increasing our listener engagement. I just mentioned transcription that would help with theoretically that would help with our increasing our listener engagement just by making our content in front of available in front of more eyes right so that will boost our reach. We also are looking at doing some special events we have an event coming up in September, a live podcast event for our 100th episode which is kind of wild to process but I think that will be really fun and a little anxious about it but also excited will. So we'll do our podcast kind of like normal but we won't have the comforts of knowing that Aaron will work her editing magic for us when we're done so. And they'll be really fun and we'll be a chance to have you know just like a conversation in a way with our listeners like David was talking about how it's you know our communication is really one way. So it'll be really nice to have more of kind of an immediate feedback and be able to have like kind of a real time dialogue with with our listeners if folks want to participate in that way. So I think that'll be really fun and we're all like I think we're open to other ideas like that so depending upon how that goes maybe we'll do more of those maybe it will be a disaster and we'll never do it again but we're up for experimentation on the big trap which is wonderful. You know you don't know how something will go until you try it sometimes so we talked we talked about social media. A little bit in this presentation, we have our query of the week, and we also kind of tie that to our reading challenge at times so we try to solicit responses from not just other library staff but also the public and sometimes we just aren't able to make that happen. It's a timing that we need to make that possible. So we'd like to be tighten that process up a little bit so it's more streamlined so we can regularly get that listener input. It's really fun I think for listeners to hear like their names announced in the air and with like their answer to whatever the query is it makes it feel more more personal and also you know sometimes we have reactions to those answers or if it's a coworker we might have follow up with them or it might spark some other conversation depending upon their answers it's just it's a way to get to know our listeners and to know each other which is a really lovely thing to be able to do. Also related to social media so of course we always want to stay, you know we're part of Omaha Public Library we're an Omaha Public Library program slash service. That's why we exist we're here to boost OPLs resources and materials so we want to always maintain that connection but we also want to make it easy for folks to like kind of beeline to the book drop if they want to. We have our own email address. That's not something that is like really widely publicly used but we've talked about how it would be nice to have a way for someone to kind of find us easily within the bigger picture of OPL like I know on Facebook. We have an OPL page of course there's an option to add like groups underneath your your big umbrella organization so we've talked about. Like could we have like a book drop page where it's still obviously connected to the public library but it's also like something you can get to directly without having to do a lot of sifting around on your own so like we want to like always maintain that balance of having our own identity but also maintaining that kind of tie to the bigger our parent organization I guess for lack of a better phrase. The other thing we've been talking about and this is kind of a recent recent thing to consider I guess so is a diversity audit. I think all of our listeners are library people today so maybe a diversity audit is something you've already heard of a lot of libraries are doing this these days and we began one at OPL in 2021 February we started with an in house diversity audit that sense evolved into an audit that's being conducted by two external companies one for our ebook collection and one for our physical materials and we're still doing some in house work for our niche collections. And it's an ongoing process but it's been I'm so excited where we're doing that I think it'll be really great for us going forward. So the key goals of our audit is, you know, to assess and measure the representation in your collection like who's stories. Are you telling his voices are at the table who is not there. What are we representing through our through our materials. We also want to use it to improve both staff and patron discovery because we're doing some subject heading work in line with that as well and then we just want to make sure our collection is intentionally inclusive and the podcast to be intentionally inclusive as well. So, we want to we talked a little bit about translating the diversity audit process to the podcast, it would look pretty similar but we would add one thing we don't capture with the, the collection audit is the background of the item and we would want to do that for the podcast so you know we want to maintain as broad of an appeal as we can for our listeners like we all have our favorite kind of areas that we read in but we're also I think all pretty open readers where maybe we won't read it something in every genre but will be will consider it like well I think we're pretty flexible in what we will, what books will pick up so we want to the podcast to be for everybody so we want to kind of start capturing the types of books we're talking about to and also whose voices were presenting. The value of diversity audit is that it gives us this information in an objective and measurable way like you know we can like I feel like we talk about diverse things on the podcast but feeling like something is real versus having the data to back it up as a different thing so we want to obtain that data and then another benefit of that too is that as we go forward we can look back and see how we evolved over over time to which is a nice thing to be able to do. Yeah, so I think in keeping with our podcast format we have a final query for our attendees today. We would love to hear what would you like to hear about on the book drop or any other book centric podcast. Yeah. Yeah, so if anybody has and you want to answer the question you can type into the question section of your go to webinar interface. And we'll see what people may be interested in. As you said this audience of course we're librarians. So it'll be different than your general I'm sure librarians listen to your podcast you might mind up. So yeah let us know type in the question section in your go to an interface what would you like to hear about on the book drop. While we're waiting to see what people type in we do have some other questions that did come out come in while you were talking earlier so we'll get into some of that too. And also if you do have any other questions on any questions you want to ask of the group here. I'll go ahead and type into your go to webinar interface as well in the questions or the chat section. I'll also mention to these slides will be available afterwards along with the archive recording. Erin will send them to me and we'll have that available to you as well so you'll have all of this good info. Yeah if anyone is curious where to find us. This is where I kind of any place you can find a podcast I think we have tried to be everywhere that's most people go to look for them spotify Stitcher Apple we have a presence on the website our websites Omaha library.org and we also have an email address if you want to hit us up directly you are more than welcome to we are at the book drop at Omaha library.org and we really appreciate you guys taking the time to listen to us today. I think we all feel really lucky to get to work on this project I know it's a highlight of my, my time at work for sure. I'm really grateful for it and yeah we if you listen we'd love to hear what you, what you think. Yeah. Alright so someone just have a question earlier when you're talking about what you use you can go ahead and keep that slide up if you want to while we're chatting or the one with a question on it want to get people answer question. So when you're talking about that you start out using zoom and then switch to something else. Why not about the cost of that is zoom cheaper obviously I think zoom, generally speaking can be free, depending on what you need to use it for how long. What is the cost of what you're using now. I can tell you give me a second. It is so all of those like riverside bus brow any software I think that we've purchased is. They're all tiered. So we pay. Let me do some quick math. So I mean right zoom you could do if you keep your meetings what is it 40 minutes that could be free. Yeah, we can't we can't do that anymore. We fail at that. Oh, so we pay $15 a month for Riverside, and it, it that covers more than the hours we need that gives us a little room to breathe on there. I think that's our price if we paid it for the year and bus proud is something very similar for hosting. I feel like they're all around like it's in a $15 to $20 range per month. And there's a lot. So much you get a lot out of, like your hosting site, like those analytics it gives us our SS feed. And then we can embed players which we use on our website. And I think it helps, you know, we, we registered with maybe like five different podcast apps and then a lot of those are connected so what I showed on the other slide is just a fraction or really on like, I don't know when you to 30 ish apps most of them I've never heard of before. So when you do a couple things a lot of other things happen on those kinds of sites. I have seven here with my encompass live show this isn't a podcast it's a web show but we have people that say they've seen us on all sorts of different library websites or sharing of webinars that you can attend or free CE like anything anyone kind of grabs it and depending on our topics as well. And then sometimes certain topics end up getting shared into certain lists serves that are about that like about historical archives or about corrections or something and, and you just never know who's going to find all out there publicly on the internet so who knows. What about the cost of transcription someone wants to ask I know you said and you're just starting to get into that. Do you have any idea on what that could possibly be. Yeah, a handy I don't even remember what companies we have kind of settled on. I know there's multiple ones. Yeah. It again is not very much I think because what our needs are so low compared to other places or like podcasts or even services that are using things like that. I feel like the service we were circling. Again it felt like it's Otter, and it was. Like, I definitely in, I feel like in the 10 to 20 for more than we would need. I want to say like $15 a month is what I was. Yes. $20 a month for Otter. And I felt like that's the business. There's like an $8 a month, which maybe that's actually no 6000 minutes per month which is way more than we use on a podcast. How long just, you know, how much. Based on the recording so like the transition process project though would we would, you know, we have 95 episodes that haven't been transcribed so we would try to start transcribing going forward and then work backwards as well. Everything. Yeah, but so yeah maybe, you know, 10 bucks a month that stuff adds up for sure but definitely need our needs. Someone has a suggestion to I'm not sure I know you said even researching but since I'm mentioning here they said, dragon professional is a program you can purchase that works for transcriptions. Okay, cool. Thank you. All right, so, okay, I try. Check off all the things you asked here so one thing that was like to hear about on the podcast, or also something if you want to. Now, what, what, what, what, what about when you're in a book club or a book group. And I think Michelle you were talking about reading things that you don't really like that aren't in your wheelhouse and so I want to find things I like. How do you deal with the book that you started reading, and you really hate it, but I'm supposed to talk about it with our book group. I know for you all you're supposed to give a book talk so you. I suppose have to finish it, but do you. I know in book clubs sometimes they say, if you don't like it. Well just in read for reading in general if you don't like it, it's okay to put it say stop I'm done I just can't even finish this book, and you come to your book club and say, is what happened to me. I have no idea how it ends because I just couldn't get through it. We're very pro putting a book down if you don't like it. I think as a, as a general rule. So yeah, like for me if I plan to talk about a book on an episode and get into it I'm like, I'll try to find a different book if I can, if I truly do not have time. I feel like I'll still give a book talk for but maybe not a super enthusiastic. We try to not speak poorly of books I guess you know we believe to like every book has its reader right so you don't ever want to be like really harsh about something or too harsh I guess. Yeah, I would say that we were very intentional with the joy of reading so we are trying to talk about like the books that we had good interactions with. I started a book and I was like two hours and I was like, I don't think I want to keep going with this one so I'm not going to. And so as far as like book groups so I would hope that the, that the, your group norms are that you can have. I think that's actually about a book, because that is your personal experience and to me book reader book groups are the place for you to feel share your feelings, and, and kind of either hear somebody else's perspective on why they really connected with it or why they did it. So, I guess, yeah, I say, as I said on that one episode of the podcast, there are too many effing books in the world. So don't waste your time with one that you don't want to read, or that's not going to something that you do you might enjoy yeah yeah. We have disagreed on books at book club I think I'm the only one who's been unrelentingly positive and her book club episodes. But yeah we kind of share it as a personal opinion and we talk about what didn't work and like see as long as you have the voice of positivity on the book club episodes you're fine and then like for book talks we just like if we don't like a book we don't talk about it on that episode. Here's a suggestion or a question and then also possibly suggest about something like to hear on the on the book drop. How many authors have you had on your show. Have you actually brought in authors of the books, and if you have you had or if you had any authors approach you to be on the podcast like local Nebraska ones, I would assume, but I suppose you can call anybody. Sorry, I have a tornado test going on in the background if you guys. Everybody. So, we would love to bring on more guests I think the logistics of that I feel like always went out but we Ted Wheeler, we had Timothy Shaffer this year's Omaha Reads author last year. Matt Mason the state poet Cassandra Montag who was our Omaha Reads author a couple years back so we try to get them when we can I would love to have more. Yeah and if you're an author and you would like to talk to us reach out to us. I think it's over. It's winding down. I'm not the only place where that's happening I'm so sorry. No, it's happening here too, but yeah, I've been. Yeah, it's been happening here. We know we're all right. Here in Lincoln are scheduled our tornado warnings for those of you interested, always a little after 10am on Wednesdays. Yeah, this show is so I am always muted usually the first time after I do my intro I'm like mute because those things are going to go off. Okay, so I've got another question here to see if anyone has any other we are a little after 11 but that's okay we didn't start a little after 10, and we will go as long as everyone has questions we don't get cut off here for anything. So if you do have any questions get it typed into the question section, but we do have one here. And I think you sort of address this earlier but I think expand a little bit on it. How do you keep the podcast fresh and prevent monotony. That's a very good question. I do have to admit that there's ups and downs. There's days that we like get off of a show of recording we're like man that was really good it was so much fun. But there's, there's days where I think there's stuff going on outside of the podcast and I'm sure that we feel that all a little bit I mean you got to put your game face on when you're making an episode. So some of those future plans, like social media, think, I we're thinking also a lot about how else can we include more of our other staff members how can we bring on more guests from within OPL. I think that would keep it fresh. Part of the one of our thoughts about the diversity audit is what genres are we not mentioning very often or a lot and maybe it's because we don't read those but who does the organization reads in that area that we could bring on so maybe if you episode from the future are less maybe it's one of us and like for other staff members who all read, like really steamy romances or westerns item trying to think what genres we don't talk about a ton. So, hopefully, there's stuff like that I think it's always constantly trying to brainstorm, but there's definitely ups and downs. I would say in our planning meetings, I mean, again, we're all professionals in as library and so we're also like reading book write articles and other library journal articles and all that kind of stuff and so kind of looking through that also through our podcast lens of like different type of topics that we would want to talk about or a new like just doing an episode on based on covers or, you know, be a little more creative so that the theme is really expansive. That way, again, we have more to select from to be able to talk about. Sorry. We've been a pretty we have like a long running list of like just kind of brainstorming ideas. So any of us can just go and add to that running list anytime we have any thing brilliant to add to the idea was and I think like keeping it tied to things like like we now that we've done this for a few seasons we have like a really good rhythm I feel like and also a good understanding of like what our capacity is like we can't do an episode every week where we're talking about books because we don't have time to find all those books and read them and talk about them in a thoughtful and intelligent way so like balancing like a news episode or like an episode where no one might have a guest or an episode that is like we do like library secrets episodes sometimes like kind of behind the scenes stuff and I think tying like so we always but we do regularly have things tied to the reading challenge and the reading challenge changes every year so that's an easy way to have something new to talk about kind of regularly our book club episodes or something we have scheduled kind of I think we're doing them three times a year now just like spaced out just in a way that works for our personal workflows but also that makes sense for the organization like we also we really I think we're also not afraid to kind of like what we want to be like broad in our reading interests like I we're also okay like kind of leaning into what we are kind of pet reading areas are to like every October we're like it's spooky book time so we'll like find different ways to talk about like a spooky scenario or like a I don't know haunted book or something but when I yeah when I first joined this team I you know the well read collective not the book drop itself because I was already part of the well read collective at that point but like I was kind of wondering if I should embrace my embrace my role as a niche reader or try to read more what everyone was reading and I decided to lean into being a niche reader but then figure out why my niche appealed to me and then understand more appeals in general and that was a lot of fun and then sometimes one thing I wanted to say is sometimes just are kind of weird episode ideas are some of our best ones like we did one that was based off of books with pink covers and that's yeah that's one of my favorite episodes we've ever done so so random yes I remember the book and this cover was pink or the title this was pink yeah and that someone just has had a suggestion for you said what would you like to hear about possibly doing shows on books that have become movies or TV shows and is which for some people this has been we did a show a while ago on this which is better the book or the movie and sometimes there's dissent a scent among dissent among that not everyone agrees yeah love it absolutely I have some divisive opinions about yeah and yeah people are very very take it very personally when their favorite book becomes something on TV or movies yeah I know one last question I think we'll do since we're getting a little late here you mentioned the three seasons when do your seasons actually run from what is your broadcast dates so we do it as calendar year so our first season was just April to December and we kind of take off the second half of December to take a break with holidays and November is usually a light month to because of the holiday and then we start back up in January so we have done about two and a half years but that first season because we were doing four episodes a month or every single week the episode number in that season I think is equivalent to what we're doing in the second and third season sure all right I would also say I forgot to say in our lessons learned we were also book talking about like full book talks three or four titles each each episode which was also exhausting so that was a big lesson learned of hey we don't need to again there are a lot of books in the world and so we have time to talk about them so that's when we kind of cut that down to two titles each for an episode you can get more into them too exactly do you have a limit for how long you want your episodes to be or we started out like 30 minutes and we with when we have five people on I think we've even had six when we have guests so when you have that many people just even a normal discussion it you're going to be closer to an hour so I think the sweet spot is like 45 to 50 minutes but we have a lot of episodes close to an hour and I think some of our longer ones are probably like 70 something minutes you got really into something yeah so we I was very cautious about this I was worried at the beginning when we would get close to an hour that I was going to get in trouble but I think if the contents worth it then the contents worth it and I don't no one's telling us no anymore people can listen as long as they have time for and then come back and pick up where they left off for sure yeah they can do it in that all at once yeah yeah we have done a couple of mini episodes to I think it's been a minute and those are like like maybe 1015 minutes and those are nice like where it's just maybe one of us and they can be done in kind of like in response to like maybe an issue that's come up or something that we want to address but maybe not appropriate for like a full length episode David do you want to talk more about about it all yeah the mini episodes are great if you have a guest who can't commit to an hour and also since they're not part of like the normal weekly routine we can just kind of do them whenever we can kind of work around the schedule to do them to since they're not part of the regular schedule cool all right well it doesn't look like anybody typed in a last minute desperate questions they wanted to ask of you also I think we will wrap it up for today and do my wrap up here so I'm going to get my screen up here there we go all right so thank you all for being here this is great I was so glad to hear about your what you all made this happen and as you said at the beginning Aaron this is something born of the pandemic and that lots of libraries did something on the fly okay we're all at home now what do we do and I'm hoping I think lots of these things will continue long after because they work they're great people like them podcast been around for a long time other virtual things and events libraries have done and made it so much more accessible to people who could not come into library pre pandemic before for things people who are handicapped can't make it have anxiety issues people who have kids but I can't take the time to take them to the library and do their 20 minutes and then take them home that's a lot but I can sit in front of the story time that's being broadcast live on Facebook live and that works great. It's really helped out I think everything I saw I'm hoping just like yours is obviously you click you're still going to go strong keep going. These kind of things will continue. So thank you all for being here today. We will wrap up here now my screen going here. So, as I said this show has been recorded, and it will be available on our and compass live website. If you use whatever is your search engine of choice and type in and compass live the name of our show. It's the only thing that will come up. Nobody's log user name. And you'll get our main page here, or if our upcoming shows but then our archive shows are listed right underneath. There's a recent one at the top of the page here. So today show will be there will have the recording will have a link to the slides as well. By the end of the day tomorrow as long as go to webinar and YouTube cooperate with me. It should be up and ready. Everyone who attended today show, excuse me and register for today show will get an email from me directly let you know that it's up and ready. We're going to post out into our social media we're taught you're you only talking about that do have a Facebook page for encompass live. So if you like to use Facebook and give us like over there, we do promotion. Here's reminder about logging in today show meet the presenters that our PR people here do. And when our recordings are available we post in here as well. We also post out to Twitter and I think Instagram using the hashtag and come live. And that there, while we're here on the archive page also mentioned there's a search feature here, you can look up and see if we've done topic on a particular show, a show on a good topic. You can search the whole archives or this was just the most recent 12 months if you want to. That is because this is our full show archives and I'm not going to scroll all the way to the bottom because it's huge. We're going to when encompass live premiered which was in January 2009. So we have over 10 years worth of recordings here. And we'll keep them up there available as long as there's someplace to host them right now everything's on YouTube. We're librarians we, this is one of the things we do keep things for historical purposes so we always have them up there, but just do pay attention to the original broadcast date. It will be great and fine and stand the test of time be good resources but things will become old now dated information and resources may have changed drastically. Some things might not exist anymore. Some products or services, some things going on. People may no longer work at the places where they were when they were at our show. So just pay attention to that when you are watching any of our shows. As you can see here and come as live does officially broadcast 10 to 11am central time. As you can see from our archives, we tend to not stick to that. More often than not we go a little over, but that's fine, but not too much. So that will wrap it up for today's show. Hope you join us next week and we'll be talking about reinventing programming kits. Dr. Sue from our Hastings Public Library here in Nebraska has done take on kits. So something else in response to the pandemic, and she will talk about what she has done with that. So please sign up for that show any of our future episodes. Thanks again everyone. Thank you Aaron Michelle David and Anna it was great to see you all and listen to the book drop. It's a great podcast. Bye bye everybody.