 All right. Good morning. Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. Day after the Christmas holiday for those of you who were very busy yesterday as I was. Welcome. Glad you're here to joining us today. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. The show is broadcast live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesday, that's fine. You can always watch our recordings later. We have them all on our website and I'll show you at the end of today's show where to access our archives. Both the live show and the archives are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anybody who you think might be interested in any of our topics. At the Nebraska Library Commission, we are the state agency for libraries in Nebraska and it's all types of libraries. So we will have things on the show that are for academics, K-12, public libraries, correctional facilities, special museums on anything that's a library or is library related, live on the show. You can find all sorts of things out there. We do a mixture of things here, book reviews, interviews, did many training sessions sometimes, demos, any products and services that we may think of will be of interest to any libraries out there and updates on services and things that are going on. We do bring in guest speakers sometimes to the show from around Nebraska and around the country. But today we have, we also have the Nebraska Library Commission staff and that's what we have today. Skechels is our director of our Talking Book and Braille service here at the Nebraska Library Commission, which is just across the hall from where our offices are. And he's going to talk about all the new things that are coming to TBBS, which is very exciting, changes coming up. So I will just hand you over to Scott to take you away and share. Now you can use either the keyboard or the mouse. Okay. Sometimes the keyboard is a little... Yeah, that sounds good. Perfect. Well, hello everyone. Thank you for tuning in. And yeah, because we have such a varied audience that tunes into the show, the presentation I have for you is kind of a combination of practical stuff for Talking Book libraries but also some more philosophical, to think about some of the philosophical implications of this change or even how it might apply to public libraries or academic libraries in the future as things switch to being more flexible in terms of being file formats rather than always a physical object. So as you're tuning in, if you're not out of Talking Book library, maybe there will be some things you can think about from that kind of perspective on how to handle digital archives and that sort of thing. So without further ado, it's pretty... Hi Sue, we did get a message from you there too. Yeah, things are pretty quiet here too. The only creature string is the mouse on this computer. So we'll see how that goes. So without further ado, let's jump in and talk a little bit about a new process called duplication on demand, which we just began to use in late October of this year here in Nebraska. I believe we were the seventh library to switch over to this. This system was created by the National Library Service, who is essentially kind of our parent organization. The National Library Service is a division of the Library of Congress and they're tasked with providing Talking Book service throughout the country. Each state kind of handles it themselves. Some states with larger populations may have multiple libraries like a regional and several sub-regional libraries. In the case of Nebraska, we serve the entire state. We have about 3,600 patrons spread throughout the state and we primarily mail things to them. They can also download things, but hey, I guess we're about to talk about some of those different technologies as well. So I'll go ahead and move to the first slide here. I'm going to start by talking a little bit about the history of talking books in terms of being physical objects. This is very similar obviously to handling books and other materials, physical materials in any kind of library, public or academic or whatever. So we too have been historically taking materials and shelving them, figuring out how best to deliver them to patrons, who in the case of Talking Book libraries may not necessarily be physically close to the library. So they have a lot of situations where we have to figure out how things can be mailed. So with the history of the technology behind Talking Books, if you go all the way back to the early 1930s, Talking Books started on 33 and a third RPM records. At the time, the proprietary commercial format was still 78 RPM. And so it was considered a proprietary format at the time, which helped to protect copyright. What happened in the early 30s is at the beginning of the Talking Book service, it was decided that in order to serve veterans and blind adults, books could be recorded and then placed onto these records and circulated within essentially a closed system. People who signed up and applied to use the service verified that they had a visual impairment that was bringing them to the service at the time. And so in order to protect copyright, which didn't really become an issue in the 30s of course, but later when audiobooks became a commercial product, we have to always have a way to keep our materials kind of within our network, if that makes sense. So at first we started on 33 and a third RPM. Eventually that became eight and a third RPM on 10-inch records. With the slower speed, you can get more audio on each record, since it's turning more slowly the physical groups can contain more material and play a little bit longer. And then it was also still a proprietary and protected sort of format that way. That was the dominant format for Talking Books from the early 30s up until about the mid-to-late 70s. They began experimenting with cassette, which became the dominant format for many decades after that. The cassette format they ultimately settled on. It uses a regular audio cassette like everyone would have been used to in the 70s, 80s, 90s, except on a typical cassette you have side A and side B. There's each stereo, so there's a left and right channel. So essentially there's four tracks of audio on each conventional cassette. For our books, since we're doing mono recordings of people reading the books, we use those four tracks independently. So you get four individual tracks on each tape. The tapes run at half of commercial speed, which I believe I put the wrong thing on there. One and seven eighths inch IPS is the standard commercial speed. I was actually running at 15-16, so I'll have to change that in my slide. It turns into you if you're using 90-minute tapes and putting about 88 minutes per side. It's getting almost six hours per cassette that way. So it was a pretty robust format. They had cassette players that were pretty handy, pretty mechanically sturdy. They lasted, gosh, I mean we did do mechanical repairs to them all the time, but they were pretty robust machines, all things considered. It's just like you need to be shipping them around. I mean I don't want to send a machine to someone, they pretty much hold on to that and then just get the cassettes, but still these things are going more to the mail than usually ones you might have at home. They can't stand up to that. They do take a bit of a beating over time. Some of them end up in care facilities and switch between different patrons of different times as people kind of come and go from facilities. So they can take some injuries and of course they're not being set up like an audiophile stereo set up or something so people might have their coffee sitting next to them and they still have that kind of thing. So the machines do take a beating. That still applies to the current digital machines too of course, which are also quite robust. So that cassette format lasted from the end of the 70s, three to 80s and 90s and the odds, and in about 2008 we started to transition over to the digital talking book format. This format is predicated on the books being made of a set of audio files and then navigation files that kind of tell the system which audio files to play and what sequence that sort of thing. All those files are encrypted in order to protect copyright and then the size limitations as a physical medium are basically limited only by the storage capacity of the medium that you're using. The book files tend to be fairly small. The audio is encrypted down to what's called a 3GP format. It's basically a cell phone ringtone format. That makes the original audio reduced to about a 30 with the original wave files that were recorded to initially create the books. So they tend to be fairly small. Virtually any book ever can be placed on to like a four gigabyte drive. Those are just absolutely enormous. In the typical book you're looking at 150 to 250 megabytes, so they're actually pretty small files to contain an entire book. It's pretty remarkable. And I think technology is getting better and better for storage. Absolutely. So all of these basically are things that are physical formats. Here again is a photo of the record player that was circulated to patrons. If someone signed up to use the service we sent books to them and then also one of these record players and then similarly this is the C1 cassette player that was ubiquitous for quite a few generations up until well I started here in 2005 and we still had... Yeah. They were still very much around. There are a few patrons that still like to use them so we just keep a tiny handful around. But basically they've been declared obsolete at this point. So I wanted to talk about the difference in circulation models that one starts to be able to think about philosophically now that things are files rather than necessarily physical formats. So with physical materials you're looking at regardless of whether they're analog or digital they're being stored on physical media which means that for your purposes as a library they're stored on shelves. They get circulated to the patrons however that happens to be whether it's in a public library and someone's pulling materials off the shelves by themselves or whether we're mailing them out to people. We do have some walk-ins here as well that will come in and check stuff out. But either way when they're finished with materials and they get returned to us then we have to inspect them make sure all the parts of a book are there and then reshell all those materials check them back into our computer system to show that they're available and then send them out again. With books as digital files the model becomes potentially more flexible. It depends I guess on what you can do. So you can consider that books as digital files can be circulated through traditional means in some physical format but additional methods do become possible. You can respond to evolving technology in terms of changing file formats or changing what types of devices the books are playable on and then you can start to consider what kinds of distribution approaches you want for the future. So the big contrast here I think is the paradigm of physical materials that are stable essentially they're a shelf stable singular object that's not going to magically transform into some other object versus thinking of books as I'm going to mention here as a distribution approach a flexible open sort of situation in which the book itself can be presented in a variety of different methods. The primary method that we've been using since about 2008 is the digital talking book cartridge. This is a specialized shape basically just a flash memory stick a fund drive like people use placed into a shape that's approximately the size of a cassette that has an orientation on one side to help align it to get into the machine and then each cartridge under this model was basically designed to be holding one Booker magazine and then it's labeled with arch print and Braille identifying what that Booker magazine is. So essentially this too is kind of a shelf stable product at least as presented this way. We still had a lot of advantages over the analog materials that we had they sound better right out of the box there's much better storage capacity by that I mean if you have records or tapes of a book you usually have multiple records or tapes of a book sometimes massive amounts of multiple records and tapes of a book so keeping track of all that stuff excuse me and playing it in sequence could become kind of a difficulty so with these pretty much every book is on one cartridge you don't have to worry about switching between cartridges to finish the same thing they also have very much enhanced navigational ease and depth we can put navigation markers into the files and so you can switch between chapters, between magazine articles in more advanced situations you could switch say in a cookbook you could go between the main sections and then drill down to the different recipes in a section and then drill down to the ingredient levels in a section things like that so they're much easier to use those things I think especially shine in non-fiction situations you can go through and if you're a student researching you can really drill down to very specific areas within a larger non-fiction text to find what you need there are two models or I should say there are two models we still very much are using these two models of the digital talking book are available to patrons the standard and the advanced I think I have a photo of them here they're basically identical other than an extra set of buttons you'll see on the right of your screen to help you to use some of the more advanced navigational techniques like I was just describing you can actually get to all those things on the standard player as well you just press and hold the fast forward button the green button that's kind of just above the hole where the books go is the play and stop button and you've got rewind and fast forward on either side of that those are probably the most important buttons then that little yellow set of buttons is for volume up and down with those you can pretty much do everything you need one interesting thing about these that we discovered between the transition from analog to digital had to do with the fact that you can get an entire book on one cartridge means that if you put a book on and you're a little sleepy it's like 9 o'clock at night and you usually go to bed at 10 the tape or the record that you're listening to finish whatever side it was on and stopped the digital book is going to keep on, keep it on so there's a little sleep button in the shape like a little press of mood you can press that to set it to turn itself off so you don't end up like way out of place and not remember where you were in your book so that can be sort of helpful for that sort of thing too like on your TV you have a sleep thing at a certain time absolutely because there's no point in just leaving it going so you can kind of make adjustments to those things so now that we have these multiple distribution approaches we've just looked at the physical method for distributing the digital talking book files here's another way you can use the barred website this is a download website that's provided to us by the National Library Service barred stands for Braille and audio reading download through this site you basically are given a login and a password a patron can then login on a computer find books that they want download those books as zip files to their computer unzip the books and then we can provide you with a blank digital talking book cartridge so they can be purchased as well online in three places and then copy the files over to your cartridge and then play them on the player that we provide there's a bookshelf feature that was added to the software of the machine because when people started to use barred they were downloading more than one thing at a time of course and it seemed more convenient to put multiple files onto each cartridge rather than just one because here we don't have that same issue that we have in the library with needing to keep a single book on a single cartridge to have on the shelf to be found and delivered to someone since this is sort of a user triggered event it makes more sense to let them use the media in a different way so they are able to download and put multiple things on a single cartridge and then use what's called this bookshelf feature you basically press and hold the play stop button and it takes you to the bookshelf and then you can navigate back and forth with the rewind and password buttons on either side of it to find the material that you want to listen to first and then hit the play button and jump to that book so that was an interesting technology that was added to the player on the software side of things after it had already been released because it became obvious that it needed to be used so this again is one of those things where you can think about it as a way of being able to take these files that comprise the book and then respond to user needs as technology continues to evolve and find better, more efficient and user friendly way to deliver those materials this is kind of what the barred download website looks like when you first go to it there's a bunch of search things that you can go into there and find the books that you need and download them to eventually put on a cartridge but another way to do this is to use mobile apps for the last few years we've had barred apps which basically access that website through apps everything gets an app that's what people want, it's what they're using it is, it absolutely is for talking books this was kind of a big paradigm shift as well because of the proprietary file format issue that we've always had to protect copyright this became kind of an interesting situation by design all of our materials up to the point of these apps were always designed to only work with playback equipment that we delivered to patrons rather than working with commercial devices so this was kind of an interesting sea change to see a way of using the talking book collection online without having to use a proprietary player of some kind but again it's sort of responding to the way people live their lives and there's no point in carrying around a backpack or proprietary gadgets to access similar types of things so the barred apps were designed for both ILS and Android devices and they can be used in a pretty similar way as the download site with the primary difference being that you can play the materials directly on the mobile device itself whereas with the barred website using a laptop or a desktop computer you still have to put the files onto a cartridge you can't play them directly on your computer so that is kind of a, it seems like a small difference but it's a pretty big difference if you're a person who's been having to carry a talking book player around as well as your friend for a long time so as well as people that use say like the Kindle Fire or an iPad if you're using that for all kinds of things and just have it with you everywhere you can use one of these apps and continue to read talking books without having to need a secondary device everywhere really makes it a lot easier for people unfortunately we don't have the budget or infrastructure to provide those sorts of players to people so this is just a it's a convenience for people who already have a device and can use it so it's another option you could say and we're still glad to deliver things using other methods as well the mobile app looks pretty similar to the machine this is just kind of a screen cap of what the app looks like when you're on the playback screen the buttons are designed to look very similar on ILS devices in particular I think Apple has done a really good job with their voiceover so you can use the device without sight very smoothly and easily and figure out how to get around the screen pretty efficiently it's really roughly about the same level of difficulty to use the bar mobile app on sighted or on sighted it's a pretty straightforward app and pretty solidly designed so duplication on demand is most of what I want to kind of focus on today though so that is kind of our setup of how things are going duplication on demand rather than being focused on the patron side of things kind of starts to analyze how evolving technology affects the back end of things from the library side so essentially what's happening here is this is a modified version of making a digital talking about cartridge and distributing them to patrons but it incorporates some of the advantages that we've seen from the download of the models as well in this case cartridges ultimately are still delivered to patrons via the mail we're duplicating cartridges on a special system which I'll show in a minute people can come in and pick them up if they're here locally or we can mail them around the state as we have for many many decades to people all over the state the cartridges will still play on the machines that we provide the standard or advanced digital talking to players but the cartridges can have multiple books and magazines on them if people so choose this again is totally flexible so we can make it so that everyone wants to have a bunch of books on a cartridge we can do that for them if they prefer just to have one we can do that for them or we can even combine those things too we can make a default setting that they get more than one book on a cartridge but if they have some particular need that comes up we can just send them a single book on a cartridge as well it can really be adjusted as patrons need from that perspective and then this is integrated with our circulation software which is called Webreads and this improves our own ability as well I think to select and deliver books which will continue to see improvements as time goes on as well so it kind of starts as a model thinking about things from the library perspective but I think for patrons who don't have for instance those mobile devices like I was just talking about and only have the player that we provide to them this will allow them to have somewhat easier things to deal with when a cartridge arrives in the mail even if they don't have their own devices to smooth things out on as well so this is a quick snapshot of what the duplication on demand system looks like I've got a little video that we'll see in a minute too I'm kind of describing this on the left is the Gutenberg screen this is some Linux software that was developed by NLS for this system the little slots on the screen app that's open there correlate to the cartridges that are in this giant USB appendage thing over on the right side of the screen so we can do 20 books at a time or 20 cartridges at a time I should say even I'm still adjusting each of those could maybe have 20 or 30 books on them how many can they hold basically whatever the capacity is the system knows the file sizes of each book so if we start to put a whole bunch of stuff on a book and we go over what the capacity of the cartridge is so pretty cool and then we can split it into two cartridges or realistically by then they have 50 books on the cartridges so they're good and we can probably just wait and send them those later as well the advantages of this system for patrons excuse me I think the most interesting thing is that if people want they can get those multiple books on cartridge their advantage is less fussing with mail delivery and return if you get a lot of talking books in the mail we have borrowers who read five to ten books a week sometimes a lot of mailing back and forth your mailbox is constantly full of these giant blue boxes which are smaller than the giant green boxes that cassettes came in but still they add up you know it's a lot of material also very important to this I think there's no waiting for books these copies are all checked out to other patrons as any library dealing with physical materials has dealt with over time let's say a new bestseller comes out the library was able to acquire 20 copies the 20 copies are out of all the system libraries almost immediately and there's a huge waiting list and you know it's frustrating for patrons it's not sometimes it's unavoidable but it's hard to call that good customer service when you can't sit at the book in this case we've had that same sort of situation we get when we were under the single book for cartridge paradigm entirely we got depending on our anticipated popularity for a particular book we typically got between three to nine copies of each book but if it's really popular those nine copies can go off the shelf the first day we put it out this solves that problem we can duplicate the files as many times as we need if some book club locally decides to switch to a book and we have 20 patrons who are in the book club all 20 of them are going to get that book the next day if they want it it's absolutely not a problem so that alone has just been a huge relief like any book anybody wants the answer is yes if the book's available to our system they can have it right away similarly books in series have always been a perpetual problem that too comes up in public libraries you might be reading a book and you just finished book three book four is out in this case not only are all the books in the series always available but typically unless the series is just astronomically large I can put the whole series on one cartridge and send it to you want to read the series here's the series if you need to hold on to that cartridge for a few months to read the whole series you are certainly welcome to do so so that's a great way to do that again fewer cartridges to keep track of around the house too again considering that most of our patrons do have visual impairments sometimes books get lost just from simple little things like you're listening to a bunch of books you happen to set one in an unusual place and you don't happen to come across that place very often this way again it simplifies that sort of thing two or three cartridges at a time they all have multiple books on them kind of easier to keep them near your machine and again streamline housekeeping and that sort of thing this should too help make sure that new books to read are always on hand we do have some books who read so many books that when we have new books come out they read them almost immediately too and sometimes get frustrated because the book will be announced but the duplicated copies haven't arrived yet you haven't gotten them yet oh yeah same thing that's right now if it shows up on the bar that's huge and it hasn't been published yet that can really be tricky so that I think will help a lot too with those like new titles if NLS puts a new title up on bar it's added to my system same day and I can make copies of it right away so it really makes those things smoother so this is trying to show what it looks like to create a series cartridge hopefully that's large enough for folks to see oh perfect a little sip of coffee here so the series cartridge if someone calls into our readers advisors and asks for a particular series they can search by title author or subject but they can also search now by series directly in this duplication on demand paradigm so here I have my account brought up and someone's searching for the Harry Potter series is that what I put up there? you can pull up the whole series and once you've located it you can click add series to cartridge rather than just add one title and put the whole thing on it and you can even adjust things too I thought about little OCD issues that can come up like I remember around the line which is the order of series there was some controversy as to which is book 1 and which is book 2 you could have been publication order or chronological or yes I know there are some wrong stance about it there are up and down buttons on the right you can put the series in the order that they think it's supposed to be in so no arguments with that it's entirely flexible you can read a series backwards if you want to whatever you want it's entirely flexible we can set it up for you the advantages for staff this is really new territory for us again we started in late October so we only had a couple months early the transition has gone much faster than we expected every book is always available for anyone this is kind of, it reminds me of just in time delivery paradigms that you hear about with internet companies it's kind of a similar sort of process obviously less storage space will be needed for book copies we have all these copies waiting around to be borrowed and it's always more than needed this kind of situation is such that it's kind of like if a public library could just instantly digitally print every book that somebody needed that day and they need room for a couple printers as opposed to all the shellful books it's kind of like that effectively it works out that way this is definitely going to cut down on staff time devoted to circulation activities right now with mail cards to the traditional model that we've used first thing in the morning you print a bunch of mail cards for what's going out that day then you pull the books for the outgoing mail then the mail tubs come in, you inspect the books coming back check the notes in those books make sure the right books are in those boxes test any cartridges that have notes about some sort of problem check them all back in, put them back on the shelves to start that whole process again in this case you run a little batch to trigger books going out to people scan the cartridges as you scan the cartridges it prints their mail card so you're just scanning in one spot and then you put the mail card in there and you're done, it's kind of a much more streamlined process overall also we're seeing that our overall mail volume is dropping because of the circumstance of putting multiple books on a single cartridge I think later in here I've got the exact numbers I pulled up to last week anyway for our most current statistics showing all this stuff so the old model here on the left you'll see shelves of digital talking books sent to us from NLS and all these blue boxes our traditional mail card is shown on the right there and basically the big barcode on there we scan to identify the patron and then there's a barcode on the side of the box that we scan to identify the item going out so we'd have to run around with book trucks load all these things up and then scan all of them to check them out and then sort them as a code order into the mail and now it's just a much more straightforward process the duplication on demand books are being circulated in kind of a transparent clear sort of whitish looking in this photo mailing container so this photo I took about two weeks into the process and already in two weeks our outgoing circulation showed as you can see here is almost 50-50 between the two formats it happened very quickly and so we still have those physical books to zip code because again in terms of distribution approaches to digital talking books still this whole system is predicated on the physical circulation process but it just changes the nature of what a physical process is in I think a really substantial way and our discovery so far yeah here's my statistics here so we started on October 25 my gosh this one exactly team on essentially as of last week December 19th we had switched over a little less than half of our patients 1658 by my count in that time we've sent about 4,624 cartridges in the duplication on demand system those cartridges contain 11,681 books which averages out to just around 2.5 books per cartridge we can put more on there we can put less on there again it depends on what patients request what they want it's going to affect that yeah there are we use a lot of people through care facilities like we'll send materials I think the mail card I showed there a moment ago was one of those where we'll just send materials to the activities coordinator of a nursing home care facility that sort of thing and then that person distributes the books to the people within their facility in that sort of circumstance of course you pretty much do you want to put one book per cartridge because of the cartridge in the building yeah so in situations like that because I think we do serve a lot of people maybe more than other states I'm not really sure I guess I'll have to get some comparable statistics on that we do serve an awful lot of people through that sort of situation which probably brings our average even down somewhat it could even go higher so but again at any way you look at it that's reducing our mail dramatically so it's kind of an interesting circumstance the other thing that surprised me is that our traditional mail card delivery service has already like last week I think we sent out I should have brought the number up here it was around 50 something books using traditional mail cards the whole week it's averaging out to about 10 books a day what's happening is our readers advisors have been switching people over as they contact us and so of course the people that have been contacting us regularly are the busiest patrons the borrow the most and so as we've hit that 50% mark essentially we've already communicated with and switched over the people responsible for about 95% of the actual books we circulate that did surprise me we have to complete this transition and effectively even though half of the patrons still need to be switched over like functionally we already kind of made the transition the ones that are left are the ones that only do things like maybe once or twice a year exactly so that's been a real surprise and patrons have been really excited about the change that's what I was wondering about through all of this that you've been talking about and also is like how are they taking this you know some people might change is scary but well you know it's interesting with this particular transition I know some libraries in the initial pilot project that was held last year did a lot of communication ahead of time with their patrons saying hey this thing is coming prepared and I decided not to do that and my reason for that is exactly what you just said is people get nervous about change and fundamentally I think this is number one a great change a much more convenient change and we can switch it back so that things are exactly as they were before if they don't like it so I'm just kind of doing it first and asking for forgiveness later in case it's an issue and as it comes out it really hasn't been an issue because if you hear about it and you just don't know like physically how it's going to work you're going to build it up in your head potentially build it up in your head and something all this is going to be terrible I don't know what is coming I'm going to be confused and if you just don't know you don't have to that dwell you don't have that drawing in your mind yeah but yeah I was hearing we made that switch between cassette and digital and that seemed to be the case for a lot of people we did there'll be a lot of like upfront calling I think we even sent out like a postcard mailing telling people hey this thing is coming I think we scared people it wasn't worth it I mean like those books again like so much easier to use than the cassette books it's just a joy to use those machines when you've been using the cassette machine and instead we freaked people out essentially so with this again I think for the most part it's the same machine the same cartridge same buttons do the same things the bookshelf feature has been there forever a lot of books may not have used it but it's been there and we've trained as a million people to use it so our way of looking at it this time has just been just to do it and say oh yeah this is really easy this is what you do and we just kind of tell them that a matter of fact call in sort of way and they're like oh cool and then they do it and everything's great and so that's what we've discovered so far that would be yeah my number one recommendation for any talking book libraries that haven't made the transition yet might be tuned in that would be you know my number one thing is to don't even really talk about it with patrons just do it and you know if they really really really don't like having more than one book on a cartridge you can go into your settings and change them back to getting one book for a cartridge at a time ten cartridges just as they were we've been switching people over to things more like if they're happy with it we'll make sure they can get up to three cartridges at a time so one's at their house one's back here and one's in the mail somewhere in between so they always have at least one cartridge there and then put as many books as they want on a cartridge and maybe five maybe ten so effectively they could have more books on hand and they've had with physical cartridges if you were sending them you know five or ten individual cartridges they might actually have 15 or 20 books now with three books five books for a cartridge so it's an interesting transition they could actually have more material and way less clutter to deal with the same amount of material so again it's been really positive from that perspective I asked viewers last week if they had any negative comments and there really aren't any other than some people being surprised when calling in and once they talk them through it they're completely happy with it and it's not freaking out it's not overwhelming but yeah you build it up ahead of time and I think it has the potential to become overwhelming even though it's much to do about nothing really so that's been a big takeaway I think for me the new cartridges look like this the physical cartridges are sort of a peach color and they all have the same label on them it just has Nebraska Talking Book Library and our address and audio books it also says that this material has a rail embossing on it as well and then the mail cards look a little bit different because you can put multiple things on a cartridge now the card that we're delivering is a two piece card that holds over so the card that you see on your screen on the right has what we're calling a manifest at the top which will list off the books that are on that cartridge as many as fit you can put more than you can really print this one has two in the picture and then the address that it's going to deliver to once someone's finished with it they can simply take the mail card out and recycle it and put the cartridge back in the box after us our return address is already on the box itself that too is new the boxes historically when there was one book per cartridge had a giant large print book number on the bottom that also had the book number in braille these since of course it's different every time they don't have an individual book label the book label is this manifest but also frankly just pop into the player like it'll as it starts to play it'll tell you what book it is easy breezy so that part's really not not too complicated future considerations right now magazines are not integrated with the Gutenberg system so we're just circulating the books this way magazines come to patrons a few different ways there's a magazine on cartridge program that's run by the National Library Service those do come multiple magazines on cartridge but those come to us from contractors there's a few different contractors around the country that serve different geographic regions in the case of Nebraska it's the national audio company in Springfield, Missouri serves patrons here so they'll get multiple magazines on a cartridge but it won't be the same cartridge as we're doing with this system and the magazines we record here we're still putting those one magazine per cartridge and sending those out as we finish the magazines eventually those things will probably be integrated so we can either make a magazine cartridge in a book cartridge or maybe mix and match or again maybe I'll be a patron preference thing I'm not really sure yet we're kind of limited by the software design so we'll have to wait and see what happens with that Braille e-readers are under development by NLS now the benefit to that will be that these books again are all being synchronized even our system here basically it has a copy of a local copy on it of all the materials that are on that bar download website there's a lot of Braille on that website too and Braille of course can't circulate on these cartridges it's a web Braille format that you need a Braille e-reader to use those things have been cost-prohibited for many many many years but NLS is testing a much more affordable one right now and the hope is a year or two from now we'll be able to have those to allow patrons who would like to read Braille using them so we're looking forward to that the Marrakesh tree was ratified by the United States recently I'm not exactly sure how that's going to affect us yet but it'll certainly give us more access to foreign language materials in the coming years those to you again hopefully will be somehow integrated in a way that they can be used with this duplication on-demand system and then I should mention down the road what we're probably looking at is this entire duplication on-demand system is kind of a it's a sub-transition you could say I think the long-term transition that's probably being planned is for a wireless delivery model we have had a pilot machine here the leverage wireless delivery using cellular connectivity with the duplication on-demand system I'm guessing what will happen is the newest generation of machines will come out which will probably be more than one machine I know NLS is looking at a few different models for those now that all would be similar in having wireless delivery capability we'll be able to push and pull books wirelessly to those patrons without meeting the interface of the physical cartridge but for people who live in a place Nebraska is a great example it's a very rural state these files are small by flash drive measurements but by cellular delivery measurements they're pretty big so it depends there may be people who live in areas where cellular connectivity they don't have a Wi-Fi hotspot at home we have all these rural areas I say Wi-Fi hotspot it's just an obvious thing there's not a Starbucks up the road from the farms all over Nebraska so if you've got spotty cell service out there plus no Wi-Fi nearby the duplication on demand model will continue to be used I think for an extended period of time but probably is more of a secondary method as population demographics go the majority of our patrons are in the larger towns in Nebraska Omaha and Lincoln and surrounding areas but there of course are people spread out all over the state so my prediction would be say five years from now it's hard to say when machines will be developed we'll have wireless delivery for people in those larger population areas on demand will continue to provide the trailers to people who live further out so that's what I'm guessing we'll see over time it's not the end of my slide so I will exit this do you have a question from Sue wants to know at this point are you still receiving physical copies from NLS if not do you plan to do so that is a good question at this point we did when we started this in October copy allotment quantities down to one copy of each thing thinking again that it was going to be an 18 month transition once we saw even at the beginning of December how massively our circulation had shifted already over to this I did contact NLS and have it killed to zero for each copy so we will still because those things are on those NLS contracts where the contractors are producing things on annual cycles and we're told that we'll probably still be getting physical copies of books for about the next six months or so even up to a year a few will trickle in but it'll probably look relatively normal for the next six months and those books are basically just going to pile up until NLS lets me send them back to them for Christmas I guess next year you were saying before we started the show we were chatting about that there's rules about how much you can send back there's restrictions they can take it all they'll go over on those contractors and they're not happy about that so we'll have to see what happens with that I know that the plan right now is that the NLS national biennial conference in 2020 is going to be here in Lincoln so I'm hoping they let me get rid of them before that just so they can see what a quote-unquote model do you get what it looks like it doesn't have shelves full of blue boxes so we'll see the library yet that wasn't every time we do conferences and library tours more or less the library is all regardless of the space that they're in what kind of similar because they're just shelves like massive long shelves full of blue boxes and green boxes and orange boxes and so forth this of course will change that whole process to not even much shelving at all honestly because a lot of this we're doing a lot of the circulation on turnaround which means that when someone sends a cartridge back to us we scan that cartridge back in and about 30 seconds later it makes a new cartridge for them we can put it right back in the mail so as far as needing to have extra materials on a shelf we're talking about maybe just a few book cards for the material it's amazing the reduction in stuff a big problem then in a year or two is going to be what do we do with this extra space we have once all these shelves are empty I'm really glad they didn't carve it around the shelves over there that's going to be I'm quite relieved that we moved where most of our books are stored we moved into about four years ago and that would have been really something oh yeah and she was asking how many users had a difficult time using the bookshelf feature not really in fact I brought this up here with me I'll set this by the mic I made a cartridge that has the announcement at the beginning on here that kind of explains to people how it works in order to get to any books you have to use the bookshelf feature to get into any of the materials because of the way the announcement file sits there so let me turn the machine on player on press volume up to increase the volume so when you first get one of these in the mail it'll tell you basically how it works and this is the announcement that you'll hear 24 books bookshelf instructions this cartridge contains several books it was prepared especially for you and contains either the books that you have explicitly requested or books in subject areas in which you have expressed interest you may select the particular book you wish to read from those available on the player's bookshelf to enter the bookshelf press and hold the rectangular play button on the player's front edge for three seconds when you enter the bookshelf the player will announce the number of books on the cartridge and the title of the currently selected book press the rewind and fast forward buttons on either side of the play button to locate the book you wish to read when you hear the entire title of the book you wish to read press the play button and that book will be selected and we'll start playing when you are ready to read another book return to the bookshelf by pressing and holding the play button for 30 seconds use the rewind or fast forward to find that book and then press the play button to select it when you wish to return the cartridge to the library simply return it to the plastic mailing container remove the address card from the pocket in the container and place it in the mail the library's return address is printed on a label affixed to the container to ensure its return enjoy your books and remember to enter the bookshelf to select a book press and hold the large green play button so at this point it doesn't start playing a book you actually have to use the bookshelf feature so for the few folks who have gotten confused or frustrated and they call in right away this is the point that they call and it's actually super easy to say ok press and hold that green play stop button which I'll be here now bookshelf 24 books, book 1 book 2 book 3 book 4 book 5 book 6 book 7 book 8 book 7 book 8 book 8 book 9 book 10 book 10 book 11 again I think we might have had one or two people who were just like you know I just don't want to mess with that and then we can put them back to one book for cartridge no problem so it is easy to address if someone really is bothered by it you can always go back but what we've discovered is handling it on the back end rather than by warning them about it on the front end is that we can be really casual about it and act like it's no big deal and then it's not a deal and so that I think has been super helpful just seeing again how I kept thinking back about the transition to these cartridges from cassettes and how I think we gave people like undue stress about it by talking about digital digital digital all the time like it was going to be this huge paradigm shift and it is and it isn't I mean it's a big paradigm shift but it's a super easy one that requires less knowledge and skill to use the machine so that's kind of what I've been thinking at the time just about the new software does a new software that automatically advances the next title on the cartridge work it does so that would be helpful with series so there's automated then you don't have to get the button there was a firmware update for the machine that went live I think it just went live or maybe it even hasn't yet for libraries that haven't switched to duplication on demand but for the duplication on demand libraries we've had it on our system since we started and we got over what that means is that despite what this message says when it gets to the end of a book it will say do you want to listen to the next book or do you want to play and you just hit play so you don't have to go into the bookshelf if you don't want to we haven't changed that announcement because I think it's easier to leave out there so people know the full capabilities of it but the machine will prompt you between books it's automatically will say do you want to keep going do you want to go on the next one that again I think has some functionality similar to the sleep button like you don't really want it to just totally go for it no yeah you'd want to like it was are you still listening that's exactly right yeah so it definitely helps with that so I did if anyone wants to watch I made a little video I apologize for the I just made this with my phone last week because I knew during the presentation we wouldn't really have a way to see the system the talking book libraries have seen demos of these but for anyone else out there you probably won't have so here's a quick video of me just making a cartridge quickly sorry if it makes you kind of seasick I tried to hold my phone steady but this is basically you need to turn the line with me this is the book face Friday book we did last week this is the first screen showing what's going on already starting and we're running to the office and the question was do you reason why this is basically what we do we put our hands we put our fingers apart and then we want to increase this so we can put the place forward place it over again and I'm going to look back here and we'll look at the screen that's probably good I guess for the video and then I just talked a bunch started to do this with one hand and I talked sorry if the audio didn't come through you can visit with a duplication there it goes really really quickly of course I just put one book on there and it was a relatively small book but even with larger orders a few minutes at the most when you're done and a few minutes gives people days literally where the books are and we'll also post this video with the archives we want to watch it separately I know how the sound was coming through and I'm not sure if it's recording too here might be easier to watch we have a question which is what have been the implications for staff workload you said it does make less time to do things does there other things it's come up really quickly so I'm not fully ready to incorporate what's going on I think what's going to happen is circulation staff will be able to do we're walking in that our main circulation staff person right now is also very talented in other areas for example has a massive commercial studio background outside of here so I think he's definitely able to help out with some studio work maybe with some machines work too we haven't even had a machines staff person for over a year now and it really hasn't been that big of a deal because I've just been keeping up with it we've been helping our duplication coordinator we've been taking care of that stuff so the circulation may be able to help with machines which again is I think workable advisement it's maybe an hour a day but fundamentally I think some more help with giving studios moving because we've been sure handed in our studios for quite some time and I think I'm looking at this as an opportunity to maybe help with that bottleneck somewhat that's true when we do local recording because we don't just get everything we actually do some of our own scratch here of Nebraska yeah we've been keeping up with magazines and their own duplication thing but we've been getting kind of behind on being able to finish books and get them on the shelf I think this will help with that certain sense we have two studios, three studios and a couple editing and post-production so we have people that come in and read for us for things that we record here so that's the thing that needs to be that will help a lot that's a very good question so yeah I'm looking forward to that I think that will be a really nice opportunity as well that will come out of this so it's kind of win-win I'm not thinking of this as I don't think we're going to have any problem finding other stuff for people to do this will just address like a long-term shortage there's been so much work with all the physical things you had to do with trends and go on and go on and look a lot I mean you should the mail just piles and piles that one picture of the shelves that's only a couple of shelves that's not our entire the whole space that's one place that when you're mentioning people coming here to the commission for conferences and things we take them on tours and take them over there and you can see the oh this is huge there's so many things now I don't know what we'll have to tell I know what we're going to show I guess we'll just show them that computer and be like it's kind of just magic they just materialize but yeah there won't be much to look at here but again that's good if you think economically too of just the amount of money that's allocated to stuff that just sits on the shelves and you have to have it because I mean you are going to send it out and somebody might want it so it's one of those tricky things where if there is an alternative way to make it available in mere seconds it's so much better than having all this money basically sitting around that's only rarely used per individual copy so it really does help to solve that problem so far again it's been a good process and a very rapid fire change and again we were really surprised I didn't think I'd be talking about the full implications of what it looked like to be operating under this model for another six months probably but here we are I mean two months in and fundamentally we've made the switch yeah when Scott started talking about this is a change coming earlier this fall I was like okay at some point we need to do a show and he's like well you're going to have to wait I'm like of course I know I'm just saying keep it in your mind that when you haven't figured out sometime next year or whenever this is all I don't know if he's boiled down to what it is and then said you know we're good now that happens half way done so yeah the other folks left I don't think will be too difficult so so oh you're asking about the show yeah thank you very informative yes yeah I should say it's a little after 11 o'clock so we'll probably be wrapping up soon how long does it take to make the archive available archive of this show we should have it done before the end of the day today the process is this process pretty quick from our go to webinar system and then it's just I gotta upload it to YouTube so I'm at the mercy of them but usually it's done by the end of the same day everyone who attended today and everyone who registered will get an email directly from me letting you know when it is available and we'll have the archive of the show it's got slides and as I said we'll also upload that video so you can watch that whole thing as well and see everything that was done and you know go over pause on the screen to see what it looks like if you want to see you know how it's going to be for you guys using it in your own um state libraries right here if you're doing this yeah awesome by the end of the day today as long as everything offering usually any other questions go ahead and type in um we can take any questions you still have we did not have to cut off here right at 11 what I will do though I'm going to bring up um upcoming yeah get my yeah we go um we'll show you first here too um our talking with the braille service this is the library commission the library commission's website nlce.nebraska.gov and um up here in our flyout menu is where we have the talking with the braille service thing so I don't want to show specifically some parts there where people go to find more if it comes to the yeah the main the main page is just the nlce.nebraska.gov nlce.nebraska.gov slash tvbs we'll take you to the main page as well yeah and um the flyout windows um the about section has I think the the most critical stuff um the applicant well actually the application process is more critical there that second section that's where you get applications and sign up um you can also contact us by email through the information there um and our readers advisors are always available to help answer questions for people who are new to the service and kind of make all that stuff kind of straightforward too so yeah I really like this just slash tvbs page because it kind of just gives you the whole setup the way out of here ways out what we do and has hyperlinks to the other sections as needed um so you can kind of just figure out what's happening pretty pretty quickly there um yeah so if you want to know what's going on and what we're doing here this is where to go for that absolutely so and you can always call us to our 800 number is 800-742-7691 and that will get you in touch with one of our three readers advisors who work with people all day long finding books that they like making sure everything is working correctly for them and talking to new potential patrons as well that's a specific 800 number that we have which is nice for um tvbs we have a separate 800 number for everything else as a commission so that's right that's right and I think we have that info everywhere on our website yeah alright so um that will call that wrap it up for today's show there's nobody typed in any desperate questions just a few minutes as we've been chatting so um that's good if you so I'm going to go now to our library encampus live website we do have that off of our main page exactly here under education we have a link for encampus live encampus live webcast but you can also use your search engine of choice or our library questions search whichever so far in the world in the world encampus live we are the only thing called so you won't find anything else if you just google our name I'll bring you right to our nlc.bracket.gov encampus live and the archives will be here this is our upcoming shows but our archives are right here underneath our upcoming ones and they're just in reverse day order so most recent ones the capital list and this is the most one we did last week about textbook programs and this is where today's show will be a link to recording a link to presentation this one ours will have a third link it will be to that extra video that started as well and while I'm here I will show you this is our archives that actually goes back to this is actually this is our last show of the year of 2018 and 2018 is because we're still in the year the 10th year of encampus live yeah it's kind of crazy so this is actually our archives going back to the very beginning if I scrolled all the way through this you'd see here we got 2060 it's only back to the first show which is January 2009 so we are librarians though we archive things is what we do we directly keep stuff so we will keep these are always going to be up here but you keep in mind that there may be some old information some expired information and things that aren't links might not work anymore or some services might not exist but for historical purposes we have all of our archives here but everything does have a date so you'll know exactly when it was originally broadcast so you can always say oh well that happened that was in 2016 and now it's like 2-3 years later or whatever I should maybe double check and make sure that's still a thing I think we introduced the digital talking book format back in around that time and we do have on here now because it got so huge we have a search feature right where you can search our entire history or just the most recent 12 months nice so I wonder if I yeah I think there was I seem to remember if I do that there we go so yeah actually well we started our show with Meet the Commission just a couple of that back in 2009 but yeah here's just taping TBBS all the things we've done over the years so you can see when we move to the new location that you were talking about downloads and apps yeah so awesome and we just did a section recently too about desktop non-visual desktop access a new thing that's going yeah I mean that has a great yeah our technology innovation library made a sweet decision so if you're interested in TBBS the history of what we've done you can see how that awesome alright so that's our archives and I hope you join us next week when our talk our topic of our first show of 2019 is best new teen books of 2018 popular teen novels new books they need to read Sally Snyder who is our coordinator children's and young adult library services here will be on here and joining her will be Jill Annis who's from our Elkhorn Granting Middle School here in Lincoln and then we can yeah and this is session for anyone who's noticing this was originally this is rescheduled from it was supposed to be December 5th the first Wednesday of this month but we were closed that day it was the all federal offices and as a result our state offices here were closed for the President Bush's that was a state holiday a federal holiday and so this one got rescheduled to January 2nd if you're looking for this one that's when it is this is Sally actually does a regular best new teen books of the previous year and bested children's books that children's once been done then our archives and the teen one will be next week she'll be our first show of 2019 so do show up for the plan up for that one and the other shows we have listed here we're always scheduling more so as I'm working with people more dates will be filled in here we're also on Facebook if you're a big Facebook user give us a like over there you'll get notifications about there's the one for login for today's show when recordings are available we post on here now we don't want to log in now so when last week's recording was available there it is so if you do like to use Facebook we do post there a couple of times a week and you can keep up with things that way other than that that wraps it up for today's show thank you so much for walking across the hall this year and thank you everyone for attending we'll see you next year on another side bye