 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am Krista Burns at the Nebraska Library Commission, your host. Encompass Live is the Library Commission's weekly online event where we cover commission activities and any library topics that may be of interest to Nebraska librarians. We do these sessions free. They are done every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time for about an hour or however long it lasts and they are recorded so if you're unable to listen to a live session you are able to listen to all the archive recordings of all the sessions that we've done previously. We do a mixture of different things here, presentations, interviews, web tours, little many training sessions, whatever we think may be of interest as I said and we have commission staff at your presentations and we do have guest speakers as we have today. Today we are doing a wrap up, I don't know what you're going to call it, the best of ALA 2010, Jessica Chamberlain who is our Nebraska Regional Library System Administrator for the Northeast Library System. We'll be taking us through what she saw and attended at ALA this year in D.C. So go ahead, take it away, Jessica. All right, thank you. Well, good morning everybody. Like Krista said, this is just kind of a wrap up, a best of what I got out of ALA and in this kind of setting it's hard to have a good discussion, too much back and forth but I would love to, if anyone was there, I would love for you to chime in at any time if there's something that you want to add or that you saw that you want to share with everyone. I think that would be just great. We would really add a lot to the presentation so please feel free to do that. This was my first time at ALA, my first time at any national conference and I have to say if you've never gone, it is a bit overwhelming. There is a lot to see. When you first get there and sign up, they give you a program directory that is just a little under 370 pages long. So it's really quite a lot to absorb and see all at the same time. I believe I heard that this year there was about 30,000 librarians there. Wow, really? That is a very large one then definitely. I've been when they've been like 20,000, 25,000 and they basically take over a whole city. Yes, we do and it was quite funny to walk around Washington, D.C. and you could just pick the librarians out. We are easy to spot but it was a lot of fun because there were just really librarians everywhere and a lot of people that share our same passions and same interests and same commitment to providing quality library service to everyone. A few of the things I wanted to highlight, what I really thought was awesome about the conference. The first thing that I really loved was authors. There were authors everywhere so I put on this screen, these were just some of the authors that were there. The opening session was Toni Morrison. She was amazing, she was a fantastic speaker. She stayed afterwards for about an hour and a half to two hours signing autographs and she was just really impressed. And then quite on the opposite end of the spectrum then the closing session speaker was Amy Sideris who was very funny, very entertaining and she made some crafts for us during her speech and that was quite funny. So this is just kind of a list and I went and saw as many authors as I could because that's something that just really that I enjoy. Here's Juno Diaz who won I believe it was the National Book Award for Drown and Soki was there and we also got to go to the Caldecott and Newbury Banquet which they have every year and of course this year's winners for the Caldecott was Jerry Pinckney and that's him way up there if you can see and if you know anything about him his story is just incredible. He has gotten the Caldecott honor five times but has finally won the actual the top honor of the Caldecott award this year so he was very gracious and then Rebecca Stead was there as well who won the Newbury this year for her first novel so she was also a very good speaker. They also had what they called live at your library reading stage this was down in the exhibit hall and there were all kinds of authors that would come and talk or do readings from their books and it was just down in the exhibit hall you can see they put it right in front of the men's restroom and and then afterwards the authors would go to a publisher's booth and sign their books so that was interesting to see too because you could just stop by for a minute and hear someone speak and go on your way. That's Jim Brewer from a lot of people know him from Saturday Night Live he was there at a publisher's booth signing and then the auditorium speaker series I put this slide in it's not a great picture but just to give you the scope of how how big of a scale some of these events are this was Sir Salman Rushdie and he was there talking a lot about his children's books that he's written for his sons and so this is how you can see the just the size of the room and of course I always sat in the back because then you could get in line to get your autograph faster it's a little trick I learned after being there for a couple of days. Very good tip definitely I was trying to be up front so I can see what's going on. Yes but if you want to get in line you've got to sit at the very back so but he was also an excellent speaker and then of course every child's favorite Max and Ruby here is the author of Max and Ruby Rosemary Wells down at a publisher's booth and again not a great picture but just to give you an idea how this is the exhibit hall downstairs it was just packed with librarians and authors and vendors and salespeople just from top to bottom and then there's the infamous Nancy Perle who was also one of the auditorium speakers series speakers but I just ran into her outside so and then there's Amy Sideris who was the closing session speaker so then a little bit about the exhibits I did not expect the exhibits to be as good as they were there were over 1500 booths of different products and services vendors if it even remotely belong in a library it was there in the exhibit hall and I thought it would be interesting to see the exhibits but I really actually learned a lot in the exhibits about what kind of products and services are available I didn't know about and the vendors were not pushy it wasn't a big sales pitch it was you know just informational so it was actually a really valuable part of the conference that I didn't expect to be to be like that so here's just a shot of the exhibit floor they had all the aisles numbered and as you can see a lot of the vendors had really colorful and interesting displays so you could you know get a good idea of what they had to offer and then this I just thought was hilarious because Brodard has this library vending machine but they didn't do anything to make it look like a library vending machine other than put books in what normally where candy bars would go so okay interesting yes I thought you could you could have done a little better on that but anyway and then president Obama was there unfortunately he was the cardboard cutout but the exhibits really were quite interesting and a lot of the vendors were very generous giving out you know copies of free books some advanced reader copies some paperback copies of the actual book you know lots of freebies and bags and pens and all that kind of stuff to entice you to come and every vendor also to try to get you to come and get on their mailing list was everybody was giving away an iPad so that was the hot thing to try to get this year but of course the main thing at ALA is of course the programs and that's that's mainly why we go lots and lots of workshops there were literally hundreds of programs that you could go to at any one time I mean there were 20 and 30 different things going on at any particular time slot so it was one of those situations where there are so many good things that you know in order to see one good thing you're giving up on seeing five other good things that are happening at the same time so it was really hard to pick what programs to go see and you don't always know what's going to really relate to you and what you see until you've actually been in it and so this is just a shot of inside the Washington DC convention center you know librarians walking around in the signs and everything what it looked like so so now I just wanted to highlight a few of the things that I got the most out of workshop wise and the first thing was I went to a couple of different workshops on ebooks this is something that I think is very interesting and just really something that the library world we need to be a part of this discussion there's a big revolution going on out there they're estimating that by 2012 ebooks will be 20% of the book market one in five books that is sold will be a digital book and that's huge that's a huge increase from where it is now and from where it was last year and you know this is going to have an impact on our libraries and we really need to be a part of what's going on out there with this and find where our libraries can fit in this new this new world so the first thing that I'm just gonna say that I that's an interesting statistic when you sometimes see lots of new stories and articles about how ebooks will just are the death of traditional paper books but yeah percent is not the death of anything it's just it's going to be a part of it and you'll have to yeah work it in right especially with the technology at the level that it is now you can't do picture books on e-reader devices you know there are things that you can do online on your computer or laptop but nothing that's as mobile as what ebooks are for adults so graphic novels things that are graphic heavy like picture books comic books are not you know there's a lot more technology has to evolve before those are going to be in danger of going away but on the other hand 2012 is only two years away a year and a half away so if that's going to be 20% by 2012 what will it be by 2015 you know what are we going to see in five years down the line so I don't think it's going to be the death of print but but it's definitely going to be a part of it and libraries need to find out we need to find out where we fit in that world and and some of that will depend on where you know your particular library is in the community a small rural population that has an aging population may not be nearly as affected by this as Omaha or Lincoln where there's lots of college students and younger people that you know are adopting this technology much faster so this Doug Owen who presented this workshop you know was asking the question why now because honestly ebooks have been around since the mid to late 90s but nobody wanted them but now there's finally consumer driven demand for them the Kindle when that came out that really appealed to a lot of you know middle-aged adults and that was really appealing now that the iPad is out at the iBooks app makes ebooks cool for younger people for teens and 20-somethings and some people actually finally want them and that's what's really driving this rise in people wanting these so they're different types of ways to get ebooks of course there's the institutional licensed products like overdrive and that library and Nebraska actually has I'm gonna go out to the Nebraska overdrive website real quick we have actually a lot of libraries that are participating in the Nebraska overdrive product or project so as I know that one's joining all the time too there are and overdrive used to just be audiobooks but they are now including ebooks they have about a hundred and seventy ebooks that are available which I think it's wonderful I think it's just really an important thing for us to be a part of but here is the overdrive list of compatible ebook devices and you can see you can use it on your desktop your windows computer your Mac the Barnes and Noble milk the Sony reader but down here the two most popular e-readers are the Kindle and the iPad and those two don't work so so overdrive is great but it's not going to be a competitor for you know for these giants for Kindle and iPad I read an article by Aaron Schmidt in library journal the July 2010 library journal it was called services before content and he talked a lot about how we need to libraries need to stop focusing on giving away three content and do something different because we're never going to compete with the Kindle and the iPad and and the convenience of these kinds of services and I thought he made an interesting point because a certain overdrive in that library are wonderful services they work really well for library models they're not exactly the most user-friendly websites they take some whoops not to go back to the beginning they take some time to learn and you have to download things and you know it's just not the easiest thing to do so I thought I made some good points with that yeah it's interesting to see when you are looking at the ones that aren't compatible with overdrive you kind of also get the idea and I've had this before because we work with I do the net library group here for the state of who will is willing to think about working with libraries and who isn't Amazon and Apple have always been we're doing our own thing and if you guys can figure it out fine if not we're not gonna do anything special but Sony readers they went to OCLC and to overdrive and said we want to work with libraries we know that's a great market and now Barnes and Noble's you know their nook reader it's interesting of who is scrap is on their side is reaching out to the library market and who isn't yes and obviously Amazon and Apple don't need us you know they're making huge profits they don't need the library market and so they're never going to be driven to try to work with us because they don't need to and just this morning I heard that Barnes and Noble is for sale because they are not making enough money and the nook is not making the money that they thought it would and so they're actually the company is up for sale so oh really I had seen that yet okay yeah I heard that just this morning on the way to work so the next one I went to was about how do you evaluate ebooks if you do have them in your library if you're using them you know once we've started using ebooks how do we evaluate them so three different people came and talked about how their library was trying to evaluate their use the Westchester library system in New York they found that and they have overdrive they found that the classics were actually the most used ebooks that they had when they had ebooks that allowed multiple users and then they found that New York Times bestseller were the most used ebooks that only allowed single users so I don't know why the discrepancy of the two but that that is what they found and then they also use something called tumble books if you're familiar with that if you're not I encourage you to check out the website it's a really cute web program that you can buy for your library and it's like interactive picture books kind of like how Scholastic and Weston Woods will animate their books into like a DVD format to watch tumble books does a similar thing but keeps it online so you just stream it online there's no downloading and they said for them it costs about 12 cents per title per year which is a great deal and it's really cute and does picture books and all that but it's only for use on a desktop or laptop it's not compatible with any kind of mobile device so that's what they reported and then Brigham Young University they were trying to evaluate their collection and they found that each year only about 20 percent of their circuit of their collection circulated they know it's true for print and what they could evaluate they said they thought that seemed about true of ebooks too so it didn't seem that the format didn't seem to influence really how the book was circulating was about the same they said from 20 or from 2000 to 2010 about half their collection circulated but that meant they spent seven million dollars on some books that no one read and I was just floored by that seven million dollars of books sitting on a shelf that no one wants this crack the spine I mean that's just in this kind of economy that doesn't make sense if they talked about how if they had gone to the on-demand just in time purchasing which I know like Omaha is doing with the Kindles and some other libraries around the country are doing you know they wait until the patron asks for it when the patron asks for it they then they download it and give it to them in a digital format if they would have gone to some a model that was like that it would have literally saved the millions of dollars and I don't know a library in this country that would not like to save millions of dollars so in that way evaluating the use of ebooks really has a lot of potential to make a lot of sense for especially big libraries and academic libraries where the titles are expensive they're sometimes very specific and sometimes don't even get used once they are purchased so but he also said that it was hard for them to evaluate some of the ebooks that they got because they need better statistics and they need better mark records for ebooks and and so he talked about how the vendors need to respond to that need for the library and then Christopher Warnock who is the CEO and president of ebrary said ebooks are worth it because they're the future like it or not he was he was very flip about the fact and he actually angered several of the people in the crowd and several people got up in the workshop and went to the microphone and and you know we're really quite unhappy with the way that he said you know ebooks are the future digital is the future the prince is the past and he he indicated personally that he loves print books and has a huge print book collection but it really has no validity in the future he said print will always have a place but from now on ebooks have one too so I thought that was an interesting way to put it are there before I go on are there any questions about ebooks or anybody want to chime in about you know their thoughts on the future of this or if you have a question feel free to type into the question section of your interface or just say please unmute me if you have a microphone and I can do that too okay well I will go on then no one has any questions the next thing that I went to that I thought was very relevant to in Nebraska into a lot of the libraries here is a workshop it was on the American dream starts at your library and this is a Dollar General Literacy Foundation grant that gives away grants to public libraries who serve immigrant communities the project overview is there on your screen if you want to read that but basically they just really want to reach out to the library and the public library as a place for immigrants to go to get services to become a part of our country to become part of our communities so three of the libraries that have got this grant 75 libraries got grants in 2010 and three of them were there Bentonville Arkansas which is of course the home of Walmart and a lot of immigrant communities that are there they did something really neat with their $5,000 grant they actually hosted the naturalization ceremony at the library so they had the judge and all the officials and all of the people that had been in the citizenship class that were getting ready to be naturalized citizens come to the library and they actually did the official ceremony there and the the library director was almost in tears about how wonderful this was for her library they had a huge turnout they got fantastic media coverage they got great sound bites and comments from people and here were these people who wanted so much to be a part of our country that they went through the rigorous process of naturalization and there they were at their public library doing the ceremonies and it was very touching she had a lot of great pictures from it and I just thought that was a really neat idea and then of course after the ceremony all the families the new citizens got care packages from the library about you know community resources and how to get a library card and all these wonderful things to to give someone so that was a really original idea I thought. Bowling Green Ohio was the next presenter and they basically upped their bookmobile service to immigrant populations they had more similar reading programs they bought bilingual materials but the good point that I thought that she made and this has been my experience working with immigrant communities to especially Hispanic immigrant communities that often they feel uncomfortable coming into an official city building even if you have bilingual materials and you have lots of things there for them they don't always know that they're welcome so it's often most helpful to go out into their community where they already are to where they feel comfortable and let them know that they are welcome in your public library and that you do serve them and you want them to come and take advantage of what you have to offer so sometimes it takes going out into their community first instead of waiting for them just to come to you and I thought that she made a really good point of that by by using their bookmobile to do that kind of service. And then the next presenter was Carla Schaefer who was the director of the Hooper Public Library and she did a fantastic presentation she'll actually be speaking at our Northeast Library System annual conference because I enjoyed her speech so much that she began a bilingual collection she used her library to create a welcoming atmosphere but then found a lot of what Bowling Green found that doing those things was not enough and it was not bringing immigrants in she had to go out into their community and let them know that they were welcome so she had to reach out to them and she's lucky enough to be fluent in Spanish so she has started an ESL program to immigrants in her community teaching English as a second language in hopes to then bring them into the library and let them know that they are welcome in her library. There is some some great resources for librarians if you have a lot of immigrants in your community and need some extra resources to help them the American Dream Toolkit their AmericanDreamToolkit.org is available online it's about a 30-page print and digital resource guide and it's broken up into different sections like citizens and materials daily life magazines DVDs and CDs so if you're looking for and this primarily focuses on Spanish speaking immigrants so if that's something that you're in need of you can download that for free and just print it off or look at it online but a lot of great resources in there and then the next one is ColoreenColorado.org and that's a bilingual site for families and educators of English language learners so there's resources for librarians on there and there's just a lot of great resources there printable things downloadable things that you can use in your library so I encourage you to check that out and then the next one is the USCIS.gov which is United States Citizenship and Immigration Services which used to be the INS so they have a lot of great citizenship resources if you have patrons that are wanting to get enrolled in the citizenship class or want citizenship materials study materials for the test or information on their immigration status you can find a lot of that great information there if you're interested in applying for this American Dream grant the link is there at dollargeneral.com and their liter they also have several other literacy grants there too so if you're not interested in this particular grant but are looking for other grant opportunities Dollar General does actually have several literacy grants that they give out they're usually in amounts of about $5,000 and you can apply for all of them in the same place. Is there any questions on the American Dream or Dollar General literacy before I go on I'll pause just for a moment. This is Krista I just want to say I thought that was very cool that Hooper got that grant they choose very very honored and surprised by it. Yeah and she really is a wonderful wonderful person and she was the only library in all of Nebraska to get this grant also. I thought that was interesting. Okay well I'll move on the next thing that I thought was really relevant to what we do here in Nebraska was a workshop called numbers that speak volumes using data to make the case for rural libraries and using data oh that already sounds terrible we most librarians did not get into librarianship so that they could do math that is not usually what our strong suit is we're not statisticians you know that's just not most for most of us what our strong point is so when it comes around time to do statistics and to do reports and budgets and all that sometimes it's a very begrudging task I know but I thought it was very interesting the presenters of this workshop really talked about using numbers to tell a story and stories are something that librarians usually are good at and so they really just encouraged to make sure that when you're using numbers and having to do reports and things make sure that you're using your framing your information so that it tells a story your information should be relevant to your audience it should be in terms that they understand and it's also helpful to give them something to compare it to if you had 25 kids in your summer reading program this year and you say that very excitedly to your city council person that you they may know that that's good because you sound excited about it but they they may not have any frame of reference for that information so make sure you always compare it to something else either compare it to how many kids you have last year to show that you're growing or compare it to how many kids were in swimming lessons if the city cool compared to how many kids played summer baseball at your city organization you know make sure that they can compare it to something else that will make sense to them so after they talked about that then they threw out all these wonderful places to get information and one of them is and I'm going to run through quite a few of those just to give you some examples of where you can find good information and good statistics not only to help you tell your story and to frame your story and give comparison comparison statistics but also so that a lot of this information is helpful when you're filling out grants and you need to find statistical information for grants so I'm going to go through quite a few sources of that now the first one is the Annie E. Casey Foundation and their kids count data center they do a lot of information on children and literacy children and poverty you can see from the screenshot that you can get data by state data comparing different states and cities so a lot of really wonderful information on this website and every state has a kids count initiative so in Nebraska that initiative is called voices for children and this is a screenshot of their county data page and if you click on any one of the counties you know if you were to click on Custer County or Nance County it will bring up this wonderful fact sheet that gives you all kinds of information like how many kids in your county are in early childhood head start how many births did you have how many Medicaid eligible children do you have how many low birth weight out of wedlock births infant deaths you know not very cheery statistics always but sometimes when you're working for grants you need to know this kind of information and the percent of children in poverty in your county so this can be very very helpful information the next is the American Library Association and obviously they are a good source of information for library information but I didn't realize how much they had on their website on interns of research and statistics so I put a big red arrow by the research and statistics tab on their homepage and especially in this I encourage you to look at some of the return on investment studies or ROI studies that they're called sometimes because typically they find that for every dollar that's given to a library it returns a four dollar value to the community and there are lots of different studies in there but typically this is what they find so there's no better argument for a city council to improve your budget or if you're going for increased funding for something there's no better argument than to say the library is a good investment you give me a dollar I will give you back for that beats any money market account that beat especially in this economy that beats any kind of return you're going to get from any other kind of investment so it's a really powerful argument for people with money to invest in libraries the next is the IMLS or Institute of Museum and Library Services their internet impact study that was released earlier this year there is a little snippet from an American Library's magazine article there that came out in April but this is just a lot of great information and it kind of proves what we already know that people use the library to use the computer and we kind of know that anecdotally but here is the hard facts here are the hard statistics that show that one in three people use the library to access the internet so it's also very powerful argument that the libraries need to keep current we need to keep up with broadband we need to keep up with modern technology when it comes to our internet access we need to have enough internet access for all of our patrons because if we don't we are disservicing 33% of our population so it's just a very good backing statistics for those kind of arguments if you need to update your computers upgrade your software or get more machines the Nebraska Library Commission is of course also another good source of information and here is the link to their library data services page we all know that Nebraska libraries have to fill out that wonderful survey every year and so of course everything that you answer on that survey is made available then on this page so you can access those files here at the very bottom there's the public library statistical files to download so you can access them that way and get a nice Excel spreadsheet they also have some great color printouts of facts of Nebraska their library statistics sheet like 86% of Nebraska public libraries provide free internet access the public and then they did a really fun thing with comparing the visits to public libraries to visits to Memorial Stadium and there were 8 million 606 thousand 616 visits to Nebraska public libraries in the fiscal year 2008 and that was enough to fill Memorial Stadium 106 times and I just love that statistic I think that's great yeah that's part of making it personal to us really get attention yes and so my question is there are all these Husker shirts walking all the way around Nebraska hats and sweatshirts and shoes where's our library shirts I don't see near as many library shirts as I do Husker shirts and we should have them absolutely that's right because more people go to the library than ever go to a Husker game lots and lots of great library information from Nebraska and I know that the Commission will be happy to help you find things as will your regional library systems if there is information that you want to find that you're having a hard time getting to we will help get you there but if you're interested in what other states are doing maybe you live in an area that borders one of the other states around Nebraska library research service is a great website and will link you to other state libraries information like if you click on Nebraska data it will take you right to the Nebraska library Commission's library services data page which we just looked at so if you want to find similar information from other states around South Dakota or Iowa you can easily find them here from this website I thought that was really interesting also the Bureau of Labor statistics is a really great place to get statistics also if you're going for a grant and maybe need to know unemployment rates or other kind of labor issues in your area this is a really great place to go the National Center for Education statistics is obviously a place for education statistics but it is the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related education so if you're going for a grant or need information about education in your county or your city or your region this is a wonderful place to go and they have some really nice tools on there some data tools and tables and things that you can do so this is another really great place to go the Pew Internet and American Life project is something that's been going on since 2000 and they do lots of great studies all the time about all sorts of interesting things and a lot of times when people quote random facts a lot of times they come from the Pew Foundation so they do a lot of research and you know a sample of a statistic that they would give you would be that 78% of adults are internet users and 65% of adults at home broadband connections so this is also a good thing to argue that if 65% of adults in your area do not have home broadband connections it gives an even stronger argument for why the library needs to have a good broadband connection because you need to bring all those adults that don't have it need to have a place to access that so just more and more good statistics so this is a little bit more about what I talked about at the beginning just using numbers to tell your story and most importantly you need to keep it simple you know plan out what you're trying to find out at the beginning and then go and collect that information think about what you want to know first before you go hunting for statistics because all of these websites that I gave you I mean it can really be overwhelming with the amount of information that's out there so in order to not get overwhelmed try to focus on what it is that one thing that you want to know and then think like your audience you know make sure that you put them in context for your audience like the Memorial Stadium attendance for Nebraska because that's something that's very close to all of us and you know that's something that we understand make sure that you put your information then in something that your city council or your library director will be able to understand and have a frame of reference and then make it pretty because people do good with pictures and visual representations so whenever possible make a chart or diagram you know a pie graph something that will visually tell your story as well because that will just strengthen the message that you're trying to get across did anyone have any questions about statistics or any of those websites or have a great place that you get scots that you'd like to toss out there to everyone else so that they know another good resource for statistics go ahead and type into your questions if you want well we're just waiting on that I just wanted to say there were a lot of URLs a lot of websites that Jessica showed there and as usual with our recordings when we put up the recording of this session we will have links to all of those as well so I should mention this really you don't have to try and scribble them all down now we'll have them all linked out from the recording session thank you for saying that Christon I forgot to mention that earlier that's a great thing to know yes so don't scribble furiously all right well the last thing I wanted to talk about then was advocacy because it was a huge huge message and the past the past year's ALA president Camille Illyri it was really her really her project was frontline advocacy so I left it to last because it's something that we could talk about forever and ever you know it's really something that there's just a lot of great information a lot of great discussion going around about advocacy so you know this is just a little what is it it's you know really us trying to get support for libraries and it means that we have to tell our story and tell it compellingly so that the people the powers that be know that we are valuable that were important to the community and that we need their support we will not survive if we don't continue to get the support of the communities where our libraries are so who should see an advocate and this is what I think is really really important everyone that comes in and out of the library doors is a potential advocate for the library especially library staff board members and volunteers those people all of those people should know the library's message they should know your mission they should know your statistics they should know and out in the large library no not every volunteer is going to know everything there's to know about a large library but but those volunteers should be educated on what the library is doing and the board members should be advocates out in the communities and the businesses that they work in and businesses that they go to do because the librarians alone especially in a small library a librarian cannot do it all they can't be the one and only advocate for the library in their community so everyone that's involved with your library I encourage you to talk to them make sure that they know your information they know your message and that they're promoting use of the library whenever they can even if it's in the line at the grocery store and they see a young child in front of them and say hey and talk to their mom hey did you know the library has story time and you know really just keep it in conversation keep it in the forefront of people's minds so how do you successfully tell your library's story that's going to be different for every library and every person there's lots and lots of ways to do this I've included I said see the small but powerful guide to winning big support for your rural library and I've got the URL for that coming up here in a minute another great place to get information is the advocacy clearing house from American library Association's website and here's the URL for that you can get lots of great resources here and again more statistics like these quotable facts for America's libraries that you see on the bottom there it's this cute little brochure that you can print out either as a word document or this adorable little PDF and it's just tiny when you print it out it's just you know meant to fit in your pocket it kind of holds up but it's got great statistics just to hand out to people like you know there are more libraries in America than there are McDonald's I actually was shocked to know that so some great resources there here's that small but powerful guide and it just has just a ton a ton of ideas samples you know what's worked for other people's in the past a lot of anecdotal stories in it just very short little blurbs about what people have done in their library to make it work and to make it all fit together and to get their community support just speaking of advocacy I don't know did you hear about the new free online advocacy training program that ALA slash PLA just made available no I don't think I have yeah there's um it was just announced just earlier this month um July yeah last month okay um there's a course of those and online well there's in-person course called Turning the Page that the Public Library Association created with money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was originally to support their grant programs that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation did for libraries as a two-day set meeting that you could go to it was done just for some grantees and then also as part of a couple of PLAs they did it as well and they have now decided with um I guess extra funding from Gates that any ALA member can take this they have made an online version of it it was in-person sessions now they've not there's an online component as well which is all the different modules all different sessions you would attend in person available online and and it's free to ALA members you can just go if you just look up Turning the Page and online or PLA you'll find the website I'll include the link to the information about it when we put up the links to your session okay and I can go sorry yeah also other advocacy webinars and more here in this advocacy courses online if you can see on the right-hand side of the ALA's Advocacy Clearinghouse website right here so there's some some great things available there as well yeah it definitely is something all libraries need to be you know thinking about and this free training is great yeah I think it takes it in total do all of it might take five or six hours to do all the sessions but okay I'll totally online that's wonderful thank you for sharing that with us um can you back up one slide so I wanted to see the previous slide yeah just that one and and this is a great resource that focuses on rural libraries native and tribal libraries so you know all sorts of small libraries that might be out there in the community especially in Nebraska we do have a comment about the ALA conference that maybe you could just mention a little what you thought of the various groups that meet during the meetings the public different consist the roundtables the committees those kind of things the school librarians how they each have their groups or meetings did you attend or see any of that kind I went I went to a new members roundtable event called conference 101 since this was my first conference so I did do that but yeah there are a lot of great sections and divisions and part of the workshops they do different tracks so if you're particularly interested in administration or management or children services or school libraries they do a lot of things and they kind of sort it out that way so that you can go to things that will be the most relevant to what you're trying to learn about and but they are there are lots of section meetings divisions and round tables there's there's pretty much any interest group that you might want to be a part of ALA has a subdivision or something like that for you and that is a great time to connect with other people who do what you do across the country yeah I found the tracks very useful myself because as you said the beginning ALA is huge and it can be very overwhelming when you get that fat book of all of the sessions are going to be available in those few days that you can very easily use in the tracks or the particular section you might be interested in or member of to focus on what you would attend out of all those things that are available yes it is very helpful I believe there were 10 learning tracks this year so nice yeah and then they all had sub tracks you know subdivisions with it in that to make it more specific if you were really interested in you know collection management or human resources any other questions no we just have a comment from one of our librarians Laura at Stanton Public Library saying she's not had the opportunity to attend ALA thank you for bringing it to life for her no problem so I think you can bump to the your final slide there for your contact info okay yeah if anybody have any other questions or comments go ahead and type them in or ask me to unmute you and we can get those in at the end here I don't see anything new okay well I really appreciate the getting the opportunity to share my experience this has really been great for me I had such a wonderful time there so and thank you for letting me do the session absolutely it's definitely a good idea and we've it's given us a good idea now that we are going to probably do a similar thing to this this best of ALA for our NLA conference in October we said why don't we do that so look forward to that we'll figure out how I might want to get some people to show up and talk about how what they experienced at NLA at our Nebraska NLA NEMA conference in Grand Island and so yeah borrow steal your idea it's all yours yeah all right well I think we will wrap it up then thank you very much Jessica definitely very good information I also did not get to go to ALA this year I don't go all the time so it's good to hear what was going on and see how it all went down there so we will wrap it up for this morning and just invite you to join us next week for Encompass Live our topic will be RSS Feed Me Michael Sowers the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Library Commission will give me give a session on how you can use RSS feeds to keep up on anything that's going on in blogs and emails and websites and give you a little introduction to that so hope you'll join us next Wednesday at 10 a.m. Central Time for that so thank you very much for attending bye bye