 Good morning, and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. We're a webinar, we're a webcast, we're an online show. There is some debate out in the world, a library world, about what these things are called or should be called, what terminology there is for them. But whatever we are, whatever you want to call us, we're here live, online every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. The show is free and open to anyone to watch, both our live show on Wednesdays and our recordings. So if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. You can always go to our website, and I'll show you that at the end of the show, and view our archives of all of our shows we've put up online. We do a mixture of things here, presentations, book reviews, mini-training sessions, demos, author chats, basically anything library-related, we grab it and have it on the show. We're always looking for new ideas, too. We have a Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes do presentations, and sometimes we bring in guest speakers, as we have this morning. On the line with us from East Coast, New York, Pace University, is a Steve file, and Phil Pagali from Mortola Library at Pace University. Hi, guys. Hello, how are you? Did I say that all correctly? Pronounce it all? Yeah, mostly. I know I got one right there. And Steve and Phil actually, for those of you who may not be aware, where I used to work. I worked at Pace University before I came here to Nebraska. That was a while ago. Steve actually officially replaced me in what my previous position was. Things have all changed since then there, but he came on board as my replacement. And just on a personal note, he also happens to be my brother-in-law. So I don't know anything to do with anything, but we are a library family. Yeah, me, my sister Steve. So this human library program, I've seen various libraries across the country doing it. It's a new thing going on. And I saw that my old place was doing it here at Mortola. And I thought it'd be great to have them on and talk about how they pulled it off, the whole process, how it went. So I contacted Steve and they said, yeah, we can come. Sure. So I'll just hand it over to you guys. You can take it away and go through your presentation. If anybody has any questions throughout it, just ask as you feel. I can grab your questions here and pass them on as they come through. Okay, I guess we're off. Alright. I'm going to start sharing some of the video just so you can sort of see the men behind the curtain here. Hi guys. So we'll keep that on for our introductions. So first I want to say thank you to Krista and the Nebraska Library Commission for having us come in. Krista, we're keeping it all in the family here. We're excited to be able to come and talk a little bit about our human library program. We're hoping to have a conversation with everyone here to explain what we did with the human library program, why we did it, maybe some tips and information for how you might be able to use it in your local library, whether it be academic or public. And also from a very real perspective, I mean, we are a very normal library. We had no experience with this whatsoever. So we had to learn along the way. So hopefully that's something that's valuable to people that are maybe considering doing this or have not even heard about it, that it's really something that I think we found to be pretty valuable. And that was actually a really cool thing, but some stuff that we really learned from it. So before I go too much further, again, my name is Steve File. I'm the Associate University Librarian at the Mortale Library at Pace University. I'm a Phil Pajalli Instructional Services Librarian at Pace. So I'm going to turn off the video to sort of save some bandwidth, but we'll come back again at the end when if there's any questions that people have or if there's questions that come up during the presentation. Feel free to chime in through Krista or Audi or whatever. So let me close this out. So to give you a little context of where we were coming from, at Pace University, we're a multi-campus institution. The main campus would be in our lower Manhattan campus, so in New York City, for any of you that have been to New York down by the Brooklyn Bridge. We have about 6,000 students or so that are down on that campus, and then Phil and I, we work in the Pleasantville campus, so we are a suburban campus, half an hour by train from Manhattan. So we are a suburban atmosphere here as opposed to New York City, which is a very urban environment. We have about 3,000 students around on this campus, so that's kind of a little bit about the makeup of where we stand in terms of physical world for that. So we had our human library event on April 16th of this past semester, and we thought it turned out to be a very good event and very useful, and we'll give you some background information about how leading us up to that event. So let's go. So first, for those of you who haven't heard of the human library event, the human library was first started in Denmark in 2000, and here's a description from their website of what the human library is all about. There's also another quote that I don't have a slide for, but I can read that, well, basically in a nutshell, it gives your users, which in this case of this are called readers, access to personal stories of people from your community or outside your community. It's meant as a way to sort of break down barriers of prejudice, folks that may become from underrepresented populations, people that have gone through obstacles in their life, or just have compelling stories that are of interest to your local community. So, but the idea behind it was breaking down barriers between groups of people or people in your community. We had to register, I mean, we did register our event with the human library organization. We wanted to make sure that it was official. They just want to also check to make sure basically for quality control purposes that people aren't doing this with an agenda, that they're trying to push a point of view or anything like that. So it was very simple to actually register and work with them, they sent us some advice on how to go with an event. Other places call their events living libraries, you can see that out there as well, but we wanted to organize ourselves with the human library and make it part of like a bigger worldwide thing. If you go to their site, you can see that they do events, you know, or they have events all over the world, including the United States. You know, one thing that, you know, when we were, you know, explaining what a human library event is, it's not just about, you know, it's about breaking down barriers of prejudices, but it's also about ways of sharing stories that you don't even, that you're not even aware of. I mean, there are people around us, you know, whether you work in a public library or an academic library that have fascinating stories to tell and interesting experiences, but sometimes you don't even know to ask them, you know, and this was a great way for us to sort of share those really personal and compelling stories that we knew anecdotally were all around us, but this is a really nice way of sort of really formally getting those stories and that information out to your local population, you know, and that we can talk, and we'll talk later on a little bit about some of the challenges of getting to those stories. So going into the event, why did we want to plan a human library event? I think one of the, you know, the strengths that we have at pace is our diversity of our student body, of our campuses, of our students, faculty, staff come from a range of backgrounds and experiences, and, you know, whether it be from the urban location in our New York City campus or our suburban campus, you know, there's really a great diversity of people and stories that were there, you know, that we really wanted to tap into. So it's one of the great things that we have at pace is that diversity, you know, one of the weaknesses that we have is that we tend to be somewhat of a fragmented population, you know, very siloed in ways, you know, between, whether it just be between our campuses or the identity of our campuses, being urban and suburban, you know, basically, you know, we have a difficult time identifying who we are, you know, as an institution, you know, and sharing information across boundaries, whether it be between the academic schools or whether it be between the different library locations. So we really are kind of a fragmented, you know, really seeking an identity, you know, and one of the reasons why we, you know, we plan this event was to sort of help get a better understanding of who we are as a community to share stories that we knew that were out there, whether we were with our student population or our faculty, staff population as well. We were just looking to internally for our stories, for our books. We wanted to, again, we want this as a community building event, and so we just look within our faculty, staff, and student population. We didn't go out to the local community around us here in Pleasantville, New York. We didn't go out looking for outside stories. We were really just looking at this as an internal thing. So we, you know, we were really looking as a great way of sort of sharing that and building that community. So that was, you know, kind of the reason why I don't remember even how I heard about the Human Library. I was trying to, I was racking my brain. I had heard about it sometime in last fall, I think, and maybe it was, I think, just reading about it, but it wasn't an aha moment, but something was an aha moment. You know, I think maybe it was just talking to people saying, oh, this would be a really great way of sharing stories and build community that I saw that was sort of lacking. We drew inspiration from, if you, if you just do Google searches, there are many different places that have done human or living library events. These were three of the places that we use as inspiration or some of the things that we use for inspiration that I think had were very good for introducing people to what the Human Library was about. And I think that's something as you go in, if you've never done this before, like we had never done this before, there's a whole lot of education of people, whether they'd be your, the readers that would be coming to your event, but just as importantly the books that would be coming to the event. So these were actually three sources that we used when we sort of approached our books or sending out information, sort of, you know, planning event, trying to get people to understand what this is the type of thing that we're trying to do and this is what the events can do. There's a lot more that are out there, but these were just great overviews for us to be able to send out and I think would be useful if you've never heard of the Living Library or Human Library to take a look at, because they really explain it well and I sort of, you know, put it into, into context. I just want to jump in, Steve, and let everyone know all these links that are mentioned here will have in the show notes afterwards, so don't have, don't try and kill yourself trying to scribble down all these long URLs or anything. We have them all, I'm grabbing them and putting them into our delicious account and you'll have a whole link, a link to all of them afterwards so you can get to everything that was mentioned. Okay, yeah, that's great. Yeah, they were, yeah, a lot longer than people can, but yeah, that, if you can take a look at them later, these are, again, great places that we drew inspiration from as we went into the sort of planning phase of our event. I'll pass it off to Phil to talk a little bit about the gathering of the stories and what we were trying to do when we went into the sort of plan, the actual planning process. Yeah, on that previous page you see the three links, but we actually looked at a lot of different human or living library events, at academic as well as public libraries, and I actually think this type of event is more common in public libraries, at least in the US, but actually going back to what Steven mentioned before about humanlibrary.org based in Denmark, if you register with them they will send you materials that you can use in the event. Ultimately, we didn't use any of them, but they will send you some things like library card templates that you can use in that kind of brand event and you can also use in the advertising as well. So looking at some of those events on the other page, academic and public libraries, we noticed that the venues had for their events a diverse mix of people who had experienced hardships and overcome significant obstacles. People who were survivors of war or disease, people who thought of themselves as outsiders because of discrimination with race or gender or disabilities, or just people who found themselves in challenging conditions overseas or in unfamiliar territory. And we hope that we can encourage interaction among people who may not normally bring up these issues in conversation. So from this research, Steve and I were able to discuss the types of people we would like to see as part of this human library. So these included people from the LGBTQ community, military veterans, religious figures, survivors of cancer or other diseases, recent immigrants and refugees of war. We actually, we were interested in feedback from the students. So I created a poster describing the event and we went over to the campus student center and set up a table and the poster out and we actually had a survey form that the students could complete. And on the survey, it read the choices listed below which book types would interest you. And they were allowed to choose more than one and we had listed veteran, LGBTQ, minority, immigrant, Muslim. We actually had some wildcards in here, entrepreneur, inventor, which actually we didn't end up getting anybody in that area, but also survivor and other. We also had a suggestion box in the sheet because we were just didn't see the students that would suggest anyone or any type that was unusual or outside what we were thinking. We got some comments based on that, but actually the majority of the people that we ended up getting were either recommended by our colleagues, particularly the faculty members, or they were people that we sent emails to and asked about. We had heard that they had interesting stories or interesting backgrounds and we contacted them through email or just approached directly in person. So actually one colleague recommended a PACE professor at the New York City campus who neither Steve nor I had even heard of, an African-American that formed a police chief. So he ended up joining the event and he became one of our most requested or popular books. Since many of the personal stories that we were seeking are of a very delicate nature, we decided a good way to ask certain students, as opposed to the faculty to be books, would be through the student organizations or through the offices that were assisting students. So we attempted to reach out by contacting, for example, the Muslim Student Association, the organization of Latin American students, but also the offices of multicultural affairs and disability services. Unfortunately, actually we didn't get much of a response. Some of the student organizations were inactive or the leaders or representatives were occupied with other commitments because this was pretty late in the semester, so people were tied up with projects or other responsibilities. So again, we ended up getting the majority of our books through email or approaching them directly or from our colleagues recommending people. So we ended up with eight individuals for the event who agreed to participate in his book. Six faculty and two students. We actually had three, originally we had three additional students, but they ended up dropping out because again it was late in the semester, so they had complete projects or they were tied up with exams. So the eight individuals we had were the African-American former assistant chief of the NYPD, who I mentioned earlier. An African-American lesbian eight-year Navy veteran and nursing student. It was number two. Number three, our campus chaplain, Catholic sister who had worked as a psychiatric social worker. Number four, a cancer survivor who would work with orphans, prisoners, refugees in Kenya and Latin America. Number five, the daughter of Jewish Lithuanians who had survived the Holocaust by working in the slave labor camp. Number six, a female pastor who had earned a certificate in theology and ministry and had taken an online class in technology that had let her become a computer programmer. Number seven, a Navy veteran and immigrant nursing student. And number eight, actually one of the ESL instructors who had taught English in Japan and struggled in his first year because of the language barrier and wanted to talk about that. So those are our eight individuals and you'll see later that we had included the character descriptions in our advertising and we have a photo of the poster that we put up for the happy event, giving the descriptions of each person. Okay. So when you know going into considerations for as you plan a human library event, I mean some of the things that you know that we had to tackle that you would, if you were thinking about doing a similar event, these are some of the things that you would have to try and figure, you know, plan on or make decisions about, you know, what kind of size of event are you really looking for? I mean we were, we knew we were looking for a smaller type of event. In our research we had seen, you know, events that had, you know, that lasted multiple days, that had, you know, over 30 different books, that you know, we knew that we were looking, I think ideally, you know, for 10 to 12 books. I mean we ended up with eight in the end so, but we were looking for a smallish type of event. So, you know, what kind of event, you know, what kind of size, how many different, even, you know, if you're a small or individual that's planning an event like this, how many, how many stories are you or, you know, possible stories are you aware of just on your own, you know, to sort of see how many people can you, you think you be able to draw into something like this. You know, one of the things that we also had in terms of deciding on a smaller event was one of the main concerns that we, you know, had going in was turn out for the event. You know, one of the problems or, you know, challenge that we have here at PACE is that there's a lot of events that go on on campus that are really good and really engaging, but the turn out can be disappointing. So we were worried that we would do this a lot of, you know, this great event and get all these wonderful books to have people check out, but that there wouldn't be anybody there to check them out. You know, so that was also part of our concern of maybe, you know, starting on a smaller scale, you know, so that it wouldn't be, you know, if we didn't get the turn out, that it wouldn't be embarrassing for us or for the books. Although, you know, all of our books coming from within the community at PACE know that this is a challenge of having turn out for events, so they were all aware that, you know, sometimes, you know, you're going to have a great event, but not a lot of people are going to show up. So they were kind of aware of that, so we had sort of prepped our books on that. You know, what kind of a location do you have available? You know, one of the next slides we'll show a photo of the area that we use, but, you know, we wanted an area, again, that was visible, but not so visible that it was, you know, people might be sort of gawking kind of thing, but someplace that people might pass by, the interested in checking out a book, but at the same time private enough that people could have, you know, meaningful one-on-one conversations. I mean, and the purpose of a lot of the human libraries is really to have one-on-one conversations, you know, or one-on-two. So have individual conversations with people. So we had an area that we could sort of break off, that was that was an area that we could, for the day, that we could reserve, that was visible, we could get a lot of walk-by traffic that we ended up, it was appropriate for a group of, you know, if we had 10 to 12 books that we were aiming for. You also want it not so private, because you need people still to monitor the events, to sort of walk around to make sure that the conversations aren't going bad, or the things are, you know, people are keeping to your time constraints that you've put on the event. You know, we also looked at having, you know, different areas, and again, this is also part of the fun of the event, is how you can play it up to be like a library. So, you know, the area where people had the conversations, we called the reading room. In some of the research we had done, they also suggested having maybe a separate little area called the bookshelf, where books could go either where they wanted it a few moments away, or that they could relax, or you know, while they were not being checked out. So that was the bookshelf area. You know, then you've got the checkout desk. Again, that's where the people would be approached to go in and check out one of the books that you had available. And then you've got librarians, quote, librarians, to monitor the area, which don't have to be librarians. Those are just people that are making sure that everything is going smoothly. Again, the conversations are going okay. And again, we were looking for some place that was going to be very comfortable for people to sit back and sort of talk. So yeah, a finding a place that you can just have that is good to talk. You know, finding an appropriate time or date of the event for us. We were, you know, this is spring or fall semester. We went with spring because so much goes on in the fall. You know, one piece of advice is don't underestimate the amount of time it takes to plan an event like this, especially for the first go around. So I'm very glad that we ended up doing it for the spring just because it gave us basically the whole fall to talk about this and sort of drum up interest and get it going. Whereas if you do it in a fall semester, for those academic libraries that are out there, you know, you come back and it's just you're going and by the time you'd be able to get the event going, you would be towards the end of the semester. And you know, again, that was some of the obstacles we had was we maybe waited too long in the spring semester when things got a little bit too busy for our students. So we were looking for a time of day, you know, that again, what's a busy day in your library. So for us, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesdays are incredibly busy here. And we decided not to go with that because it's hard to sort of partition off that space. Thursdays was our sort of our compromise of it's busy, but not so crazy busy that we couldn't like reserve the space that we wanted to use for the event. So we ended up going with a Thursday afternoon. You know, what's the length of the event? You know, we thought that it would three hours was an appropriate amount of time to sort of expect people to dedicate towards being a book for this event. And even with three hours, we had people that couldn't stay for the full three hours and, you know, that we either had to leave early or arrived late to make themselves available as a book. So we found that the three hour actually was a pretty good time limit, you know, because we found after the event, it is kind of, you know, especially if it was busy and like it was, three hours is a lot to talk constantly. You know, we had very little down time for a lot of our books. And so three hours, you know, is a good time to start, I think. If we were to go more than that, I think it would be, we try and segment it into maybe a morning session and afternoon, have different books in the morning and different books in the afternoon, because three hours is a really, I think, a good time to expect and from folks. PR materials, that's, I think, the key thing of how do you get the word out about your event. I think the most important thing, whether you're gathering books is to talk, you know, keep talking to people. So there's the people that you know that have good stories, but the importance of getting out, you know, if you have a meeting or for me, you know, going to faculty council, talk to people at faculty council. If I'm going to a curriculum committee, I talk to people at the curriculum committee about it, like that's the way, I think, the most important way of doing the PR for the event is to talk about it. We did the normal things. We did teaser posters around campus. I'm actually going to go into that so you can take a look at that. The teaser posters, the poster there on the left, it did not include book descriptions. It was just meant as this is what a human library event is and this is when we're having it. So it did not have any of our book descriptions. So you can go with that approach or you can have the book descriptions, but also note that it takes time to get the book descriptions from people, too. So we were kind of glad that we didn't have to wait for all of our book descriptions to come in to do that. So we put teaser posters around campus. We used local LCD signs within the library. We used the student development campus activities, have something called a flush flash, which is where they, well, initially it was advertising in the bathroom, but now it's gone away from just being in the bathrooms. Again, talking to people. We put in the weekly university email. We use the university LCD signs that we have around campus. On the day of the event, we actually use an old beam projector that we have, and we beamed an image onto the floor of the library, which by the way is if you have an old beam projector in your library is a great way of using it if you're not using it anymore. It looks, makes it look like a museum kind of exhibit. So we beamed it onto the floor. It got some notice there. And I think also the, you know, personal invites. You know, as we got close to the event, personally inviting people that we knew around campus to come out to be book, or to be reader, to be readers at the event. Food and beverage is always a good thing. We had coffee, tea, some cookies. So it was very light, but again things that would sort of help with conversation. You know, and then what kind of book content, what kind of, you know, knowing your community, whether it be a public library or an academic library, what stories are of interest to your community? What barriers are you trying to break down? What stories might you be able to get from those areas? And finally it's also talking about a checkout process. You know, what is the process that you want to have for checking out the books that you have available, and setting up those parameters? I'm not sure. The important thing also, you know, in setting up those parameters is you need to spend time preparing your books for the event. Again, especially if you've never done this before. Oh, by the way, this is the space that we ended up using for it. So we took all the comfortable chairs that we could have that we found in the library, and we moved them all to the first floor. So those, we put it into this area that we use as the common area. That was the reading room for our event. In terms of preferring your books, I mean, I think the important thing about that is most of your books have never done this before. I've never heard of a human library. So, you need to really prep them. Again, those sites that we shared earlier. One of the first things you need from them after you've gotten a commitment from them is obtaining a book description from them. So we, you know, I think it was three, four weeks before the event, we're asking them for a title of their book. So something catchy that would just sort of describe them as a book, and then three to five sentences describing their book. Sort of giving them the clues, like in your book description you should include all the aspects of your life that you think you'd be willing to share. So because people are going to be looking at that description and say, okay, this is basically how the conversation will be beginning, is talking about some of the things in their description. So, you know, three to five sentences, they could be super creative, and they want to be creative, or it could be just as straightforward, you know, as you, as they want it to be as well. You know, some were more creative than others. Others, you know, were very much, you know, straightforward about who they are and what they want to include in their descriptions. You know, we also asked them, you know, to prepare maybe five questions that they would go in into their heads about what questions they might ask themselves that would help, you know, generate conversation, because some of our students might be a little bit, you know, timid in terms of starting a conversation. So we wanted to, you know, so that they would be prepared with some questions that they would ask themselves that might be able to throw out to, you know, to them. You know, other things that we said was also to keep in mind to maybe ask the reader's questions as well. So it's not just about them, but asking questions. So some of the questions we suggested were asking for the reader, the book, to ask the reader, why did you choose me as a human book? Or have you ever met someone like me before? Or did you have a good or a bad experience with a person like me? So it's not just about their stories, but also about the readers themselves. So we tried to sort of prompt them to sort of go in with that in mind. You know, when we set the parameters, you know, for the day we were looking, you know, how long do you want your books to be able to be checked out for? We ended up choosing 30 minutes. So 30 minutes slots. We also prepped the books to be able to let people know that 30 minutes is your maximum time. That to be completely okay with, if someone wants to have a conversation for five minutes, that's completely cool. It does not mean you have to check out and we try to get this to the readers as well, that it's okay if you want to have a short conversation, because sometimes those can be just as meaningful as a 30 minute conversation. So, you know, we really said, you know, five minutes fight and for the books that's not an insult, it's okay if someone just wants to talk and maybe just want to ask you one question, and then that was the end of the conversation. And for the most part, people did stay towards the longer of the 30 minute time slot, but we wanted to prep our books and our readers that shorter conversations were welcome, you know, just as well. The other parameters that we had, you know, that we sort of set for the readers and that we made the books aware of were that the book and the reader and the subjects discussed will be treated with mutual respect. The readers and the books may opt out of a conversation at any time for any reason. So a reader or a book could opt out at any moment, and that's kind of why you have people that are sort of floating around to make sure conversations are going okay. That the reader will return the book in the same mental and physical condition in which it was borrowed. So basically that you're, you know, you're not going in to harm in any way mentally the book in terms of your line of questioning. And also that you'll keep, the reader will keep an open mind to viewpoints and perspectives different from their own. So we set those up at the checkout desk so that people were aware of before they would check out a book that these were what our expectations were for the readers. And we made aware that the books were also aware of these as well. We also told them, you know, in prepping the books, that they could also bring any photos or artifacts that they wanted to the event that might help explain their story. So a few of them did take us up on that, but if they had photo albums or, you know, something from that just helps describe who they are or their story, we encouraged them to bring them as well. So now I will pass it off back to Phil to talk about the actual day of the event. Okay, yeah. So it was on April 16, 2015, and you'll see the space again from the earlier photo. This is actually when the event was going on. Now this was actually, this was held in sectional library on the first floor toward the entrance. That's normally used for group study, and it's a very popular section in the library. A lot of the students will use the computers in the area. We needed to close that space off for about three hours, and actually we had booked a room to the right, it's not in the photo, to the right just out of the frame of the photo. There was a room for the books to have to talk and just kind of rest and have a little bit of downtime. But there's a challenge when you're closing off a section of this library, and that's how to basically keep it exclusive to the event, to give privacy to the people who are participating, to essentially keep the normal student traffic out, but also to encourage students to come in. Okay, so when we put up these barriers we had, you'll see the white board in the photo, a couple white boards, telling them that there was an event going on and when, and that it would be closed off for three hours, but also giving information about the event, so hopefully we can encourage walk-ins, just students just coming by who would see what was going on in the space and think, hey, this looks kind of interesting, what is this all about? So we also put up, these are actually the books, so this is shortly after they arrived, before we had opened it officially and they're talking and getting each other, but we put up a poster with all of the book descriptions. Okay, we had each of the numbered right by the entrance, along with the registration table. You can't see the actual descriptions too clearly, but you see we had some, hopefully some eye-catching human book names, so you'll see, just let me explain from program or to professor to preacher. So the process was a student or faculty member, whoever wanted to be involved would approach the poster, read the description and then get the number and approach the registration desk and say, I would like to check out four or five, and once that happened, I was at the table, I was manning the table along with Steve was there most of the time, so the person would give the number of the book they were interested in and then I would have corresponding number of cards for each book, okay, and then I would write down the expiration time on the card, so each book would have, or each reader would have 30 minutes to talk to the book, so I would write down, you know, if it was at 2.30, you have until 3 o'clock, and hand the card to the person, and then tell them to hold on to it and return it after they were done, so we would know, you know, what books were now available. I also kept a sign-in sheet, so I kept my own record of what books had been checked out and when they would be due back. This got actually a little, we have more and more people later in the day, this got to be a little bit crazy because some of the readers weren't returning the cards, and sometimes I had so many people at the table, I was getting a little confused myself, so one thing that we would do differently is we would have more people sat at the table. Also, when they came back and hopefully returned their checkout cards, we would give them a feedback form asking them if they were satisfied with the event, and whether they had, you know, additional comments, okay, that was really about it. They were very small feedback forms. Okay, so now somebody approached and that the particular book or number was already taken. I had, hopefully I had the record of the books due date time, so I could tell the person this book, this person is checked out, this book is checked out until three o'clock. If you come back at three o'clock, you know, you can have some time with that person, and we did keep a waiting list, although that didn't, that didn't get too, that didn't get too crazy. So ultimately we had, we had about 34 checkouts total, and again the event was three hours. The readers were allowed 30 minutes with each book, and we had about a 10-minute break halfway through the event. We had, we had somebody from the school newspaper show, and he ended up checking out a lot of books and writing a nice article about the event and giving, you know, giving the event some more exposure, so hopefully some people read that and will be interested in the event the next time we do it. One thing that I think we could do a little differently next time, so we could be a little bit more proactive about getting walk-ins, and I think actually Steve and I are a little bit shy, so we were maybe a little bit reluctant to pitch, to, you know, pitch it to the students walking by, and all, but also it was again, and I've said this a few times, it was later in the semester, so I, there were students in, in the library who were working on projects or projects, and they were cramming for exams, and they told us, there were a few that told us, you know, normally I would come in and talk to a few of the books, but it's just a great time in the semester, so I have to get, I have to get this work completed. So I think actually we had the event just a little bit earlier in the semester, maybe in March, okay, before it gets really crazy with the exams, we would get, we would have gotten more of a turnout. Okay, the, yeah, so there I am at the table. Actually the, there's a student worker on the left who's with the pace, the blue paced t-shirt, and she was, she managed to get through the people, like she's very extroverted, and she was able to get people interested, but she normally works at the technical help desk, so she helps people for our lab times, etc. So feedback or reaction to the event, oh, this is, this is actually a photo of all the books. It looks like everybody there is talking to, everybody has a reader, they're two of the books standing up in the back, having a conversation, but this was basically, this is what it looked like when it was going on, probably about half way through the event. So a reaction to the event, again we had 34 total checkouts, mostly staff and faculty, not a lot of students. Lessons learned, we would allow more break time to the books. I think some of our books, they became exhausted because they have three people in a row that they had to talk to, so that would be, that would be about an hour and a half, and they were, they were exhausted not just from the conversation, but also subject matter, because a lot of them had very emotional things that they were talking about, and Steven and I talked about, well, we would, next time we'll bring in more Kleenex, because there was a lot of crying going on. So this is a very, this is emotionally trying for them, so we would allow for more break time. We had great feedback, both from the books and the readers. I think a lot of the readers, we had to, we had to go back and tell them, you know, your time is up. They would actually go all the time, 35-40 minutes, so, and there would be somebody waiting. The books, the participants, there was at least, there were a few people who told us that the readers that they were, that they had spoken to were interesting and interested stories, so it seemed to be about, in some cases it was in equal given take in terms of the conversation. But they said, you know, this was wonderful, we're gonna tell people about this, we're gonna talk to our colleagues and try to get them involved the next time that you do this. And, you know, again, we're gonna have to think of ways to engage the students more as books and readers through, whether that's through the advertising, whether that's through just approaching them during the actual event, getting more walk-ins, and again, moving the day of the event to perhaps earlier in the semester. I mean, I think, you know, and from my side, I'll turn the camera back on for this, as we've sort of finished things off here. So, you know, one of the things that I was sort of was really happy with, 34, by the way, is a really good number for this event. So, you know, in terms of putting it in context, pretty much all our books were checked out for most almost all the time. So 34 is actually a really good number. You know, and one of the things that was really sort of energizing me after the event was the enthusiasm from the books was really, like, palatable. Like, you had some of the, you know, the books came with, like, this was so much, this is awesome. You know, and for our own benefit, one of the books had, right after our event, was going for a meeting with a provost, and was just gushing to the provost, and I got an email afterwards from the provost, sort of, you know, saying how much he appreciated that we're trying, you know, these types of creative ways of creating community, and it was all because one of our books went, and it was, like, so enthusiastic about the event, and from the book side of things, and, you know, and I think that's one of the things that you'll learn, you know, I think we're learning, is that I think we're hoping for the next time we do this, you have to start, you know, if you start small, it's the word of mouth, so all these books that we had for this event are super enthusiastic, and it's about increasing your sphere of, okay, we know our own stories of people that we interact with regularly, we know their stories, but then your books know other people with other stories or other, you know, aspects of their life that would be interesting to share, and you sort of, okay, we need to build that out so you can make a bigger event, or have more books, or, you know, get different, you know, different books, you know, and I think it also is a way of engaging people too, because we had a problem of, you know, for the most part, Phil and I did this event, just us, you know, we tried to engage some other folks to become part of a committee, but no one wants to join a committee, to help us make decisions and plan this event, or, you know, we weren't really faced with a decision of having people say that I'm interested in being a book and then having to tell them no, so I think having a larger group of people that would help make decisions, if, as the event gets bigger, we might be faced with situations of people saying they're interested in telling their story, but we, if it doesn't resonate or doesn't, you know, with your community being able to tell them no, and it's a lot easier to do that as a committee, than it is me as, you know, associate university librarian saying no, I'm not interested in having your story told, so I think engaging people on that committee level too, beyond just being books or readers, and I really think people will come out, I mean, having recognition of the event, I think people will come out even more the next time we do it, and I hope we can, you know, make it to a larger event, I mean, I think, as Phil said, we really need to find a way to engage our students better, you know, the student organization didn't probably work out so well, you know, of getting, we know there are stories there, that I think, you know, I think it takes a certain type of student, you know, I think it would too be able to want to tell their story, particularly if it's a very emotional story, you know, I envision that it would mostly be juniors or seniors that are, again, more comfortable with who they are, or who they become in college, telling their story and being able to pass that off to other students or other colleagues, you know, but how do we get those stories and get those students to, you know, to see, to participate and be both readers and books, I mean, but even more so on the book side of things, you know, we were really disappointed that we had those two or three students that ended up dropping out, and I think doing it earlier in their semester will definitely help with that. So that is kind of the end of our, the presentation part of things, you know, do people have any, do people have, do people have any questions? Okay, I don't know yet, thank you very much Steven, Phil, that was, that was great, that's exactly what I was hoping, it looks like you guys seem to take everything you could think of into consideration with this, with planning it and running it and everything, but like you said, seeing other places that had done it, that helps. Now, actually let me say one more thing, I forgot one thing I was going to say, one, one opportunity for us to advance in terms of next time, and this is again for both your public and academic libraries, is maybe not the next time, but maybe beyond that, I'd love to be able to do a partnership with our local public library. I think that would be awesome, like be able to have almost like a two-day event where we could have representatives from our campus community, plus can't representatives from the local community come in, so and have one day here in our library, and then in the next day have it in the public library, because that's also about how do you generate like for those, for those of you that are in, you know, communities where public, how do you create that, okay, the local community understanding who you are, and what is the local community about, like I'd love to eventually get into that, with the local public libraries, I think great academic public library cooperation. Definitely, yeah, that was going to be one of my questions, thanks a lot. Well, actually you even explained more, I was just going to ask you if you were ever thinking about bringing in, and because you said you limited this for the first time out just to pace people, to be the books, if you're thinking about bringing in from outside of pace to come in from the local community, but you suggested even better, yeah, go out there and have them come in and do it both together, yeah. I do think that is sometimes public libraries and schools like K-12 seem to do more together. Academics or the universities and colleges for some reason sometimes just don't see that, get that connection as well or have trouble with it, I guess, with, you know, saying we can do things together, we can, you know, we're not just off here on our own and not related, I mean, people are going to come to the public library if the university is not open when they need to do something for their schoolwork or whatever, and so they're going to have to have some sort of connection there. So if anybody does have any questions, nothing came in while you were talking, I was writing some things down as you were talking though, but if anyone has any questions, type them into your question section of your GoToWebinar interface, I can grab them from there or if you have a microphone, let me know and I can unmute you. I was wondering if you were considering, you did say going to two days, but were you thinking of doing a longer three hours to me seemed, well, without knowing how it was going to go, three hours seemed kind of short with that many books to talk to, but was that something you would do longer than three hours of a block or would that also be just so huge, I don't know? I mean, did you think it was kind of you needed more time as far as the block of time as well? I think we could go up to four hours, but at a certain point your books are so exhausted from talking. Yeah. You know, and I think the better way of doing it would either be to increase the number of books available or increase the checkout period. You can, 30 minutes is kind of a long conversation, so you could go down to 15 to 20 minutes, so you could shorten that so you could get more checkouts, or I said I think you could do it also in terms of having different books in the morning and different books in the afternoon or from 10 to 1, this slate of books is available, and then from 1 to 4, this slate of books is available. I mean, I think even with our faculty, to ask them to give a whole day is a lot to ask, because there are, you know, even if you were going to do it all day long, they would most likely not be able to stay all day long. Yeah, I mean, people have other things they need to do, of course. Yeah. Now, you did mention that you did, oh, you want to say something? Oh, yeah, no, I was actually going to say that we never had all eight books there at the same time. We had two who could only be there for a limited amount of time, so we had like number seven was available there for the first hour, and then number eight for the last hour, so we did kind of do that already where we had them at a separate time, so I'm sorry, go on. Cool. We do have a comment. Librarian from one of our community colleges here in Nebraska, Southeast Community College, says they'd seen an article about the Human Library and shared it with our global education coordinator. I believe we'll be planning an event like this in the near future. I'll be sharing this recording with the coordinator, because he was unable to join me today, so that's great, our locals. I know one of our, I believe University of Nebraska, Omaha has done this as well. I'm trying to remember off the top of my head. But this is a community college. It would probably be involved in it. That would be great. Yeah, that's great. There's ways of even honestly doing it online. I mean, if you wanted to, how do you share stories via the web? I mean, something like this would work out just perfectly is checking out online. So, I mean, I haven't read about anyone doing that, but I'm sure it's really possible. For remote people, or making it bigger? Yeah, absolutely. You did talk about that you had some rules about how people could ask, what people could ask, and people could walk away when it was getting too difficult or whatever, and you had some, I guess, people walking around checking out. So, that was one thing I was wondering about. I was thinking about you said that part of the reason is to bring out the stories that are delicate or that you might not really think about before. And you said there's a lot of emotional responses from everybody, both books and readers. Did you have any bad reactions as negative from either side or say, or people coming in just trying to be, or was it all pretty much come out? Because that's something I think some people may be concerned about is what if we have someone who comes in and talks about a really horrible situation or something that was really stressful and the person reading is not empathetic enough or whatever, people pretty much do. I mean, we didn't have anything like that. But we could certainly see how it could happen. I think it's just a matter of again prepping your books so that they know that they can opt out and being aware. But also understand that it's okay to have challenging conversations too. Like that's, it's not that, it's basically, it's okay to have different, like you don't have to be, you don't have to be the same as that book, but you have to be willing to accept their point of view and the same advice versa. So it's not meant as a way of, you can have challenging conversations and that's okay. And as part of what this is all about too is that you can talking to someone who you might not want to talk to or haven't talked to before. And sitting down and even if it's for a couple of minutes. So they said we didn't have that but I can certainly see it's a consideration. And that's why sitting that little those ground rules for before books were checked out. It's kind of important to let people know that that's what's expected. Yeah, having those set expectations ahead of time and making sure they understand this is how it's gonna work. And if you don't, you're out of here. Yeah, that's very interesting. And I think that's part of what you're talking about is that part of what should be part of going as in the academic situation. Going to college is about challenging yourself and looking at these new things and learning new things that you might not have thought of before. And this totally fits all in that. Yeah, what doesn't look anybody had any other questions? If any last minute things you want to get in here, hurry up, we're gonna wrap it up here. Now you did say you have been making some comments here and there about doing it in the future. So you're gonna do it again. Yes, I think so. Yeah, I think we'll do it again in the next most likely next spring. Maybe a little bit larger event. I'm thinking earlier in the semester. But yeah, I know that other things just as a side, I can see how this definitely is more popular. Coming from a background in the New York Public Library myself, knowing the fast, I used to work in the Bronx at a local public library and Phil actually works at a public library now too, part-time. They're fascinating people that come to public libraries. And there are just as fascinating people that come to academic libraries, but I think it's just harder to get to those stories. I think from my experience in the public library, there's a whole lot of people that just want to tell their story. Oh, yes. They're looking for somebody to listen, yes. Exactly. And to use that as an advantage. I mean, that's a, I mean, and sometimes you may be, you know, like, you know, oh, I just don't want to hear the person talking, but it's using that as an advantage. I mean, it is a great thing about your community if you have these fascinating people that have compelling stories or stories of challenges or overcoming obstacles. It's a little bit more difficult in an academic library to sort of get to those stories, I think. You know, people aren't quite as willing to share, but that's kind of what the purpose behind it was it's to share that. Like, get, you know, this, you know, computer science faculty member that you work with for years is also a pastor in a church. And it just never came up in the conversation about what does the computer science people need in the library. It's you, it wouldn't. Yeah, and I think it's great that you said this already getting word of mouth to them telling other people you need to participate in this as a book. You need to, you know, and finding other people for you. It sounds like you might be one of the, you know, the cliche the victim of your own success here. Hopefully you don't get overwhelmed by it next time around. All right. Well, it doesn't look anything else came in. Like I said, you guys were very comprehensive with everything you talked about. I think that's great. I think this is going to be a great recording for people who are thinking about doing this and getting involved themselves. Like I said, I've seen that there's been these going on. I didn't know there was that group that humanlibrary.org that it was actually a someone. I mean, I assumed somebody started it up. But I didn't know there was like a place to register and do that kind of thing and get some real good support if you're getting involved in that. But actually, there was my question. Did you actually, I know you said you looked at lots of places done it. Did you actually contact any other libraries who'd done it? Or you just looked at what they had out there about it. Like, talked to anybody at another place who'd done it? Nah. There's a lot of information out there already, I think. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that certainly would have been helpful to have that. But we didn't really know anyone locally that had done it or people that, whether part of our, I mean, I would have most likely part of our library consortium with Waldo or whatever to ask if someone had done it, but no one really had done it. So we just sort of based a lot of it on what was available. Well, yeah. It sounds like you did good, definitely being a, well, we're librarians, we're organized, generally speaking. So I think we can figure these things out. Yeah. What's the worst things that can happen? Let's prepare for those. All right. So I think that'll wrap up for today. We're a little after 11 a.m. Central time, but we started a little after as well. So thank you very much, Steven Phil. That was great. Thank you for having me. I'm going to pull back, present your control to my screen now. There we go. Get rid of this. Where are we? There we are. So that will wrap it up for today's Encompass Live. As I said, we have been recording. So the recording will be available potentially later today depends on how long it takes to process and go through everything. Our archives go right here. This is our Encompass Live website. You can just Google Encompass Live. We come up first. Our archives are over here, so it will be loaded up here with the, this one just says recording and links, but if you guys will, Steve, if you guys don't mind, if you email me or send me the slides or linked wherever you guys post them, I will add those as well to here. I think here, yeah, here when we had Courtney on recording, our slide goes on to YouTube, record presentation, goes on slide share, and then our links go into our delicious account over here where I started collecting them. So you'll have like, as I said, all the links to all these sessions and everything that was mentioned during the show. I only posted there on our website. If you, so that's what I put up for this week's show. Help you join us next week when our topic will be making the most of the cloud. I have another remote speaker, Robin Hastings, who's down at Northeast Kansas Library System, just south of us, is going to talk about cloud services and how you can use those in your library. So if you're interested in that, definitely sign up for that show or any of our other shows we have coming up. Also Encompass Live is on Facebook. So if you are a big Facebook user, please do go ahead and like us over there. There it comes up. And I do post reminders of what sessions are coming up. Here I posted this morning, reminder to log in right now on the fly for people. When the recording is available, I will post that as well onto here. So you'll know that the recording is ready to watch. So if you are big on Facebook, definitely do like us over there. Other than that, that wraps it up for this morning. Thank you very much and we'll see you next time on Encompass Live. Bye-bye.