 All right, welcome back to Big Talk, excuse me, Big Talk for Small Libraries 2018. I am Krista Porter here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Up next on our conference is Craig Anderson, who is the Director at the Boundary County Library in Bonners Ferry, Idaho. Good morning, Craig. Good morning. And his library is the winner, was the winner, because now we're in 2018, of the 2017 Best Small Library in America Award. This is a award from Library Journal Magazine, their annual award that is sponsored by the Junior Library Guild from Division of Library Journal. And this is an award that showcases exemplary work of libraries serving populations under 25,000. And yours is actually quite a bit below that, your population served. Yeah, we're about 11,000 in our county. Yeah. And Craig is going to tell us about how they got this award, how they created a culture of opportunity at their library that then got the attention of this. So I will just hand over to you, Craig, to take away and tell us about your library. All right, for starters, boy, I get asked to tell about our library a lot. Today's focus really, I would like to make more about you guys. Actually, and then I'll give some tidbits about what we did along the way. But really, if you look at the little blurb that was on a schedule today, first thing you probably noticed was creating a vision of hope. Hopefully you noticed that. And here's our website. So welcome to Boundary County Library. Hopefully you can see all of this as I'm scrolling along. Is that is that working? Yeah, looks good. Yep. OK. And as we go through, you'll see some pretty interesting pictures of things that we do. But really, my whole focus in my career, my previous career, as an educator at Monters Ferry High School, where I talked for 32 years, was in this novel of life, you are the main character, not what the teacher thinks you should do. Not what, I don't know, a state curriculum maybe tells you to do. However, we did have to follow all those things. But really, especially for seniors getting ready to exit in their lives, it was all about them being the main character and what they would learn how to do. And this is how you really create that culture of opportunity. It has to be about the patron. It has to be about the student. It has to be about the people that are coming in the door. Not so much about us, but what we can allow them to see about themselves. So that's a huge part of that. And a lot of times people, this is going to sound kind of esoteric. I hope this is OK. How am I doing so far? OK, it's going to sound a little esoteric, but really, deep down inside, this is what this is what you do when you create this vision of hope and in this culture of opportunity. I always looked at my previous career and my current career, which I'm only in my second year as a library director. And already we've got that award that's still blowing my mind. And I am merely holding open a really cool door so that people can just go charging through it. That's my whole focus. That's what I've been thinking about. It's what I've been doing. I'm going to continue to do that. I do that with my staff. I do that with people that come in the door, people that come to our fab lab, all of that sort of thing is to do that. And sometimes people don't have that strong vision of hope within themselves and sometimes they just need to have somebody at their shoulder to allow them to see that they really do. That they really have some amazing things inside themselves and they can really, given the right situation, which we're trying to create here at our library, find all the coolness inside themselves. That's what we're all about here. And you're probably already telling them pretty much that's a relationship guy. I mean, that's really key and a huge part of what we do at Boundary County Library is we do create this relationship. People come in and you guys are from small libraries. You do this too. I know you do. People come in and you know them by the first name. You're able to engage with them as human beings. And my staff said the other day, you know, I don't ever want to go to automated checkout. They said that in our little community of Boundary County, our town is about twenty two or twenty three hundred people. If you think of Mayberry and the old Andy Griffith show, that's what we're talking about, you know. And so we just want that personal touch. We're known as, you know, the library with the bear because we have a large stuff to bear in our library. And the library with the heart. Those are the things we're known for. And that's how you begin that culture of opportunity just by building those relationships with people around you and letting them know that, hey, we're here. You know, we've got some pretty cool things. We invite you to join in those cool things. And let's see how far you can go. And people have gone pretty darn far. People have gone far during my teaching career with what they're doing. People are in the process of going pretty darn far with what they're going to be doing in our our library with all the things that we have to offer. So by the way of visuals, hmm, if you look down here, you can see these icons. Then I'm running the the mouse along right now. So one of the first things that we did to create a culture of opportunity when I began working here in the summer of 2016 was we decided to rebrand ourselves. And, you know, we're always looking for things that are measurable, definable. I mean, if you want to see measurable, it keeps stats on everything. Hopefully you can see that. But as a teacher, I learned how to do that. And I have got an amazing staff member who's a wildlife biologist and she loves to keep stats on things. So we have all of this that we do that we track and visualizing them like that makes a huge difference to the people you are presenting it to as well. Yeah, and it's great when you go into a board meeting and you have, you know, all these really tall bar graphs about what you've been doing. And, you know, it's it's pretty cool. So if you're looking at these icons, you can see that we rebranded ourselves. And what we tried to do is we tried to create an image of the different things that we do and keep it really simple so that people could understand what they were and people could know exactly where that they could plug into in our library. If you notice the B.C.L. symbol right here, each one of the colors corresponds with the color on the rings around on the different parts of the icons. We decided to follow the Star Trek method because, you know, we're very subtle, though, you would. It doesn't scream that. So that's nice. No, no, my no, Catherine Booger, who is our our graphic designer, you know, she and I sat down and we got input from all the staff members and and I thought, OK, how can we how can we do this? And so, you know, as you see this wheel right here, you're seeing little bits and pieces of all the other ones in there. And it's just like like I said, on Star Trek, when you have the, you know. Everybody's got their little little communicator there and it has a different symbol inside of it for all the different parts of the ship. And so this is our ship. And so as we kind of scroll down through here, you can see it's a pretty clean website. This is kind of the classic mountain of Boundary County. It's called Clifty and everybody looks at it every day as they come into town. So that's that culture, that's that relationship. That's we're all looking at the same thing as we're coming along. And as we roll on down through here, to the OK, that's kind of fun. And you can actually look at the article. You can go to it yourself if you want to. It's on Library Journal September. And as we go down through here, we have so many different kinds of things that are going on. And I'm sure that you're going to hear about this cool stuff all day, which is great because librarians and libraries are just doing things that if everybody in this world knew about it, they would just be beating down the door of every library of everyone who's listening and those who aren't. So I mean, this is totally, totally cool. We decided to have an event called Sikeringite that you're looking at right there. I don't know if you can notice that's death right there. I see you there. OK, he's telling some really creepy stories to some kids. Oh, that's me underneath that. That's a persona that I created back when I was a teacher at the high school. But there's a lot of life and death. I mean, it's not really death. But it's it's it's an opportunity for kids to enjoy and have fun. And and this thing was so well attended. We started it just this last year on Friday the 13th of October. And we had at least 60 people just playing in and out of this library all night from from seven o'clock to nine o'clock that night. It was it was really amazing. And people were hearing stories. They were playing games. They were doing story time. They were building their own skeleton, which is where that kind of scientific part of it came in. And they had now they had to actually do a scavenger hunt to find all the different bounds. And then they found the bones and they were able to glue them on a piece of paper. And we had a plastic skeleton to take a look at. So that was the wildlife biology part of it. It's like, OK, here's what's inside of your body. So it's an educational opportunity, which we thought was pretty cool. So yeah, some interesting, fun things that we've been doing. Why do we have an alley that? Well, we actually have a 3D printed alligator skull in our lab. Down here in this area, we have, you'll notice the big screen right here, another opportunity for kids. We do have a polycom system. And so we have connection with Alaska Zoo, the Toledo Zoo and we're trying to hook up with the Smithsonian so that we'll actually have FaceTime, kind of how we're doing today with an actual zookeeper talking to the kids and questions and answers and all that good stuff. We used to work with NASA, but they've been their funding went elsewhere. I think they're going to head back to the moon so they didn't have enough funding to do their outreach. That's OK then, I guess. I guess I'll let them do that. Total bummer. Because NASA was kind of, there was a big partner for us. There was a lot of things. Yeah, a lot of libraries have done their partnership with NASA and bringing in programming and things about space. And of course, the most recent Eclipse. Oh, yeah, we had an Eclipse party. That was really fun. And live streaming and then out in the yard and everything, even though we're pretty darn far north, we only had 80 percent of totality. So we didn't quite get that. But it's neat. It's neat to have these kids in here, you know, actually talking to somebody who's talking about how do you go to the bathroom up on a space station, you know, and then they think, oh, my gosh, look at these opportunities that I'm here in this little tiny town. And this is where I'm going to go back to this culture of opportunity each time. You know, here I am in this little tiny town, but yet I'm talking to somebody who works, you know, in a zoo or works for NASA or maybe the Smithsonian. And, you know, wow, that's a vision of something that I don't usually get every day. And I'm engaged with them and oh, wow, maybe I maybe I can go do that stuff. You know, maybe there's a bigger world out there and I can go be part of it. And that's just that's that's, you know, our entire staff shares that vision. And so I fit right in really well. It's it's pretty cool the different things that we can do. As we're moving up here into the our website. Of course, this one that I'm hovering over right now is our main collection. And then we have story time at what library doesn't. Right. And that's that's so core to. To libraries and what we do. But it's interesting to note too that right now, the person that sits on the other side of the screen is out and about in the community. She is reading to four age kids up at the middle school right now. And outreach is one of the most important things that we have done. And we were part of a summer reading program at a local school that opens itself during the summer to all these kids. And so we read to them, that's part of our summer reading program. You know, there's so many different ways that you can reach out for me personally. And I'm not sure how many of folks out there are doing this, but for me personally, one of the most valuable outreach is that I do and I have a volunteer that works with me. He's a he's a retired gentleman, a Vietnam vet, someone who was searching for some extra meaning in his life. And he came to my office one day and said. I heard you're taking books to the folks over at your local historian, which is a facility for really old people that can't get out anymore. And he said, I want to be part of that. And I said, you're you're in the boat, Larry. Let's go pick out some books for some people. And so we do. And we go over there and you should see what happens to these people. The more that we go visit them, the more present that they become in the room. It's really neat. I'm not sure how many of you guys are doing this, but, you know, it's one of the most valuable things I've ever done in my entire life. I mean, it really is when I'm sitting in a room with a gentleman who survived World War Two. And what he says about it is I walked across Europe. And we didn't have it nearly as bad as the guys over in the Pacific. This is this is the connection. This is that human relationship that forms and that, you know, it enriches us. It makes our lives better, but then they have someone to listen to their stories. You know, I ran into a lady who was a teacher who had actually brought the first microscopes to the children of the Island of Palau in the South Pacific after World War Two. She didn't even know she had done it until I said, wow, as a teacher, I got to tell you this as I was a science teacher, too. And we did a lot with microscopes. I've got to tell you this. I'll bet you that on that island, kids had never looked through microscopes before you brought them there. You did it first. You made history. And, you know, this is the great generation. They didn't even think twice about that. And that's like, wow, I guess I did. Didn't I? And all of a sudden this door in her life just opened up and she realized, well, I'm stuck in this place. But you know what, I changed a lot of people's lives. And by telling me that story, now I get to share it with you. See, that just goes on and on and on and quite amazing. The things that we get to do when we do our outreach. So do as much as you can, you know, we bring library. We don't have the budget right now for a vehicle. I know some of you guys do. You're out there with your with your van bringing books to your community. We do library in a box. So, you know, it's it's amazing what we get to do. We get to to bring boxes of books that you can just take them or leave them or put back another one. And we just want to put books in the hands of people and increase their lives. And you guys are doing that, too. So talking to the choir here. Next one over is our section that we're we're building and growing as we go. And I think the connection between the way and the fab lab are probably what's really kind of helping that part. And again, you can see the big screen right here in that one. And so I do want to focus in here for a bit on the fab lab. Outreach was one of the reasons that we were nominated for a small library. Our fab lab is definitely another big reason that we are doing that. And I'm clicking on this and that goes. Yep, I went away for a while from my own view. I'm hopefully you can see me. But you're all good. Well, loud enough. Kind of a quiet voice. So as we go through, I wanted for you guys to see what what we have available. And this is where a part of that that culture of opportunity. So when you go on our website and everybody can do that if they want to, you go on down to the machine video courses. And I'm going to do something kind of bizarre, but I'm a teacher. So we get happens to work in a library. So. You see that? Isn't that weird? OK, yeah. OK. Chainmail, no similar required. You can get the skills in our lab to make almost. Is that off of a 3D printer? The blue. Yes, that was 3D printed. Nice. One printing. We did this at our county fair. We get a booth at the county fair. And I'll tell you what, you want to talk about outreach and connecting with people that last year at our fair, we had one thousand and twenty eight visits at our little table and you put a 3D printer on a table and and a couple of monitors where people can see what you're designing and some videos about, you know, making 3D printed hands for kids and stuff like that. All of a sudden, especially for the older generation, notice all this gray hair, their whole universe goes and they they'd like, wow, they can do that. And I'm like, no, no, you you could do that. And so before you know it, they're coming in for a fab tour and they're getting to see all the stuff that we have. And so in the picture there, you can see this is kind of the outer glass enclosure to our our outer office. And when we roll inside of there, OK, these are the machines that we actually have in our lab. And this is why it's called a fab lab because I need to go back just a bit here. This is why it's called a fab lab because we have. And this is thank you to my predecessor, Sandy Ashworth. She was the director here for 20 years and worked in the library for 12 more before that. And she had this amazing epiphany that if you put a technical center for education in your library, in your community and let everybody come use it, it's going to be like this flower. And people are going to blossom out because they're going to be able to use things that they couldn't afford to have in their homes. And I see that you have different models of 3D printers in there. We have three 3D printers, two of them is the 480, the 800. And we have just recently with some of them prize money that we got. We've got the Ultimaker three, which is an amazing printer. And actually print with two colors at the same time. So I'm not sure how if you guys all know how 3D printing works. A lot of libraries are doing it now, so you probably do. And you can YouTube it and watch it and see all these things. So 3D printing is kind of becoming the norm in the big libraries anyway. People in the small libraries of Idaho and Columbian and say, well, you know, what does you guys do and how did you get this? Sandy wrote two amazingly huge grants. Sandy wrote two amazingly huge grants. Two and a $90,000 total. One of them was Idaho Gym through the Department of Commerce for the state of Idaho. The other one was a USDA Rural Development Grant. And even though the deadline had passed, they believed in what we were doing so much that they actually harvested unused funds from other states to put together like $45,000. And so in that original picture that you saw with the glass wall, that was actually storage in our youth librarian's office area before. And so a lot of materials out in the storage unit now, kind of a bummer for that material, but we have a fab lab. And so as I scroll down here, you can see what else what really sets us apart from other libraries is this thing right here. This is the epilogue laser and it looks small in the picture, but it's not. We don't take that one to the fair because, you know, it's it would fill up part of a pickup bed. It's pretty good size. And so you have to be lugging around. But with that, the amazing things that you can create. Now, we've got this is a family tree. Oh, nice. And we have another one. And is that that's on wood? Yeah, this is on wood. But we have another one that is on it's on acrylic and I wish I could it wouldn't look very good in here because it's there's a lot of light in my office right now. But when we edge light it, you can see all the people's names and everything. The light comes through. And so when you turn the lights down, you get this amazing view of this family tree. We've got another one of an angel. We've got another one of an activity scene that made huge waves at a local church gathering this this winter. And they had all these new activity scenes on display. And everybody's like, you know, then it's on social media. That came from bounty county library. And so the outreach and that holding that door open and saying, OK, time for you guys to show up and go charging through. You can learn how to use this thing. You know, and it doesn't it's not that difficult and it goes really well. We also have a desktop Roland milling machine, which is kind of like a small CNC machine that sits on top of the a cabinet and then the shop bought buddy, which is really actually bigger than this. This guy is as big as Sasquatch right here, you guys. It's a lot bigger than that. And so, I mean, if you had, let's say, furniture pieces or a beautiful sign that you wanted to make with scroll work, or maybe you had the idea of an electric guitar body that no one else had that shape. You know, you can see this on my, you know, that's a guitar right there because that's I play guitar for kids here. So so I always go there. But you could make all these different possibilities. And then, of course, you know, this one right here, vinyl cutters are pretty common. A lot of t-shirt shops have them. And but we have one. And what I encourage people to do is think about these skills that you're learning. Go into rapid prototyping. Take an idea that is intellectual property. Be able to make the model of it without having to risk going elsewhere with that. And there are there actually are 3D printing and other shops around there, you know, commercial. So you learn the skills and ours, you know, go there down to standpoint, 30 miles away or whatever, or court of lane. That's about 60 miles away. And then you can start a sort of business. And when we go to the fab symposium around the United States, because we're part of the Fab Foundation through MIT, a worldwide organization. This is the this is actually the grocery list of machines that you need to have to be affiliated through the Fab Foundation and which is connected to MIT. Grant Money, right? Go Sandy. So once you are able to do that, what happens is instead of taking years and years to start a business and untold thousands of dollars, it has been determined by people in the fab kind of the business of fab that you can do this for maybe six months and three thousand dollars and then be starting to launch a business based on some intellectual property that you had in your mind for years, but never was able to turn it into a reality. That's a culture of opportunity. It really is. I mean, inviting them the chance to just even try out these things that they would have never been able to themselves have access to. We have classes for the CAD classes. So you can actually for the CAD program. So you can actually learn how to how to design your own things. People start off with a program called thingyverse and everybody can go on that. T H I G I verse and there are thousands of free downloadable legal designs and people will start with those and then they'll put them on the screen and then they'll morph them, change them a little bit and little by little they're actually learning the the sync or CAD program or Corel draw. You know, we offer several and so then you can do that. And if you want to learn how to do more, then you go on Linda dot com. We have Linda L Y N D A dot com and you can take literally thousands of different classes. So you can learn all these different CAD programs. You can learn marketing. You can learn filmmaking. You name it. And since we're paying the bill, it doesn't cost you 30 to 40 dollars a month to do it and you can use your own device or computer at home. And we actually do have a question about, I guess many of these machines here. Someone wants to know, I figured I'd jump in now because you were talking about them now. Do you charge for the materials or the use of these? Things like, you know, the, you know, the filament that goes in the 3D printer, the wood, the whatever. Yeah, how do you, how do you do that? Okay, so the answer is no, we don't charge for that. One of the things that I had on my little blurb there that's on your website is foster understanding in your stakeholders. And stakeholders are kind of everybody because it's not my library. It's everyone's library, but the stakeholders that I'm referencing there are our board members. And here in Valerie County, we have a separate library board. So I don't have to go to the county commissioners or anything outside. We have an actual library board and five members from different zones around our county. Then we meet once a month and we discuss some, you know, how this place works and what we want to do in our dreams for the future. And, you know, how, where do we want to go with this? Because it's amazing and it's probably going to become more amazing. You know, like I said, this is the year two for me. So I'm still overwhelmed. I'm still kind of blown away by the fact that I'm even on this screen right now, but I'm really happy to be here. So stakeholders, so upkeep for the machines, equipment budget, materials, all that is, that's a line item in our budget. Okay. And so when we're developing budget, you know, each spring, then we make sure that that's properly funded. And... Someone has a specific question. Is there a huge increase in, and it's just something I had never thought about with people doing all these makerspace and fab labs. Increase in the cost of your electricity bill because of all these different things that are plugged in. Is that anything negligible really? I've thought about that a lot, actually. And that's a valid, valid question. Right now, due to staffing, our classes are only open on Monday and Friday. If we were cranking, you know, six days a week, yeah, I would see that, that happening. But we're Monday and Friday. Our hours are long. We are open from nine to eight on Monday and nine to eight on Friday. Classes go from one to three, three to five, and five to seven. And then that gives staff the last hour to get back upstairs and help with circulation desk and because everybody wears all the hats, you know, we do have certain people that are tech ed that just teach those classes to people that do that. Primarily, and then a third that kind of supports them and helps with CAD programs, teaching those. And, but you know, you have to roll back in and start putting them, you know, shutting down. You guys know how that works. Gotta go through your checklist. And so that's why we turn that off at seven. And so six classes a week, we're rolling into a Tuesday afternoon for 3D printing for people who are certified. That means that the instructor has given, they know that the person is not going to ruin the machine, that they're gonna be safe, you know, cause we, you know, we had to develop a safety program on our website here. When you click on the different machines, you're gonna have to actually go through and watch tutorial videos, take a safety quiz, just like in high school or middle school, you know, and sign your patron agreement, which I actually had our city attorney go through and make sure it was, you know, so you have to cover everything, you know, and you know which parts I'm talking about. And so when, when they're ready, then they can come in with minimal supervision. There's always gonna be somebody kind of walking through the lab and checking on them, but they can make things on Tuesday afternoons as well. So, but no, our, our electrical bills hasn't, haven't really jumped hugely yet. Nice. Yeah. What really makes things jump around here is weather. Ah, yeah. My window right now, you know, there's like a foot of snow right outside, right? You know, right out there. So, so that's what really, you know, as far as natural gas and electrical and that sort of thing, it's the weather that has the biggest, you know. Now, would you ever allow someone to know people to, can they also bring in their own materials to use in some of these machines? And obviously like maybe the wood or whatever. Yeah, if they want to, yes, people do. And, but they, we have a strict inspection of the piece of wood because, you know, if you're using, you know, like the CNC machine, the big one, I mean, you've got a high speed bit that's spinning right here. And if it hit a nail or a screw or something that was in that piece of wood. Yeah. I mean, we're talking destruction of the property here and potential hazard for people. Right. It is full-on wood shop machine right here. So, you know, there's a strict inspection that we do. Anything that anybody wants to bring if somebody that is bringing their stuff in. She's making a really cool bottle up on her wall hangers with, and using the laser to get her there. She created a monogram for their family. And I mean, it's really neat. Let's start in the house with this stuff. So, and the sky's the limit. Every time somebody thinks of something, somebody else has to think of something else. And then it goes bigger and bigger and bigger, you know. Of course. Now, someone else know, obviously, actually there's a couple of kind of related questions here, I think this versus the small libraries in their state don't have the funding to afford these kinds of things, of course. Or also the space to house them. Now you mentioned with the funding that you did that your predecessor had applied for grants to help get this going. Yep. In the first place. And then the, go ahead. Because we needed to repurpose the back part of our basement. Mm-hmm. So. So look for grants out there. I mean, there are funding other things that, but now you have it as an ongoing budget item because you have brought in the library board to be very supportive of. They were in there even before the whole thing started. I mean, they were cheering Sandy on all the way. And so was I, you know, I was starting to volunteer here and everything even before I left the high school. So, you know, I was, I'd come in and visit her and, you know, she'd be asking questions about should I do this and should I do that? And how do we move forward? And I'm like, you can do it. You could do it. You know, a little engine that could basically, because it's, you know, it's kind of cliche now. The thing about it takes a village, but you know, it takes a town to build a library too. And that means people that are just, the moral support is tremendous. You know, you have to have it because otherwise you're not going to be having that vision of hope that you can sustain. You know, the other thing that I said about developing a solid plan, Sandy did that. She developed this plan of creating, basically she wanted to create a big business center, educational center. And I actually was on a committee. We've tried to float a bond for an $8 million building and in an economically depressed community. If I could see everybody out there, I can't, but you could, if you could raise your hand and say, okay, I'm from an economically depressed small library community. I bet you'd be seeing a forest of fans out there. So yeah, we, that thing went down in flames so hot that it would make your heads spin. And so, but Sandy, all she did was, you know, she reached in this drawer right here and she pulled out her tape measure and said, nope, I'm not taking no for an answer on this one. And she looked at the back part of the basement back there and said, Terry, we're moving your office. And, you know, Lynn and Diana, we're going to move these books that are in storage elsewhere and that are in the very back by the under the stairwell. And we're going to build a fab lab. So, and that's a huge part of it. It's just having a really hard head and not taking no for an answer. Even though it's not the building, we were going to just replace this entire thing. And of course, this building was finished in 1974. And people in our community are like, wait a minute, you can't replace that building. It's the newest building in the downtown area. Yeah. 1974. So they're the way you care about that. And we're going to put the books in the meantime and blah, blah, blah, and all this stuff. And, you know, so it crashed and burned but just, you know, picking yourself up, like in a Disney cartoon, dusting yourself off and starting all over again. And, you know, but having people around you that say, you know, you can do this. And I was one of those people and now I'm here. And, you know, as we move forward, there's going to be people around me saying the same thing to me. Because there'll be times and you guys all know, right? There are times when like, you know, the last presenter, well, okay, here's some things that happened. But we're going to do it this way next time, you know? And, but you do have to have people in a rah-rah chair and you want to do that. But, you know, that solid plan, you know, having point A to point B to point C and on down the line. And then of course, you know, she built the fab lab but she didn't open it. That it wasn't open. And she retired and I took over and I said, well, you know, during my interview for this job, they said, what's your first objective? What are you going to do in your first 60 days? You know, that's a question that is asked. And I said, we're going to open the fab lab. That's the first thing we're going to do. And we did. And, you know, I started officially in October, first of October, that's when our physical year starts. And by mid-November, we had students. Nice, that's fast. Without students, right? So that's, yeah. We put together all the paperwork, you know, my crew went on Linda.com and learned how to use the machines. And I've got some really apt folks that really wanted to, they'd been wanting to get in there for a while. So they'd been preparing and learning and playing in the lab. And it really is playing. And it was just a matter of me opening the gate and letting them come running out. And boy, they did. And then, you know, when you start doing these events, like the craft fair and the hospital fair and the county fair, and you're out there in the community and you're, you know, and before you know it, you've got all these grade school kids coming through and, you know, you're making little tokens for them. You know, if you're a laser and you're handing them out, you know, out of even, we found out that we can actually laser on tortillas. Really? Okay. I don't think we've ever seen that done yet. We could do it on toast, tortillas. Sure. So cardboard is really cheap when there's lots of it. So if you ever get a laser, you can give away tons of little counters about your library and just give them away to people. You know, quite amazing. I had my first intern that I hired was a student in my class before and he had a 3D printer at home. And so he knew how to do it. He taught us a ton of stuff. He designed this on Blender, which is a free open source webpage that is used for character design for video game characters. Ah, right. He was really into that. He's going into film right now and he's gonna make, you know, 3D generated characters, you know, like in all these movies that you see, the superhero movies and all that sort of stuff. You have all this 3D generated stuff. So he's working on that right now in college. So we lost him, darn. But he taught us how to use a lot of parts of the lab, actually. His dad totally believed in the present and the future and kids and then they had a 3D printer at home. And another one that makes pancakes, but on a griddle, 3D prints, pancakes. But anyway. I've seen videos of that, yes, 3D pancakes. Yeah. Yeah, think of Scooby-Doo with all the details of all the spots on him because the parts that hit the griddle first are cooked more. So they're darker and so you get the coloration of the pancake. Really fun. All right, we have a question about something that's not, I know you have lots of things, you do not just this fab lab that we're kind of focusing on here. So I did have a question you had mentioned early about doing the program with Zookeepers and NASA. What was the name of the system you used to do that? It's a Polycom system. Polycom, okay. And you can go online and check out Polycom. Yeah, they do have me a pretty big invoice, but that is, again, part of our budget. And someone did ask how big is your budget that we're talking here for your library? County library, so if people have to remember that, this is, you serve the entire county. You're 11,000, some odd, yeah. Almost 12,000 population served. It's like 314-ish. That's, I don't know if that answers that question very well, but so it's not huge, but it's the way that it's broken up. We have certain things we emphasize more than others, and it's the way that it's broken up and where we appropriate funds. Other questions, I see that, I mean, we are getting, I could talk about this library all day, but you know. Someone has actually a good question that I think many people may be wondering about something, because you did mention, and we have that here too in Nebraska libraries, when you have this kind of equipment or anything like this in the library, having this specific training and certification so that people know how to use them safely, both use them correctly, both for their own safety and as you said, they don't break anything. What about your liability insurance? Did you have to do something special to cover this new equipment or is that something that is already part of what you already had? How does that work? We're part of what's called ICRIMP, and it's the state of Idaho, all the entities like us in the state of Idaho form a group. So it's a pretty large insurance pool. Oh, okay. So as we embarked on this, we have put together a much more complete inventory, which I sent to our jester here in town, who was my 11th grade civics teacher. We all know each other. And so yeah, that's just part of that. It's part of our ICRIMP, and we've got the state of Idaho liability insurance policy too, that this is all part of that too. So yep, so that's taken care of with that umbrella. I've got to say that one of my tech educators, when you first was setting up the shop, the bits are razor sharp if it's in here. So he just ran, he was just sweeping off this deck right here where this little finger is going, and he barely touched that bit with the back of his hand and he went to the hospital. So I got to fill out that paperwork, and so they paid for our policy, paid for his visit. So it's not like things don't happen. And then we had a big training session with all the staff members and everything, but I had a training day here, and we learned CPR and all that sort of thing. And so the more of that kind of thing that you do, you know, with your staff, your risk tends to go down because you're demonstrating a risk management. That's a huge part of what we do. And someone has a question that I think might be, you said that your family and all this equipment is in a basement space in your library. They wanted to know how do you handle the noise that comes with the machines? But is it because it's in the basement that kind of takes care of it in your case? No, because I'm in the basement right now, actually. It's just, you know, okay, it's just that way. But it's quite amazing. When Sandy first designed the remodel, there are three different areas. There's the outer office, which you saw in the picture. And then that's where the computer part is, where you can do the computer training and you can do learn your CAD classes and get your designs downloaded to a file that you can send to your 3D printer or send to the laser. You can get all that there. And then there's another room behind that. And that's where the 3D printing takes place. And 3D printing is not very loud. I mean, a lot of you guys don't know that. It's a real quiet thing. And then behind that one, there's another door and you go behind into the other shop and that's where these things. Now the laser is really quiet. The loudest part of the laser, because it's a light, it's like you're clicking a flashlight on a thousand times per second or something. It's quite amazing. So there's not much noise involved. And we do have, we did have to create a venting system because you do have some of that burnt dust from whatever it is you're lazing. And so it's vents outside, to the outside of the building. So that's some of the requirement there. Now the vinyl cutter doesn't really make any noise. It's just, I don't know if you guys have seen these probably in the t-shirt shops, but it's just a sharp blade right here that just moves back and forth this way. And then the material slides in and out this way. So you get your X and your Y axis. And then it just moves back and forth. It's really quiet. And this is a little bit louder because it's a high speed bit that's just, but it's right kind of under the stairwell that you take to get downstairs. So it's way in the back. And then this one is towards the back too. And the loudest part of this thing, believe it or not, is that there's a big dust collection device. It's like this huge shop vac that sits next to it. Yeah, there's a lot of extra things beyond these equipment sometimes that you have to have. Yeah. When that comes on, all you hear is it sounds like, it sounds like an AC unit in your building coming on. That's what that sounds like. It's kind of a whoosh, because you're actually hearing the suction more than you're hearing the bit. So yeah, I thought, oh, we should do a sound test during the off hours so that we can find out from upstairs how it's gonna be. Nope, the dance class that was back in our little conference room was actually way louder than that. People on the computers upstairs could hear the boom box when they're doing their interpretive dance down there. But that's something else we do. Let people do that stuff. We have a little room for crafts and meetings and interpretive dance. Kind of cool. So, nope, it's not that loud. I thought it was going to be, but it's not. Nice, all right. Yeah, lucky. One other question about these. If a small library who has small space, small budget, or just do enough budget for one thing, what one, if they were able to buy one piece of equipment for their lab, what would you recommend? It's just the one thing to start with or? This guy right here. And I guess I can't plug it, right? Because I don't work for Affinia, but a small 3D printer, you know? This one, if you bought it now, since this one's not the newest model in the world, 700 bucks for that guy. The Affinia, the H8 480 there on the left. About 700 that you could get that one. This newest one we got was over three grand, but it is so nice. I mean, it's got an onboard camera system so that if we're doing projects that we're doing, Derek, who's our IT guy, can actually, on his phone, up in his office, watch the print. Nice. To monitor it. Uh-huh. Yeah, it's got an onboard camera that's wifi to his phone or his computer. And so if there's gonna be a failed print or something, you can just run downstairs and turn it off real quick. Because you get failed prints with any printer. It happens. Oh, yeah. But yeah, that's, here's why I would get this first. Because the laser, the milling machine, the buddy, these are subtractive technologies. Anybody with a hand saw and a board is using subtractive technology. You're lopping something off, right? I mean, cutting something to make something else. And this is something that everyone is so familiar with. It's no big deal to them. I mean, it's cool beyond belief and the laser is awesome. But this sparks the imagination. This, when a person sees this build space right here and there's nothing on it and then they watch. And, you know, a little bit later, you know, they're going like this. And it's like, oh my gosh. And, you know, when you're like at a county fair or, you know, a place like that and people, you know, they watch the beginning of it and they go look at the goods for a while and they come back and there's more of it done. And so on and then they come back and it's completely done. And as they're watching that build, this is a Star Trek feel. It really is the imagination of the person who's watching that. It just goes, you know, you get on fire. There's this one young girl, she was like 12 years old and she came to our table and she's looking at this and she's just mesmerized. And I said, hey, you want to see how it works? You know, and so I hopped out and Daniel, my intern was there at the computer and she sat down at the computer there next to him and she turned to him and she said, I'm going to be an engineer. That's why I'm going to be an engineer. And then she dragged her whole family back later on. Mom and dad, you know, we need to start saving money because now I'm going to go to MIT or I'm going to go be an engineer. And see, this is huge because more and more young ladies need to get into science and need to break that glass ceiling. I'm a dad of a daughter. Let's break it. I get that. And this is that culture of opportunity. I mean, we provided the opportunity. She provided the desire. And she's going to go do something and it's going to be really sweet. So that's what this is really all about. And I have that in my mind. It's contagious within my staff. I do do this stuff all the time with them, you know. And we talk it up amongst ourselves and then we talk it up. The first pretty printer that you're mentioning there, the one that's the older one, how big, how much space does that take up for a library? There's not a lot of room to do something. Yeah, it's about a smaller one. Yeah. Yeah, you can fit on top of this table that my computer's on with the, that's small. Most three printers are not more than like a foot or two if that dimensions, yeah, less than that even. And if you want to know more about it, you can YouTube it and watch it building. That's pretty easy. This one's a little bit bigger and then this one's bigger, yeah. This one would take up in a top of a counter space, but they're all countertop, all of them. They are, I guess. Oh really, yeah. I did talk to one librarian that said, man, I don't even have enough room for even an extra table. But my board wants me to have a 3D printer now because they read about you guys. And I felt kind of bad because they're really putting a lot of pressure on her to get this done. And another lady came from miles and miles to come up to visit us just to, she was a board member and she wanted to talk the other board members into getting at least one 3D printer in their library. And it's a small, small little community between Blottersbury and Moscow, Idaho, about 90 miles away. She came up here to check us out. So, kind of cool. That's great, awesome. It's been like that. All right, we're almost at the end of the time. Do you have any last minute or so, last words for everybody before we wrap up your session? Man, it's just right where it started, you know? With, it needs to be about you, you know, as a librarian, as a library director, needs to be about you. And then you turn it around and you make it about the patrons because they're your students. And picking out the right book, you know, having a story read to a kid, and then that kid will probably read a story to their kid, you know? And it's about holding up this really cool mirror and letting people see how cool they really are. That's what it's about. And then you just make a place where they can do that. And I know you guys are all doing that. And, but it doesn't hurt to have, you know, an old teacher doing a little cheerleading. I mean, I did that for a long time and kids, kids created things, you know? I had this business project that I had going. And during the 16 years I taught that class as kids created these projects. It's an entire portfolio. And I'm gonna give that opportunity for people who go through our fab lab. They can learn how to make their own business cards and all that good stuff. You know, from what we did before and brochures and web page and all that sort of thing. But during the 16 years that I taught that class, you know, eight kids went on to start up their own businesses. One of them was called Under the Sun in Bonners Ferry. You can look that up online. It was voted the most innovative small business in the state of Idaho. And that's what's about planting the seed for them, absolutely. That's what you do. And that's what we're doing. I did that at the high school. I'm gonna continue to do that here. And my staff's gonna do that. And you guys are gonna do that. You're doing it already. But it just needs to be mindful. You know, it's like, okay, we show up to work. We're doing the things that we always do, but it's mindful. It's like, okay, this is what we're really doing. And it's gonna be really, really big. Hopefully that helps. Absolutely, yes, great. Well, thank you so much, Greg. And congratulations to you and your library and your staff and your town for this great honor from Best Small Library in America. Yeah, the state legislators right now are making a proclamation for us. It's gone through the house. It's going to go through the Senate. We'll have a statewide proclamation in honor of our library. We're the gem state. So they're gonna say that we're a gem of Idaho. So I'm not sure how that happened. I guess I go down to Boise and I talk to people like I'm talking to you guys and they get excited. So you need to go do that. Go get excited and make things huge. Start small and then get bigger. Absolutely. You can do this. Okay, well, thank you very much for being with us this morning, Craig. Here you come. Yeah, so thank you for having me. It's been a real pleasure and honor. Mm-hmm, absolutely. Take care. Thank you. All right, I am gonna pull back to my screen here now. Oops, there we go. All right, so that wraps up for Craig's presentation today. We are recording all day. So if you miss anything, you wanna go back and see anything, you will be able to watch it later. We also have a link to his library's website here so you can go and see more about what they're doing there and a link to the article from a library journal about the Best Mall Library in America so you can read up on exactly all the details about what they were doing there and how they earned that honor.