 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 are a webinar, a webcast, online show, whatever you want to call us. We cover a variety of library topics. The show is free and open to anyone to watch. And we do the show live on Wednesday mornings at 10 AM central time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record all of our shows. So they're all available on our website. And the recordings are posted to our YouTube channel for you to watch afterwards. And we do a mixture of things here, presentations, interviews, mini training sessions, book reviews, basically anything library related. We are happy to have on the show. And we do have a Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes do presentations and sometimes we bring in guest speakers. And that is what we have today. On the line with us, we have staff from Kearney Public Library, which is right here in Kearney, Nebraska, a little west of where I am here in Lincoln. Matt Williams is the director there. And Christy Walsh, the assistant director. And I think you guys said that someone else was with you there, too. I didn't catch your lawyer. Sarah Hack, our circulation coordinator. Right, Sarah is there with them, too. And they're going to talk about some cool things I've been doing, same customer service at your library and what they've done at their library. I attended this session last fall at our state library conference. Nebraska Library Association and School Library Association has a conference in October. And I attended this presentation at a conference. And I thought it was awesome. I took lots of notes. And I thought it'd be great to be able to share this with more people. So I contacted them and see if they'd come on the show. So they're here to talk about the great changes in the extreme customer service they've done at their library. So I'll just hand over to you guys to take it away. Thanks. Our presentation today is, of course, about extreme customer service at your library. And we feel that while providing innovative services and programming helps to draw new patrons, excellence in customer service is what keeps them coming back. So we've recently embraced a more patron-focused approach to library policies. And that has included changing many policies to create a more positive experience for patrons. What we'd like to talk to you about today is, in that shell, how to keep your patrons happy by being nice. About us, just a little bit, so you know a little bit about us. We serve a population base of 46,000. The main library is the Buffalo County Football Field, that's what we have. No other branches. We have 40,000, almost 41,000 car holders, about 20 FDE employees, function size 165,000. Our 20 FDE in circulation is 523,000. And we get about 231,000 visitors a year. So what inspired us to take this extreme customer service approach? One of our management team, one of our division heads, had watched a web junction webinar called Extreme Customer Service. And she thought it was really excellent and ended up passing it on to the rest of the division heads. And in turn, we all watched it and thought it had some really great ideas. The webinar focused on changes that libraries can make to have a more patron-focused approach to customer service. And it also pointed out different brands that excel at customer service, such as Ritz-Carlton, Hotel and Apple. A little bit from that webinar at the bottom there. The presenter talked about customer service as a mindset, not a set of rules. It was also emphasized that you need to think about the patron and not your own institution. All of us want to provide good customer service. And as a librarian, if you don't want to provide the customer service, you're probably not in the right profession, she said. Many of us say that we provide good customer service, but that's something that you can always improve on. And I think we thought here that we had good customer service, but we have definitely improved it with the changes we've made. Our patrons expect us to provide good customer service, and they know the difference between good service and bad service. Every interaction with a patron is an opportunity to exceed their expectations. And so we not only want to meet their expectations, we want to exceed it. So once we listened to that webinar, the management team discussed it, and we decided that this is an idea we really wanted to embrace and try to implement at Karni Public Library. So why did we change? Well, we had this fabulous opportunity with a new building. We were rethinking how we did different processes. We had expanded space, so we were reworking how staff did their jobs. And so it gave us an opportunity to rebrand, to redo our policies, and kind of put a whole fresh face on the experience at Karni Public Library. Things weren't bad, but like Sarah said, you can always improve. So we started questioning, why are we doing these things? What's the benefit? And is there maybe a better way to do it? And what do we, which led to, what do we do that upsets patrons the most? Is it something that we've just been doing for years and, you know, maybe it doesn't really have a purpose anymore? And how much would it cost to make the changes? Is there a monetary cost? Is there a PR cost in terms of goodwill with your patrons? So we looked at things that were upsetting the patrons, like replacement items. Someone messes up a book or a DVD and they go and purchase one at Walmart, bring it in while we didn't before accept that just because you never know if you get what it is you want to replace in the collection. We re-evaluated that. We had a last processing fee, which was kind of, you know, our service fee for processing lost materials. We changed all the new books from seven days to 14 days. That was patron feedback that said, gosh, I love my new books, but it's so hard to get through a bunch of them in seven days. Didn't cost us anything except stickers to change it. And the response was immediate and enthusiastically positive of, great, I now have two weeks. I think a lot of them probably still return them in seven days. But the idea that they have 14 days and they don't have to stress about it, they love it. How much would it cost to make the changes? You know, do we have the ability to forgive fines without messing up our budget? Can we replace some of our fees and rethink how we do that? We found that the cost was minimal and was offset by the increase in good public relations. So to build on what Christy was saying, as she said, we looked at these things. In fact, I remember I came in and we have divisions. We call ourselves division heads. We're the managers here. We had division head meetings and I came in and I said, I've been thinking about what annoys our patrons. What annoys them? What makes them annoyed with us? And I want us to kind of, and we do this a lot of our meetings, kind of have our thinking caps on and have a brainstorming session and what annoys people and the things that she mentioned were some of those things. And we thought, well, how can we change these so that people aren't annoyed? And so we had specific policies we changed. A lot of libraries, I've worked in two or three different libraries and it was always the policy was we don't accept replacements. And there's a good reason for that. The reason is we don't know if you're bringing back the same thing as you lost. Maybe we don't want that anymore, we want something different and so on. And not that they're like bad things, but my take on it was, well, you know, how often does that really happen? How often in the year does somebody just come in with something? And does it really hurt us to take that item? Does it really, you know, is it really worth having an argument with a patron forcing them to go back, take that item back? Now, we don't encourage people, if they call us we're not going to tell them to buy an item and bring it in. But if they do, we tentatively take it, give it to the person in charge. Once they ascertain it's actually the same item that we lost, we accept the item and people go away much happier than they did before. We eliminated the $5 processing fee and lost items. And that was put into place, I believe, because we were trying to stop people from continually paying for items and then bringing them in and getting a refund. It was not, the $5 was not refundable, kept people from just using that and continually saying they lost something, bringing it in again. However, the processing fee really annoyed people. And to tell you the truth, we already charged people the full price of an item, not really the price that we paid, but the price that it says it's worth when you go on Baker and Taylor or Amazon. And so we're already really getting from them a little fee on top of it. So we eliminated that. We used to try to catch people and make them pay their fines by not letting them use library computers. Now, the more I thought about that, the more I thought, you know, the reason, what is the reason that we find people? It's because they're not, we don't trust them to bring their items back on time anymore and it hurts other patrons. Well, using, I'm pretty sure they're going to return the Internet on time. So we just don't see that as connected in any way. There's no, I mean, no reason they can't use our computer, use our Internet. A lot of times they're looking for jobs and things. How do they pay their fines? They don't look for a job. I really think that that was a good thing to do for people. We give patrons the benefit of the doubt on claims or trans items. We give them one freebie. They say they returned it. We say, okay, you returned it. We're giving and we tell them we're giving you a freebie today. We're going to take your benefit of the doubt. We do market so that the next time they do that, we say, well, you know, last time we gave you a freebie, but we really can't keep doing that. We changed the checkout time, as Christie said. On the new books, that actually came from a board member that came to us and said, Richard Miller had come talk to the board. He said, you need to get out of the community and see what they want. So this board member went out in the community and listened to him. She came back and said they want two weeks on their books. And we had heard this before from patrons. We thought, oh, why not? I mean, if people don't like it, we can always go back at some time. So we changed them and put new stickers on them. And as Christie said, very enthusiastic reception on that. So how do you change the climate in the workplace and start making some of these changes? Shift your focus from the library to the patron. And that said, we really tried to think about what things the patrons were particularly bothered by and tried to focus on those to change it first. We're continuously evaluating policies and processes that come up to see if we can do something to change them. For example, another one that came up recently was we had patrons call often who are on their way to the library. They ask for an item. It says it's checked in on our system. We say, we'll have it ready for you. Hang up the phone. We go to the shelf. We can't find it. Needless to say, when the patron gets here, they're not very happy that the item isn't relating to them. So that's something that we had to evaluate recently to see what we could do to solve that situation. Question, what you are doing. Why are you doing it? Is it because you've always done it? Is there a real benefit to the community? Always just kind of keep tabs on what you're doing and why you're doing it. Consistency is important, too. Communication is key to success. Keep the staff informed of changes so they are consistent in processes. They also need to read library newsletters, know what events are occurring that day, what craft is going on upstairs, what is the movie that is being played that day. And then they're better able to help patrons with questions. Changes take time, so make it easy for the patrons and for the staff. We had changed printing systems not too long ago, which was a change for the staff and for the users. But we tried to offset the change for the patrons by giving them a dollar's worth of free printing on their library accounts each month. People are really excited about that. Empowering staff, in order to keep the momentum up for making these changes actually happen, we continue as a management team to lead by example and constantly encourage staff to make decisions. We have guidelines with a policy manual, but they have latitude to make decisions based on their best judgment. So we keep encouraging, some people are comfortable with that and some are not. And so as managers, we continue to work with people. But the other piece of that is as a management team, we need to support those decisions and emphasize to the staff that if you decide to waive a fine for someone, that is fine. It's really good to keep us in the loop so that if that patron comes back or some other fallout occurs, we're not blindsided by it. And we just keep emphasizing that as we have staff turnover, it gives us an opportunity to refresh the existing staff and then introduce the new staff to the whole concept of they have the power to make these decisions and to run with them. If it's time consuming for the staff, how do you make it easier? And that as a management team is an ongoing challenge to look at, okay, is this the most efficient way? Do we need to move these five pieces of paper anymore or can we do it online? Can we just take that process out of the equation altogether because it no longer has a purpose? So we continuously challenge ourselves as management team to look at that too and encourage the staff to give us input on things they do that perhaps there's a better way to do it. And last but not least, of course, is to take pride in the library. We are the largest public face of the city in the community. We have about 800 people through the door a day. And so we need to put the very best face on for the city of Carney that we possibly can and take pride in our work. Smiling when someone walks in the door, it is huge. Nothing doesn't take that much effort and certainly is in everybody's best interest. So we make sure that that is a priority and everybody knows that's the expectation. Because when someone walks through the desk, they don't know if they've got the library director or they've got one of our pages or one of our new clerks. It doesn't matter. They should have the same positive experience regardless of who they get. And just a word to just continue that a little bit. Continually question, as she said, your procedures. Some library procedures don't change for years and years and years. Everybody, we try to get them to think about what they're doing and question, why am I doing this? Why are we doing this for? Why are we continuing to do something like this? And to just ask, could this be done easier? Do we need to do it? Do we need to really... We quit taking paper and I know this doesn't work for everybody, but we quit having people sign up for cards on paper. We just do it on the computer. They sign the card and that's it for them. That has cut out. So much time. We used to spend hours and hours and hours trying to pull defunct ones out of the system, trying to put the new ones in, trying to get them right. And how many times did we pull that thing out to look at it again? Zero. We never did. So that was something we cut out that saved a lot of time. And also, I would agree with her on take pride in the library and think about your experiences when you go to a store or another library and think of the bad experience and as Lou Grant used to say to Mary Tyler Moore, you know that way you are? Don't be that way. I'm destroying the table as we sit here. And what is the most important? Focus on your basic services at your full potential before getting wrapped up in additional services. That doesn't mean don't add things. We've added a lot of things here, lots. But what it means is if you're not doing the basic services at the best possible way you can do them, there's no point in adding another service will not save your library. It will increase people's love of your library if they're not coming into your library and getting that positive experience to begin with. And you can have every service in the world. But if people coming into your library don't feel welcome, they don't leave happy, they're not going to come back. So get those basic services right before you just try to save your library by adding new services. And I want to say the most important asset of any library goes home at night, and that's the library staff. Okay, personalizing service. You know how when you have a good customer service experience, you feel like you have the full focus of whoever is helping you. We try to make sure that that is what happens here, is that no one feels that we're trying to rush the transaction, even if there are people behind you in line. Take the time, do it right, make it positive. So how can you say yes? People come in with all kinds of questions, and I'm sure all of you have lots of stories you could tell. You thought you'd heard every question in the book, every possible scenario for why the book or material was damaged, why they don't have their card, etc. It doesn't matter. How can you say yes? How do you meet them halfway? Can you forgive a portion of their fee? Can you help them work on a payment plan, because that's just going to give them some peace of mind and gives them an opportunity to have a successful transaction? And sometimes you just have to give the public a benefit of the doubt. Once you're in your library for a while, you have a sense of who your population is. Some people you know are going to try to push the system every single time. Do you handle them a little bit differently? Perhaps, but it still should be as positive an experience as you possibly can. So, you use the guidelines that help you keep the patrons from abusing the system. That gives you some structure to how you handle things, but does it also allow you to say, oh, you know, you have a dollar fine and we had two snow days and people weren't getting out? Can we work with you on that? Absolutely. Look at that. And another thing is don't punish everybody for what a couple of people are doing. I've seen that happen too many times. A procedure or a policy is put into place because you have a couple of annoying patrons that do something. And so we say, well, we're going to learn that we can't let them do that, so we change a policy that hurts everybody. So don't punish everybody. Deal with those people on a one-on-one basis. You can limit those people what they do without limiting everybody. And you may not always be able to say yes. It doesn't mean that you can accommodate every single situation. But if you can lessen the impact to the best of your ability, it means you've made the effort, and that effort will go a long way with people. I ask for input. And this does act on the suggestions of patrons and board members. I'd say also add in their staff members. Listen to suggestions that people give you. If a patron gives you a suggestion, it may or may not be a good suggestion, but give it. Give it it's due. Think about that suggestion. Think about whether it's good. Listen to your board members. We had the one board member that said, hey, we need to change that. The amount of time we can have those new books out. So we did it. And listen to them. They're coming to you, and they're coming to you. Sometimes they've talked to other people. You can't accommodate everything that somebody's saying, but you can certainly. And don't be afraid of failure. That's another thing, that you're trying and failing. There's nothing wrong with that. And if you try something and it doesn't work, what do you do? You just don't do it anymore. You change it back. Or you try the next thing. No harm, no foul, I guess, and other sports analogies like that. But, you know, we did a strategic plan recently, and we did a formal survey, and that was really interesting. And we got a lot of surveys back. And we found out a lot of interesting things. First of all, people really, really love the library. It was overwhelmingly positive. But no matter how good something is, you can approve on it. And they asked for things. They asked for that we remain open on Sundays year round. Well, we're going to do that. We're going to remain open on Sundays year round. We had some other things. I'm trying to thank you. What were some of the other things we went through going on there? Cleaning the disks. Cleaning the disks. That was another one. Should we, you know, please clean your disks? Well, you know, they're not really aware of how many disks we have. And the time it takes. But one of the things that I'm looking into to ask for in my next capital ask is a multi-disk cleaner so that we can clean our disks faster and do more than that time. But we're trying to go through our collections and do that. So you want to make changes? I was going to tell you where to start. You can start with some really basic things if you want to embrace this idea. Greet patrons when you see them come in the door. It's really easy. Sometimes you just need to smile. Say hello, wave, do something to acknowledge their presence if they're coming in the door. Makes them feel welcome. They'll feel more comfortable approaching the desk and asking questions if they have questions later. Don't point people in a direction. Show them. If someone's looking for a book, we ask the clerks to walk them to the stacks and help them find it if they need assistance. Sometimes we even go get the items for people. Sometimes that's just easier for them and for us. So we do that. Make service as personal as possible. Do the best you can to say yes for what they're asking or at least send them somewhere where they can get an answer if we can't solve the problem for them here. Frontline service is the most important. No one is exempt. Everyone here is expected to know the basic routines at the front desk, whether you're management or work. If you're walking by and there's a line, you're expected to jump in and help so people don't have to wait. The staff members know that they can always call the management out from their offices to come and help at the front desk if they need help. Communication is key. That is a big one. You have to communicate between the management team and the part-time staff. The staff themselves need to communicate with each other so they know what's going on with different patron situations or what policies we've changed and why. And the library also needs to communicate with the patron. That's one of my biggest pet peeves is when people call here and we say we will get back to them, we need to get back to them and we need to do that in a timely manner, even if it's just, you know, we're still working on it. But we wanted you to know that we're still working on your issue. They need to know that they haven't been forgotten. Another tip is explain what you're doing. A lot of times people will come up to the front desk. They'll ask a question and clerks will immediately start to look things up on the computer. Maybe won't say too much to that patron about what they're doing. Let them know. Let me check in the system to see if we have that book. I don't see the book in our system. Let me check on Amazon to see if I have the title correct or if I'm spelling things correctly. Sometimes we turn the computer screen around so we can walk them through and show them what we're doing on the screen. This just helps them to know how you're trying to help them. Think about your bad experiences. Do not recreate those. You can help it. How would you want to be treated if you walked in as that patron with that particular problem? Try to go that direction. Answer the phone, emails, et cetera, ASAP. I kind of just touched on that a little bit. But if patrons email and want to book renewed, we need to do that as quickly as we can. If it sits in there for three days, they might have a fine after that. We don't want to cause that problem for them. So get back to them and do this possible. Acknowledge patrons when they're waiting in line. If you're busy at the front desk, the phone's ringing, just signal to people that you will be with them in a moment to help them know you need to get the phone and then you will help them. If you're the only one at the front desk, let them know that you'll be there to assist them. Shortly, you just need to find somebody else to help cover. Usually, people are perfectly happy to wait. We actually had several compliments from people lately that have said they don't feel like they ever have to wait at all. They said if they're in line, somebody pops out in the back room very quickly to help them, and they really appreciate it. Avoid transferring patrons when possible. Try to not send them on a wild goose chase if they have questions. Sometimes people have complicated things, so figure out where to send them. That comes back to communication with the staff. They need to know who's in charge of what areas and where to send patrons with particular questions. The more people know, as Sarah said, the more people that know how to do things, the better. If they come to the front desk and they ask you how to use I'm having trouble with my e-reader, we try not to say, well, you're going to have to wait an hour because the one person that knows how to do e-readers is out of building. We try, and this is an ongoing training situation to get people to do this. Some take it on easier than others, but we try to have everyone so that when you come up to the desk, the first person you get is the person that helps you. Some things are more complicated, of course, and you can't do that, but as much as possible, we try to help people so that the first person they encounter is the person that helps them. A lot of these things you can do, even if you have a small staff or just one person, you can always be friendly and you can always explain things as you're doing them and many other things we've mentioned. Share your success. You've done this, you're successful, people are happy. Collect stories. Our staff collects stories. What do we do with these stories? We give them to the board every month, every two months actually in our case, so that when they are with somebody, they can share them. They can say, hey, did you know at our library this happened? This is a great opportunity. This is a great thing that happened. Just yesterday, a couple of staff members realized that maybe we weren't sharing all of our stories with everybody on staff, so they share them with the rest of the staff so everybody knows and feels good about the successes that we have and shares with that. Document them, use them for advocacy. Use them when you're giving a talk somewhere. They're great things to use. They can help increase the importance of the library and help make the people aware of that. All of that goodwill, when you have those stories that we share among ourselves, it kind of gains momentum unto itself. With our bookmobile services, we reach all of the communities in Buffalo County, which involves small libraries in the area as well as lots of schools. Sometimes there are kids who have fines by no fault of their own because mom and dad don't take care of it. It doesn't seem quite fair perhaps to punish them for their parents' lack of attention to it. We've made an effort in the past three years or so at the beginning of the year to forgive some of that. If the materials are back, can we waive those fines so that that second grader or that kindergartner can get back out on the bus because if mom and dad aren't taking care of the fines, they probably aren't bringing them physically to the library, which is out of town. We want to take down the barriers as much as possible. As we all know, things happen in life that mess stuff up and they're out of your control. We had one recently before Christmas. I was working with a patron. I got a nice note. I bought a fourth grader. I got a nice note from his dad that said, I had no idea all of this was going on, had been through a life change, and thank you so much for letting me know that my son can use bus again and for just taking the time to make the effort. I will be on top of it from here on out, so thank you. It's always nice to know that what you've done has had an impact too. Our two of those will keep us going as a staff, too, to keep looking at what we can do better. Another piece that fed into that is we do a food for fines thing once a year, so you can bring in canned goods or non-perishable goods and get part of your fines forgiven. Well, on the bookmobile, that's a pretty fun thing, too, because those kids will bring in the beginning of the school year. They can start with a clean slate, it gives them another opportunity to address fines or whatever is going on on their account. We don't use it for the last materials. That's kind of a separate beast, but a lot of times if we can get the fines out of the way, we've got a lot of progress and headway. And in the same vein, somebody in their early 20s in the library and says, we say, hey, I see that you have all these huge fines and fees from when you were 12. Welcome back to the library. We usually forgive those right away. We don't try to visit the sons of the parents upon the children, so we leave that to God. But we just try to look at things and think reasonably. Be the person that you want to encounter when you go to the library. And we are open for questions. Okay, great. No, we're here. Sorry, I just had to. There's always a little delay with getting unmuted sometimes. Great. Thank you very much, Nat, Christy, and Sarah. That was great. That was, like I said, I attended a session at our conference and thought there was some really great ideas in there. We did have a comment from one person. I think Sarah, when you were talking about the customer service and taking them to the actual things they knew, not just pointing, someone said that one of their library mentors referred to use calling them golden retrievers rather than pointers and setters. That's a way to describe the difference in how you would provide that kind of service. And I did have a couple questions in here that I just wanted to let people know. Yes, the slides that they used today has already sent them to me. They will be available afterwards when the recording is posted. And I've also found the webinar that you guys watched from Web Junction and added a link to that as well will be included in the show notes afterwards. So you'll be able to watch the Web Junction one that these guys based their changes on. So we do have some questions coming in. What training has your staff had for dealing with angry or irate patrons? How do you handle that kind of situation? Most of the training is in-house training. We actually, as an ongoing thing, do scenarios at all of our staff meetings. We hand out scenarios. Everybody reads the scenario. We say, what do you do in this case? And then we talk about the cases. So it's not quite role playing, but it's a little bit similar to that where they give their answer and then we all discuss whether that's the right answer. So we do a lot of in-house training. We also encourage if there's any opportunities close by, they can go to them. And we try to make them aware of any kind of webinar type things that are available. They want to listen to those on their own. We try to emphasize to them to kill people with kindness. Somebody comes in and they're really upset. Try not to aggravate that further. Fuel the fire. Just stay calm and don't take it personally. Take the time to listen to what they have to say. Usually if you listen to what they're trying to tell you and you are actually listening to what they have to say that in itself will help them calm down pretty quickly. And you can always pass them up the chain. Go to the top. By the way, I'd like to give a shout out to Matt Kovar if he's around because he was in on this originally with us. He hasn't died, but he has done Pavilion. Right. Yes. When I saw this presentation at the conference in October, he was with Christie and Matt. Now he has moved on to different library here in Nebraska. Okay. Next question. Does anyone have any questions? I know some of you are already typing in. Just let you know. Use your go-to webinar interface type in the questions section and I can see them here. Next question we have is, have you considered not charging late fees at all for late returns? We, sure. We're all for it. Unfortunately, there's a hard reality out there called hard reality and that is city hall. Once you take in fines and fees, it's extremely unlikely that city hall will ever give up that income. It just doesn't happen. When we have been able to freeze ours for many years, I mean, we got up to a quarter and we haven't gone up, I don't know how many years it's been about a quarter, but several years now and we haven't. And we have dropped other fees. Last year we dropped two or three different fees and they never said a word about it. But it's a reality. We all know that probably fines aren't the best way to get people to behave, but they are something that cities are used to. I would think it would be the odd city indeed that would allow you to give up that income. That was something I was going to ask about, but I remembered you mentioning at the conference was the city push back on some of the things and basically trying to figure out what can you, to put a bullet, get away with that they don't notice or just do it and see, like you said, they didn't notice some of the things you did. I don't feel the need to ask permission for everything I do. But if it's something big, all our policies are passed by the city. All our fines and fees go through the city, so you know about them. We have a very, very good relationship with our city and certainly don't want to hurt our city in any way, but they realize, we were able to tell them, hey, why are we charging this $5 processing fee when we already charged them more for the book? It's not fair to our patrons, and they could see the list of them. Yeah, the logic is there, yeah. Okay, next question up we have is, how do you usually go about gathering your staff and community suggestions? How are you collecting those? Well, the survey we did, we actually made available online. We did, we had a blast. We got the president of the chamber to be on our committee and got a free email blast out of the deal, and so we were able to get, to send out the survey that way, and so we got a lot of responses that way. We had paper at the desk, so people coming in could do it. We also tried also going out to certain places. That had mixed results really going out. We had surveys at the senior center. We had surveys at YNPA. We had, I don't know if I missed anything here, but we got a lot of them back, and then the last week when we did the email blast, we had a whole bunch more that came back that way. We also just listened. Our board is out in the community and they're talking to people. They're talking to their neighbors. They're talking to people online. They're talking to their colleagues and they're coming back with these stories and listen to what people say. We actively solicit input at programs to say if you've got an idea for a presenter, there's a topic you'd like to see, whatever it is, keep us in mind. We've all got our name badges on, so it's very apparent whose staff are in the building and they can grab anybody who's got one of these bright green lanyards on to, if they've got a question, they want to share something with us. We make ourselves as visible and approachable as possible. As far as the staff input goes, I think everybody's pretty comfortable just walking into my office and they'll be like, hey, I was thinking about this. What if we did it this way instead? That would eliminate this part and it would make it easier for us and for the patrons. They're not shy in giving us new ideas and we try to encourage that. Because they know we're not going to shoot them down and we're not going to just say, well, that's a stupid idea. They know we'll give it thought and if it doesn't work out for some reason, they'll explain that to them and they are understanding. These strategic plans are important and it's important to get community involvement. Like I said, somebody from the chamber, somebody who's a business person in the city, those people have an ear to what's going on in the city that they can input and they can also help you get the word out. So it's important to have those relationships. Connections and networking. Next question actually is kind of leading off what you had said, Christy, just now about tailoring library programs to customer demand. That sounds like that's something that you have encouraged. I have. One of the things that I do is there's an arts and crafts program for adults. Part of it grew out of adults coming to our arts and crafts program during summer reading with their kids. The kids were doing crafts and the parents were going, gosh, this would be really fun. I'd like to do it too. Okay, so you act on that. Well, then it grows and we do it once a month. Different topics. I'm always looking for presenters because I am so not Martha Stewart. But I'm game to give stuff a try and that's the biggest thing is if people are willing to come in and play and it has really gathered momentum. People bring you projects that they think we could do as a group and if the group says, great, let's do that. So we put it on schedule for next month. This year I solicited input on what their favorite things were last year and then new things they would like to see this year. And then we'll just plot that out for the next 12 months. And so it becomes a patron-generated program. Another one that kind of did that is we did beginning knitting classes last spring. And we did formal classes with projects for four weeks in a row. Well, that group had so much fun together they said, gosh, we'd like to keep meeting. So we just reserved one of our meeting rooms and they show up weekly. Wow. They also like to fireplace some of them because I walk around the library and there's a group of knitters around the fireplace. You got the right environment for it there. Well, we do. And it keeps feeding itself because the folks who have been a part of that knitting group for a while are happy to help the new beginners. The library has an introduction to knitting packets. So when someone new shows up, they have the basic tools and the scan of yarn and a project to get started on. And it's become a time of, I mean, this group has become good friends and they just love it and continuously or thankful that we have a space for them and they really hope that the space doesn't ever go away. So it's exciting to see that happen. And the survey explicitly asked what types of programs people like the most. And we had three or four different examples of programs that we had and they marked the ones that they liked the most. So that was kind of what you were saying. Cool. The next question we have up is, and I think this is kind of assuming logistics, how did you solve the problem of people calling for items and locating them before they arrive at the library? I assume they might be asking, like, how does that all logistically work out? I figured that question was time. It seems like a great service, but yeah, I can see implementing it and making it work could be. We just don't answer the question. What we've tried to do recently, if someone calls and specifically says they're coming down within the next 10 or 15 minutes, is we'll either have the clerk ask them to hold while they confirm that the item is available so they can run out to the shelf, make sure it's there, tell them it's here, or we'll just let them know that we'll go grab it and we'll give them a quick call back just to confirm that we have it here and so they don't drive all the way down here and then end up not giving the item. Now, does that happen very often that we go to the shelf and not find it? Not often, occasionally, but we figure it's better to save those few occasions and at least let the patron know we'll keep looking for it and hopefully find it within the next couple of days rather than have them make a trip down here and then not have it be available. Make sure you confirm back with them before they leave their house, yeah. So, yeah, call them back or keep them on the line while you're working. And that's basically something you worked into your basics. It's just a service we provide, so when someone calls and wants to do it, it's part of the job now. We try to go out of our way. I mean, if the book reveal is here and it's parked in the garage and we look on there and we see the books on the book reveal, we try to go back and get kind of out to the people. It always sounds that there's a bookmobile person around that actually knows where the book might be and the book might be. So many. Yes. All right. That's the last question we had. Anybody have any other questions? Go ahead and type them into your GoToWebinar interface so we can grab them. We just did the show. I'll just let you know because there are a few technical questions. The show is being recorded, so it will be processed sometime today, potentially, and it will be posted onto our website. Everyone who was registered and attended this pre-registered and attended the live show will be sent an email letting you know when the recording is available and links to the slides. Well, the slides will be available and links to Carney Public Library's website, the Web Junction webinar, and those other documents that you showed there of your, or it's on the next slide. Those will all be added into the Library Commission's delicious account where we collect all of any websites and links that are related to any of our sessions here. They'll all be available along with the recording, and you'll all be sent an email letting you know when it's ready to watch. Please don't hesitate to contact us. Our information is up there and would be in with the slides and things like that. We are happy to visit. If you want us to share our policies or our strategic plan or anything like that, just let us know. I'll email them to you. We're actually in the middle of updating our policy manual once again. It's a yearly thing now because we looked at it so many times. That's a good idea because you're making so many different changes. It's always good to keep it up to date with what you might want to be doing and what needs to be, like you were saying, things have just been around for years and years to revisit them and figure out why. It's possible to make things procedures instead of policies so that we don't have to have them in stone necessarily. It doesn't look like anything urgent has come in while you've been chatting. No other questions. I think we can wrap it up for this morning unless you guys have any other last comments. Where's the wisdom? Go out and do good and be nice. Be nice. That's a great motto, yes. We're just getting some thank-you, great suggestions, great ideas, comments coming through too. Well then, thank you very much, Matt and Christy and Sarah. I was glad to have you on the show. That was great. I am going to pull back, present your control to my computer now. And as I said, all of the presentation, all the links are here on our delicious account. So you'll be able to get them afterwards. The show is being recorded as we speak and it will be available here on our Archive Encompass Live Sessions page where we post all of our previous shows. The link to the recording which we post to YouTube will be here. The PowerPoint slides will be here and link to the delicious page with all of the websites. And then that will wrap it up for today's show. Thank you very much for attending and I hope you'll join us next time when our topic is the accidental catalog or tips and tools to help you use the rules. Emily Nimsacont is the cataloging librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission and she'll be with us next Wednesday to give you some ideas and things to use if you're not really a cataloger by training or trade or previous experience and you've just been dumped into the position potentially or it's been added to your job. She'll give you some tips on that. Also, we are on Facebook so if you are a big Facebook user, please do go to like us on our Encompass Live page on Facebook. There we go. We do post when recordings are available on here, reminders to log into a current show, when news shows have been added. The accidental catalog one was a last-minute addition to our schedule for next week so I did a reminder about that this week. So if you are big on using Facebook, please do go ahead and like our Facebook page. That will wrap it up for this morning. Thank you very much for attending and we'll see you on future shows of Encompass Live. Thanks. Bye-bye.