 And welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics about libraries. The show is broadcast live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. But the show is also, we also record the show every week. So if you are unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine, we can access our archives and I'll show you where you can see those at the end of today's show. Both the live show and the archives are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with your friends, neighbors, colleagues, anyone that you think, family, anyone you think might be interested in any of our topics. So welcome to sign up for our upcoming shows or watch any of our archives. We do a mixture of things here on Encompass Live, book reviews, interviews, mini training sessions, demos of services or products that we think you might be interested in. Basically our only criteria is that is something library related, something libraries are doing, something they could be doing, some services or projects we're offering here through the Nebraska Library Commission for Libraries, very broad and all types of libraries we serve, not just publics, public, academic, special libraries we've had correctional facilities on, K-12 schools, library is our focus. We do have Nebraska Library Commission staff come on sometimes and do sessions and presentations about things we're doing here locally, but we also do bring on guest speakers and that's what we have today. On the line with us is Joey Holmes, good morning Joey. Good morning. Yeah and he is from the Lawrence County Library in Lawrence, South Carolina. It is, yes. Yes and he's gonna talk to us about some tops and flops as you can see from the slides here of adult programs at their library, some successes and even some failures like failures that you can learn from. So I will hand it over to you Joey to take it away. Well thank you so much and I really, really appreciate the opportunity to present this topic. It's a altered version of a program that I did at the Arsenal Conference in St. George, Utah in 2017 and it was a lot of fun to put together and a lot of fun to reflect on what worked so well and what did not. So yes I'm Joey, I'm a library assistant, not a librarian but a library assistant, but I am the circulation manager here at the Lawrence County Library in beautiful Lawrence, South Carolina. We are in terms of a South Carolina County a bit above average in regards to square miles and population. We're relatively close to Greenville which is a major metropolitan area. Charlotte, they have an Ikea. Atlanta, Columbia, Charleston are all relatively close. We can have, from Lawrence we can have our feet in the ocean in about four hours which is wonderful. There is, within our system, the Lawrence Library, the Clinton Library and the Bookmobile. We have a new bookmobile. We just don't have a good picture of it yet. Lawrence has nine full-time employees and six part times. We're one story building and on a good day we average 300 people. If we start right out looking at these stats we'll get a bit distracted pretty soon. So let's jump into the fun stuff. Flops, what did not work well? This is a top 10 list based on numbers and numbers alone. Sort of a David Letterman style format. Number 10, Zumba Roses in South Carolina State Parks. We had a three-way tie with 16 people attending these programs. Let's look in. Zumba with Cassie, I have a hard time calling this a flop because I adore Cassie, she's the sweetest person ever and really 16 people is hopping around in a 650 square foot meeting room doing Zumba is probably a pretty good number. Yeah, but other information from that day. We had 590 items checked out that day. That's a great circulation number for us and new cards. Yes, this was a good day for us. Can we give Cassie credit? No, not really, but we can give her credit for this. Zumba with Cassie was in the Clinton Chronicle, a local paper, 4,000 people a week see the Chronicle. Zumba with Cassie was on Go Lawrence and used website, 4,500 people a day. Log on and they ran that two days in a row. Zumba with Cassie was in the Lawrence Advertiser and that's a circulation of 7,200 people a week. And the Chronicle did a follow-up article and all the people who saw it on our Facebook and Facebook event on our street side sign, the flyers here, we got a lot of mileage out of this presentation. And really for 16 people to attend, yeah, technically it's a flop, but it did a lot for us and we were pleased with it. The next one was Billy came down from roses unlimited. He brought roses, he brought a PowerPoint, he wore a suit. Yeah, we did not have a lot of people attend this, but look at when it was. We set our programs for the first Thursday night of the month. This time it just happened to go up against high school graduation. In a small town, that's hard to do. So 16 people was a good one for this program. Likewise, exactly likewise for the lady who came from the state parks to do her outreach presentation up against high school graduation the very next year. So yeah, that's kind of hard to do, but we set them and you can try to find a night when other people don't have stuff going on, you'll never find that night. So I just set things for the night that was convenient to us here at the library and sort of let the chips fall where they may kind of thing. Unfortunately, they fell on Billy and on the lady from the South Carolina State Parks at least those years. Number nine, what's worse than 16 people attending? Fitness for beginners with 13 people attending. Fitness is one of those things. Do you start with diet? Do you start with exercise? I don't know, but my daughter-in-law was an exercise science major at Old Dominion and she knows. And the answer is yes. Yes, wellness director for the Y, she did a presentation. She brought handouts, she brought gadgets, gizmos, lots of nice things. Here's the thing, this is nobody's idea of a good time. Nobody wants to face the fact that they're gonna have to alter their lifestyle in order to be healthier. So it's not well attended. There was years ago a scout master in Lawrence whose motto about motivating the kids to get things accomplished was, if it's not fun, it's not done. And we're gonna revisit that theme here during this presentation a couple of times because fitness for beginners is not fun. Now, just a side note, there were actually 14 people attending this program. It's not gonna change the ranking, but right there in Breeze Tummy is the world's cutest grandchild. You can't see him yet, but the world's cutest grandchild was there that night. And he yelled that title for three years, now he shares it. Okay, number eight, book discussion series, 9.5 on average for this book discussion series. It was on Rick Bragg's book all over, but the shouting Rick is a Pulitzer winner and a great guy. And because he started out as a sports writer, we did a thing about sports writers because the book largely is about his mother. We did a thing about who is the real strong Southern woman. We had a thing about writing memoirs. We had a thing about discussing the book itself. These were not well attended. When Rick did show up, and we did this in cooperation with the Greenville County Library and the County Next Door, Rick showed up to do his big presentation. There were probably 250, 300 people there. But for the little programs we had in Lawrence associated with this book study, or book discussion series, not well attended. But Rick is a celebrity author. He drew quite a crowd. Number seven, local authors. We're the library. We're gonna do this, but they're seldom well attended. The top left, Ms. Martha. It's a great story as her aunt laid dying. The aunt said, Martha, I want you to go to the cedar chest top of the closet, wherever. She said, I want you to get the shoe box. And she's, Martha said, well, what's in it? And she said, it's all the letters that your uncle Porter wrote me when he was gone off to World War II. Take care of them. Well, Martha did more than that. Martha turned them into a book. But it was not a presentation that's well attended. Rick Veal and Andrea Sifalo, local authors, paranormal, vampire romance type thing, not well attended. John Jeter, fairly local fella, used to have a music club in the upstate and is also a published novelist. When we promoted this as a meet the author event, not well attended, had we promoted this as the music business insider event that it actually was, maybe it would have drawn a better crowd. John's club in Greenville was a wonderful place to see a show and I've, you know, gone to and met Leon Redbon backstage and seen Johnny Winter on the stage, Arlo Guthrie, Sam Bush, lots of great people at that music hall. And John had an amazing thing that he had to orchestrate in order to run a music club. He had to satisfy the artist, meet the needs of the agents, keep the employees in line, keep the vendors coming back and then please the audience. And when you look at the music business, that's also sprinkled fairly heavily with alcohol. So John had quite an obstacle to overcome. And he wrote a book about it, Rock in a Hard Place. And as a book event, not well attended. As a music insider event, it might have done better. Likewise for John Lane. John Lane's a widely regarded local author. But as an author, he was not well attended. The book, My Paddle to the Sea, had we had promoted this as a, here's a guy who puts his canoe in the Paklet River in Spartanburg and takes it 200 miles to the open ocean. Had we done the event like that, it might have been Epic Outdoor Odyssey type thing and drawn a better crowd. But local authors in general, not well attended. But we're the library and we're gonna do them. Number six, book discussion series, another eight average. And this was a Pat Conroy book, My Reading Life. Pat Conroy is literary gold in South Carolina, but this was just not well attended. Number five, cycling. Van, an old friend likes to ride his bicycle and we have some people in Lawrence that I know personally that are avid cyclists. So I thought, well, we'll get Van. This should be interesting. Seven people attended. And you know who those seven people were? They weren't cyclists. They were the people that remembered Van as the drama teacher at Lawrence High when we put on God's Bell in South Pacific and you're a good man, Charlie Brown. That's why they were there. They didn't care about the cycling. They just wanted to hang out with Van for an hour. Van did have a better idea though. He said, well, let's try this. Let me bring my wood lathe and let's set that up and we'll see how that goes. It'll be more fun than talking about cycling and it was, and it was much better attended and maker programs typically are. When I've brought my pottery wheel to the library and set up just demonstrations, those have been well attended and I'd love to get a blacksmith. We'd have to do that one outside, but we could. And other things like that might be a lot of fun. Number four, internet safety. Nobody's idea of a good time. It's not fun, it's not done, but because we're the library, we're gonna present these type things. Six attended, pretty bad. Number three, social security website. Five attended. You know all that stuff I just said about number four? Yeah, that stuff. Number two, texting for seniors. Hey, I thought this was a good idea. I really did. The ladies from the phone co-op, they came, they had their gadgets, their gizmos, they were gung-ho ready to go help the seniors learn how to text one lady showed up. It was just one. So this was not a program of epic proportions. But what's worse than that? Worse than one person attending? I had a friend who I worked with years ago and she absolutely glowed when she talked about the time that she threw Hike the Appalachian Trail. And I thought, well, I'll get her. Here it is, epic outdoor odyssey. Lady threw Hike the Appalachian Trail alone. It'll be empowering to women. It'll be of interest to fitness buffs and outdoors enthusiasts will find it interesting. So I set it up. Now, gotta put this delicately, I suppose. Having known this lady and having worked with this lady before, I knew that she was capable of certain inconsistencies, perhaps. And the day of the presentation, the day of the program I got to work was handed a note. She was not going to come. So that's the day that we learned how to cancel an event. We did everything we could think of to let the public know that the event wouldn't be held. We still had 20 people or thereabouts show up saying we're here for the Appalachian Trail lady. And I had to tell them all. I said, I'm so sorry, but we canceled that event. And they were like, well, I hope you're gonna reschedule. And I thought to myself otherwise. But we did end up and some month later, my mom, Rester Soul gave me a newspaper clipping about a gentleman, fairly local, who had through-hiked the Appalachian Trail as a 69-year-old retired widower. And I looked in the phone book, he was in there. I called him, he said yes. So when he came and did his presentation through-hiking the Appalachian Trail alone as a 69-year-old retired widower, it was well attended. Over 45 people came to that one. So there was a bit of a different spin on that flop. But yeah, the worst thing we've done was when our presentation wasn't even held because the presenter canceled. Let's get on to something a bit more positive, okay? Let's see, tops. This is numerical based on attendance number 10. Quilt Show. The ladies from the Loose Threads came over. They brought beautiful quilts. My wife's a quilter. I recognize this as a fantastic art form. It took a while to set it all up, but it was great and well attended. And I think all the ladies had a great time. Number nine, antiques. If you've got antiques, what are you gonna do with them? If they're not family pieces that you definitely need to keep, how do you cash in at the best possible value? And there's Craig's List in eBay and there's local antique dealers and then there's auction houses. And what are the best for your particular case to get the best buying audience? I went to my friend John who runs an antique auction house and I've seen him sell everything from pre-war kimonos to oak phone booths such as you would see in the lobby of a grand hotel in the 40s. John can sell it and he did a good job of letting folks know what it is that's out there as an option for moving your pieces to the best possible benefit. It was well attended. Number eight, ghosts. This was fine. This was a good time. We had, I had wanted to have a ghost program in October, something with a Halloween theme, but I didn't know anybody that could do one. So I looked on Amazon, books, ghosts, South Carolina. Tons of stuff popped up. It'll pop up for anywhere that you are. Tons of stuff popped up and I looked at the authors and some of the authors lived in Richmond or Cincinnati or places like that. Some of the authors probably had become ghosts and other authors, John Boyanowski and Tally Johnson, their author bio said that they lived in the upstate of South Carolina and I thought, I'm gonna find them. So I looked on Facebook, found them, sent them friend requests, they accepted, sent them inbox messages. Would you be interested in doing a presentation? They both said yes. Boyanowski's a little bit closer. So we went with him first. He did a good presentation, really well attended. The next year we got Tally and he did a good presentation, really well attended. And Tally's actually a paranormal investigator. So his presentation was not so much, the facts as it was, the stories behind the facts about being out by the river and the moonlight with the moss hanging from the trees and the Confederate soldier steps out from behind the bushes with his saber drawn and then he dissipates and Tally tells these stories with an awful lot of humor. So this was fantastic. We had a great time at both and they were well attended. Notice the dates. You do these about a week before Halloween. They're gonna go great. Number seven. Yester Yooks, we have in Lawrence and I'm sure you do too, an all senior citizen ukulele band. And these folks are delightful. And look out, they come rolling in deep. There's a lot of them. So you've automatically got a crowd and let each one bring a spouse or a child or a few grandkids and all of a sudden you've packed the house. That's awesome. They do a great job with some really fun old music and they have fun and we have fun and they're just wonderful. But we really enjoyed this presentation and so when you get off the webinar, go look up your local senior citizen ukulele band and book them immediately, okay? Number six. Karen White, I said authors don't do well. Karen is absolutely an exception to that. She is, I don't know about your area but in South Carolina, she's pretty popular. She writes books about mystery and intrigue and Charleston and they ate it up. She had 83 people come. She held them spellbound with wit and charm and it was a good, good presentation. We were so glad to be able to get her. Number five. Hunter Holmes, the name Holmes resurfacing. Hunter is my son. He is a musician and music historian and he has grown up studying the music legends and the music history of our area. So the Mill Hill music, yeah, he does that. He does a program called Lauren's Blues Legacy. Oops, sorry, went back. And Hunter's programs are fairly well attended. They're not all family either. We don't have a big family. We don't pay the house with that. We pay the house with good music and information about the musicians who were here before World War II and things like that. Number four, we came in at a tie and sorry for clicking the button too quick. We came in a tie with Dory Sanders and the Tourism Fair. 96 people attended each of these programs. And when I said that local authors don't do well, Dory is also an exception. But here's the thing. I'm not sure Dory is an author. She is a peach farmer who writes books or she's an author who owns peach orchards. I don't know which, whichever the case is, she's delightful. She is so funny. She's always gonna be going on some little quip or joke of some sort and everybody seems to love her. She does a great job. She did our Friends of the Library presentation one year and was really, really awesome. The Lawrence County Tourism Fair was good. We had gotten in touch with the Lawrence County Chamber. I said, I wanna do something in regards to vacation, staycation and vacation here in Lawrence County. What do you have on tourism? And they said, well, tourism is divided into dining, shopping, lodging, arts, history and recreation. And we could set up a station for each and we could put the reenactors for history outside and they could set up their encampments and we could put the recreation people outside and they could bring in four-wheelers and kayaks and canoes and we could, and wow, this turned big real quick and it was well attended. We haven't done another one and I'm not quite sure why, but this went well for the Tourism Fair and I do love the idea of people earning their paycheck somewhere else and then bringing it to Lawrence County and leaving part of it here. Number three, Rudy Mankey. Rudy is an old friend. He was the Curator of Natural History for the South Carolina Museum Commission and then in the early 80s, he got a show on South Carolina's PBS affiliate network called Nature Scene and Rudy and the host, they would walk around and the host would say something like, wow, a feather and Rudy would pick it up and he would say, yeah, this is a primary flight feather from the right wing of a yellow shafted flicker and we can tell this because of this, this, this and the yellow shafted flicker lives in these environments because it takes advantage of these situations that present themselves in places like this and they'd walk a little ways longer and catch a butterfly or a dragonfly. Rudy would pick up a turtle or a snake or something and they would discuss each item and they would come back to discuss how the geology and the climate affected the plant life which affects the animal life in that particular environment and they went all over the country. They even went out of country for a few episodes and this show was on the air for over 20 years. Rudy is now a professor at the University of South Carolina but being an old friend, I called him in for a Friends of the Library annual meeting and he came and being a bit of a local celebrity, he drew quite a crowd, 100 people came to that one. Number two, better than 100, the coupon lady. Okay, this one, this was a special circumstance. Miss Ladonna came to do her couponing program in 2010 before there was a bunch of extreme coupon stuff all over the media and she did a great job. We had 101 people there. Here's the deal about that night. Notice the date, August 5th, notice the time, 7 p.m. It's hot in South Carolina at seven o'clock on August afternoon. It's really hot and our meeting room is on the side of the building that catches the afternoon sun and about a block away there was a telephone pole and the utilities company had already or a power pole utility pole. The utilities company had already decided they were gonna need to replace it soon. Well, they didn't replace it soon enough. It snapped during Miss Ladonna's presentation. We lost power, nobody left. The room started heating up, nobody left. The room was dark, they were using their cell phones to light up their notepads so they could take down what she was saying. This was 101 people that were very, very interested in hearing what this lady had to say. Now, I don't know if couponing would be a big deal. Nowadays or not, but for this presentation, it was a whopper, very, very well-attended. Now, here we go. The biggest program on our list with some more to talk about was the high school orchestra. And I wanted to have, during the holiday season, during the evening, I wanted to have a string quartet playing over in the corner, Christmas music. So I didn't know where to get a string quartet. My son had been in strings when he had been in high school, so I got in touch with the teacher. And the teacher said, well, you know, we only got 10 kids, could we bring them all? And I said, sure. And so they came with their little violas and violins and there was one cello and they played beautifully. And here's the thing. A quartet for kids, four sets of parents, four sets of grandparents, four sets of buddies and siblings. 10 kids, that's much better. Now, we did have some naysayers to this presentation. Where are you gonna put an orchestra? I said, well, I see opportunity. And we cleared some four space, we brought in the chairs from the meeting room, set it up auditorium style, put the kids down by the big window, pack the house. A good program with kids getting performance experience and us getting good numbers. So this went very, very well. I love that. I was in the high school orchestra when I was in high school all the way through. I played violin. Oh, fantastic. Yeah, I have no musical talent whatsoever, but everybody else in my family does. Okay, let's look at some stuff that wasn't necessarily mine to present, but it worked very, very well. I don't have to say super well. The first one was when the governor came. There was a Republican women's group who wanted her to come do a book signing. But the little bookstore in Lawrence has a tiny parking lot. So they got in touch with us. And we said, we can do that. And so governor Haley came and she did her book signing. We had a big crowd for that. She posed with kids. She posed with adults. She posed with library staff. She was funny. She was inclusive. She was just very charming. And the audience really enjoyed getting a chance to meet her. And I think she sold some books. But while she was there interacting with children, and this was during the after school time, she's interacting with children, asking them about how often they came to the library. And I heard her say this. And I thought, well, this is just fantastic. This is worth its weight in gold. And yeah, so we really enjoyed the opportunity to do this with governor Haley. And it went well for us and hopefully for her too. That's great to have that kind of support. It is, yeah. Every time we have a problem, I remind our director, I say, well, you know what she said? She said anything she can help you. She can help you in any way, just call her. Call her. And we haven't had to. This was a neat situation. A local lady who has always been a real good friend of the library and BFFs with our genealogy local history specialist wanted to bring in some archeologists to look at people's artifact collections. And I thought, you know, race, rural, southern. I thought, well, everybody's got a coffee can with a few airheads that they picked up on the dirt roads of life or working in the garden. We did a Whitman sampler box, a coffee can. Everybody's got airheads. Just what I thought. But when we started out that day, it wasn't necessary. Well, there are some Whitman sampler boxes and some coffee cans, but there were people with five gallon buckets on dollies of their shards and their points and their pieces, game stones, hammer stones, they had everything. There were people with three foot by three foot shadow box arrays of beautifully done pieces. And the crowds were huge. And these archeologists were sitting there. They were getting something out of it. They were photographing. They were getting locations and stuff like that. But one o'clock, and we closed at one on Saturdays at one o'clock, I told the two people who were working with me that day, I said, y'all going home? I'll stay. And in truth, I had a couple of pieces. I wanted them to look at myself, but I didn't want to jump in line ahead of anybody. So we got out of there about 230 that day. But a huge, huge event with people having their pottery and their airheads looked at. And we've done this a couple of times in Lawrence, not necessarily with the library, but with the little local museum. And it's never quite achieved what it did that first time as far as numbers are concerned. Here's a good one. This was, we had in 2011, one of those traveling Smithsonian exhibits that came to the Lawrence Library for six weeks. If you ever get the chance to apply for one of these, please do. They're an overwhelming amount of work, but they're a lot of fun and they're very beneficial to your community and to your library. So we got the one on Roots Music, and it was 800 square feet of Smithsonian exhibits here in the library, stretched out down through the adult section about like we did for the orchestra. Because this will not fit in the meeting room. Now they wanted us to plan events. We did musical programs. We had the banjo guy. We had the jazz lady. We had my son. We had John Jeter talk about the music business. We did all that kind of stuff. And we also did our grand opening. Now for the grand opening and ribbon cutting, we got a shape note choir from the Smyrna AME church. And we pulled out all the stops for inviting people. Of course it was in the papers and universally promoted as we do. But we went to the point of inviting our representatives who go to Washington. We invited our representatives who go to Columbia. We invited the county admin and county department heads. We invited the city admin and the city department heads for Lawrence, Clinton and the little municipalities in Lawrence. We invited everybody that the chamber said to invite, everybody the radio station said to invite, everybody that the main street Lawrence, main street USA network said to invite. We invited all the press and we got good press coverage for the ribbon cutting day. And we had about 180 people at that one. And with the ladies from the Smyrna AME church we had a fantastic time. So getting a Smithsonian exhibit through the Humanities Council is one of the biggest things as far as my 11 years of doing this is ever produced. This was great. And this was up until, you know when I originally put this PowerPoint together this was the big one, but it got beaten. Our biggest event ever is an event that, hello? Krista? No, go ahead, no. We lost our power, our power has gone off. Will you still here? Well, okay. I'm gonna go ahead and walk you through this one. Our biggest event ever and there are hundreds of beautifully shot pictures and smiling children and happy adults and things like that. Just imagine it. Okay, our biggest event ever was the 2017 solar eclipse. Ah, yes. And I don't have to tell Nebraska people about an eclipse because you did it as much as we did. But we had about 750 people come to the Lawrence County Library and we found out about a year before this thing happened. And we thought, well, that'll be fun. And I remembered an eclipse from my childhood and it wasn't a big deal. But we said, okay, we'll do something. We'll get some glasses. We ordered 500 pair of glasses. They sent a thousand. We laughed. We joked. What are we gonna do with all these glasses the next day? How can we get rid of them? Or is there a Pinterest that we can craft with them? You know, we knew we were gonna run out of glasses. A thousand pair, that's ridiculous. Well, we got our thousand pair of glasses. We came up with a policy. We will give out one pair of glasses to each adult who comes in and signs for them. And that's the rule. And we'll start giving them out one month prior. So a month prior to the event, we opened up the glasses box. We kept 100 for us for our eclipse party here. And a month prior to the event, we opened up the box. We were out of glasses in two weeks. The phone kept ringing. People kept calling, do you have any glasses? No, I heard they had some at the hardware store. No, they're out. There might be some at the credit union. I'll try there. There might be some at the electric co-op. That's for their customers only. There might be some down at the main street office downtown. We'll check there. No, everybody was out of glasses. You guys know this. Everybody was out of eclipse glasses. And we really, with the thousand we had, we could have given out 10,000 pair. We had people who said, oh, I need 50 pair for my eclipse party. He said, you can get one pair for every adult who comes in and signs for them while supplies last. Well, I need 50. Well, you can get one pair for every adult who comes in and signs for them while supplies last. And we didn't satisfy everybody. I'll just put it that way. But we did the best we could. And we had, on the day of the eclipse, and we'd been getting calls from out of state, North Carolina, Virginia, Boston, Brooklyn. The weekend before the event, on that Saturday, there were people in here from Orlando. There were people in here from Fort Lauderdale. People in here from San Diego. And I thought, wow, this is gonna get big. And the people were all over town, Lancaster, PA, Pittsburgh. We still did not know until that morning. And I got to work early that morning. There were eight o'clock. There were Virginia tags in our parking lot. 8.30, when I went out to get the book drop, they were setting up tents, dragging out coolers, putting out blankets, lawn chairs, tripods with their big telescopes and cameras. By early morning, 10 or so, our 59 places in our parking lot were gone. They were used up. People were starting to park street side. We had run out of parking. We had plenty of snacks, water. It's hot in South Carolina in August. We had, afterwards, people came in and they said, we enjoyed it so much. And this is something we had no idea. They said, we enjoyed it so much. Can we make a donation? Do you have a PayPal? And I said, a donation? And they said, yeah, y'all bought snacks. You had to stock extra paper goods in the bathrooms. We just thank you. And we'd like to make a little donation. And we didn't have a PayPal. We didn't expect that. We didn't know it was coming. So what we had to do was say no, but we can take cash or checks or if you'd like to mail something back, here's a magnet for your fridge and you can mail us something if you'd like. Otherwise, just put it on your fridge and think about us when you see it and say, I had a good time there. So we did that. And some of the things we didn't know to do, we did not have souvenirs. We didn't do programs about how to take a black t-shirt and put a plate in the middle of it and spritz it with bleach and then take the plate away and rinse it out real quick and let the bleach spritz on it create the corona of the eclipse. We didn't have any souvenirs. We needed a map with people to pin their hometowns on as they were visitors from all over. But we had our 750 people there for the eclipse day and that was absolutely hands down our biggest event ever. And it's one we didn't book, one that we didn't plan. It came to us. But we, of course, there's another eclipse coming in 2024, we're a bit out of the line of totality on that. But I do hope that libraries who were within totality do prepare properly and make that event as big as it could be. I think eclipse tourism is legitimately a thing. At least it was in 2017 and I hope it will be in 2024 as well. It definitely was. It was here too in Nebraska. It came straight through Lincoln. Yeah, you guys had more square miles under totality than we did, obviously, as a bigger state. We probably had about the same percentage of our state under totality as y'all did. Not trying to do math on a Wednesday or anything, but I think y'all did quite well with it. And we had our major cities, Greenville, Spartanburg airport, the Columbia airport, the Charleston airport were all within totality. We have I-95, which goes from Maine to Miami. Comes right through South Carolina. I-20, I-77, I-85, all these corridors that just bring in loads of people. And it really, really was huge. And I don't, you know, people, we're not on I-85. We're not on I-95, but people chose Lawrence as a small town so that they could come and eclipse with us. And we were just overwhelmingly grateful. And so pleased with it. So, and I think having it on a Monday enhanced people's ability to turn it into a long weekend. So, if you're ever gonna plan an eclipse, plan it for a Monday. So, it'll work a little better for you like that. Well, I can see that we're, our staff are out front with a flashlight, checking things out by writing down the barcode numbers. Yeah, I was gonna say, you said you lost power there and we did lose your slides, but that's okay. You're still here on audio. And while you were just talking about the eclipse, I did find the write-up you did for Programming Librarian website. There's a link to that on the PowerPoint, yeah. So, I've got that. I just did some quick Googling, I used my librarian skills and found your report about that on their website there. So, I've got that up on the screen for people to see. Oh, good, good. When you do get your power back, you can send me your presentation so everyone will be able to see your full slides. Okay, I am so sorry about this, but we're victims of our technology and our technology is a victim of our utilities and something has gone wrong somewhere in Lawrence today. I hope no squirrels got electrocuted in this power outage. So, what else did you have for your presentation? That was it, that was the big one, the eclipse. You're talking about the eclipse, okay. Yeah, and do want to reiterate the fact that if you make your presentations and your programs fun and oriented towards good times, oriented towards humor, oriented towards edutainment, that typically they're going to be better attended, at least that's what we've seen. And the stuff like the social security website, internet, the safety, things like that, yeah, they're not well attended, but we do the best we can. And hopefully they work and hopefully they make a difference for the handful of people that do attend them. Local offers, yeah, we're going to continue to do that too. You talk about success being attendance. For some people, for the people attending, maybe it was useful for them. Yeah, and there are the intangibles, like how many people saw in the paper that we're doing something good for the benefit of the community? Mm-hmm, and then there's the side effect of what comes of that. Yeah, you said that like the donations, and people seeing one event that they just don't want to go to, but they realize you're doing things and they look for something else to go to, you know, trickle down effect, maybe? It makes us more of a central and positive community leader for the good of everybody. And I started doing programs because I got put over PR and I thought after floundering with that for a while, because we really weren't putting anything in the papers. And I thought, well, geez, the Baptist nursing home, they're in the paper all the time. What is it that they're doing? They're doing stuff. If we do stuff once a month, we'll get in the paper once a month. And so I planned the year, and your year is quite simple. January is International Creativity Month. Anything goes. February, African American History Month. That's an easy one. December is Christmas-themed. October is Halloween-themed. November is typically Thanksgiving-themed, but it could be a pre-Christmas thing. Really, March is great for women's history month. There's lots of things in here. May is National Barbecue Month, but there's so many different things that you could do. Just by planning one event a month, getting into the papers, I always wanted to do something with, so many people now have backyard bees and backyard hens for fresh eggs. So many people have do gardening and things like that. A lot of people now are into tiny homes, and I've wanted to do something with tiny homes. There is virtually every major base, a band. I've heard the Parris Island Band, the Army Band from Fort Jackson. Oh, yes, yes, it was always a band. The Air Force has a great touring band, as does the Navy. Our National Guard Unit in South Carolina has a band. That's what they do, and those bands are free. Now you have to go through some federal military hurdles to book them, but wouldn't it be nice if you had a big lawn to have Memorial Day weekend, to have a military band play for the good of the community? And things like that. So we do have a question, and if anybody does have any questions, please do go ahead and type them into the questions section of your GoToWebinar internship face. I can relay those on to Joey. Someone said they noticed that one topic that was missing from your list of both your top sandflops, actually, was genealogy. Have you done anything related to genealogy? We haven't. It usually fell between the cracks of the tops and the flops. Yeah, okay. So fairly well attended. I think when we did genealogy for beginners, I think it was 38 people that attended that. And we do have the genealogy society meet here on one of the Thursday nights of every month. It's not a presentation. They just booked the room. So it's not a program that the library puts on. They booked the room as their own entity and then they meet and they do their own things. But we like our genealogy here. And I think a lot of people from west of here, there's a good chance that they came through here on their journey to their current lives. Great. So yeah, so this presentation, you're focusing on the very best and the very worst, but there's a whole bunch of other things in the middle there that were just your staples that always have good attendance. Yeah. All right. So we do have a question. How much do these programs cost? I'm sure that varies, but how do you create good programs on a tiny budget? Well, I think all of those programs off the top of my head were absolutely free. And setting programs, it depends on who you know, who has the ability to inform or entertain. And who are you willing to impose on? And some people are gonna say no. I don't like being in front of a crowd or no, I have to do something else. But then you draw in the people that you know will do it. Local authors typically do things because they know that they're going to sell their books. And we do, with somebody like Karen White, we do have to present them with, and Rick Bragg do have to present them with a little bit of money, but that's an admin situation more than it is a Joey situation. For the Friends of the Library annual meetings, there's a little honorarium involved. But for the most part, the programs that you saw there, they were free. You know, we did with the Smithsonian exhibit, we did have to match the grant, which I believe was $2,000, but we could match it with labor, we could match it with expense, and we could match it with cash. I think a lot of the sessions, yeah, it is, you know, find people you know who have a cool thing to share. Yeah, I've got a great friend, he is canoeed every, there's over 200 miles of canoe trails in the Okefenokee Swamp in South Georgia. He's canoeed them all, and he's canoeed them all in all seasons. Wow. But I can't get him to come do the talk. No big deal. He's just more private, would rather be out in the swamp than in front of an audience. And I totally get that. All right, we have a few other questions here that are coming in and we have some time left, so we'll still keep going with them. Have you noticed a difference between, for local authors that you had come, a difference between self-published local authors and I guess traditionally published ones, have you had that difference? For the local authors, no. We've had some that were self-published, and we've had some that were done by publishing house, and typically it's gonna run about the same. Unless you're talking about getting up into the league of Dory Sanders, or Kieran White, or people like that. Yeah, the big names, no matter how they're published, they're gonna, yeah. Someone here also says that I lived in South Carolina for years, and I know how popular Pat Conroy is there. Any idea why the program didn't do so well? It was a book discussion series, and those just never draw a big crowd for us. I think that was in 1988. Someone else also mentioned about that book discussion series too, another whole separate question, but related to that surprise that the attendance was so low. Yeah, and we were too. We really were, and I didn't know Mr. Conroy, but we have some mutual friends, and he was certainly a big deal in South Carolina, literary world. Because book clubs are the big thing now, you'd think, yeah. Well, yeah, you would, and there are other book clubs that are not library-organized book clubs and book discussions, and we have, we know when they're looking for a certain book because the same people will come in asking for it. You get all the requests, yep. You get all the requests, like, no, we've got two copies of that, and they're already checked out. Um, yeah, that does happen. Yeah, another question about specifics, have you done anything related to cooking, like a cooking presentation? We have not, we've thought about that and talked about that, and that might be great. We don't have, in our meeting room, we don't have the capability for gas or for an electric range. We could do a hot plate, and that's about it. Right, yeah. And we don't have any running water in that room. And it's carpeted, so. Yeah, you don't wanna really go too far that way. Yeah, yeah. Talk about the one that had, you had canceled. Have you had any other programs other than the canceled one with zero attendance? We've had several where no one showed up and a few with only one or two people. Not in the adult programs that I've done. I think there have been some children's events or some other events maybe before me that didn't have anyone attend, but that's the only one that had absolutely no attendance and it didn't have any attendance because it didn't happen because of presenters. Right, it was, yeah. You know, canceled. Different reasons. It would have, had we pushed forward with that and had she not canceled, we would have had a good crowd. I have no doubt about that. It would have gone well, and it did go well. Right, people did try to show up. Yeah, and it did go well when we had the retired Woodor to do his version of it. Someone commented that one of their new branches has a full demo kitchen in it, so they purposefully had built into the library a kitchen, kind of like I guess you have on TV shows, a whole kitchen set up where they can demo present new presentations and things and that they highly recommend if you can do that, especially some place in like South Carolina with a strong food culture. This is a former South Carolina resident, but that would be something great to have. If you have the ability to have either your library updated or it built in, that's kind of an interesting idea. It is, and I applaud them for that. That's forward-thinking and probably at no small expense, they've planned ahead, yeah. Our power just came back on, but I'm gonna tell you something. It's probably gonna take 15 minutes for our servers to reconnect and stuff like that. Oh, that's okay, we're fine. But we can keep on like this if you'd like. Yeah, I've got your library website up right now just as a little placeholder for the screen. Okay, all right. No problem. And we're almost up to the top of the arts. I've got one more question here. Anybody has anything, any desperate things you wanna ask right now, get them on. Otherwise, you'll be able to reach out to Joey at his library. And we will have the full slides available. Once you do have your power back, you can email me your slides and help us. I'm so sorry. No, that's okay, things happen. Someone wants to know regarding the visit by the governor, does your library not have policies against programming related to political parties or private bookstores selling things in the library? How do you work around that? This was not a political rally. Right. It was just an author who happened to be the governor who was doing a book signing. And when book signings take place here, whether it's one that we set up or whether it's one that an author sets up, we typically just roll with it. And we do have some political organizations that do use the meeting room. They book it, they use it, and they believe it is found. We do have a fairly standard practice of when someone has booked the room for a for-profit effort. It's $50. Okay. Yeah, but when it's literary, we typically overlook that. Sure. I just wasn't coming at it from that side at all. It was, she happens to be, we're having an author signing and she happens to be the governor, but this is all about the book. It was, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But that was a good event. And doing it during the after school hours was great. And I left that event and went straight to the thing with Rick Bragg. So I was in the course of one evening, got to hang out with the governor and a Pulitzer winner. Nice day. That was kind of fun. And then the next night was a death or a toll concert. So that was even better. You had a great week then. I did, yeah. Yeah. Even got my autograph there. Awesome. All right. Anybody else have any questions, any desperate last minute questions you want to get asked before we wrap up? We did just hit 11 a.m. here, 11 a.m. central time here. We'll wait and see. Go ahead, please. Oh, I just wanted to thank everybody one more time for sticking around and listening and for logging in and for feeling like what I had to say was of interest because I really do appreciate it and appreciate the Nebraska Library Commission in Compass Live for asking me to do this. And it's been a lot of fun. And as with anything in life, it's a certain amount of adapt to the obstacle that presents itself, such as losing power in the middle of a webinar. We've had the, well, this is pretty not bad. We've had the entire internet go out on us. We're the state agency for libraries here. The state of Nebraska's internet connection has gone down for us, which is, that means pretty much we're done. Yeah, we've had a lot of rain lately and typically a rainy day that pushes, a windy day that pushes out the rainy day, so we might have had a limb snap, a power line go down sometimes, there's no telling. Well, yeah, well, thank you so much, Joey. Yeah, I appreciate you being here too. I have attended ARSL before. That's what we're talking about, Association of Rural and Small Libraries. They do great programming and for some of the things on there wherever they're in-person conferences, I do like to sometimes bring some of them onto our webinar series here, so more people can hear about the great things going on in the Small Rural Libraries that are presenting there. And that's how you and I connected on this, is I did this in the ARSL conference in St. George, Utah in September, and that was really great. Yeah, and the next one coming up is in Springfield, Illinois, I believe, this year? Springfield, yeah, I don't know if I'm gonna push to go to that, I may try to go to the one in New England the year after. I just think New England would be a fun place to visit again. Of course, yes. That's where I'm originally from, of State New York myself, so. Oh, yeah, okay. All right, so I think we'll wrap it up and someone just saying, I agree, thank you so much for doing this and especially for your honesty about what worked and what didn't in all your different situations, and that's something that a lot more people are really need to just embrace, it's okay? Well, and learning what not to do is as important as learning what to do. Yes. I've always felt, I've always thought that one of the greatest teachers in life was an electric fence, because you know, absolutely, without a doubt, instantly, what you'd never want to do again. Yes. Okay, but thank you so much and I hope everybody has a great day. Yeah, thank you. Okay, so that will officially wrap it up for today's show. Thank you, everyone, for attending. Thank you, Joy, for being here with us. Well, thank you. As I said, the show is recorded and will be on our website. Here, I'm gonna go over to our Encompass Live homepage here. We've got our upcoming shows listed here, but right beneath them, we have a link to our archives. So anyone who wants to, you can go over here. Probably tomorrow, the archive for today's show will be made available on here on the website. It'll be the top one at the list. This is the most recent ones here and we will have similar of what we had here. We had presentation and recording. They had some links from last year's show too, but last week's show, but we will have that posted here as well. And everyone who attended, you'll be notified when it is posted here. And I'll mention, this is our Archives Encompass Live. This is our 10th year of Encompass Live and we do have all of our archives here on this page. If I scroll down and don't get dizzy, all the way you'll see is a huge, huge list, goes all the way back to the very beginning, January, 2009, when we first started the show. So do keep it that in mind. We have a lot of good shows. We've got a lot of good archives recordings out there. Some of them will be dated, however, obviously out of date. Some of the things we post, we had shows about maybe no longer exist or information is old. But we are librarians, so we archive everything. So it will all be there, but everything has a date. So you'll know exactly when it was done. So you'll know when this presentation happened. We do also have a search feature here. So if you're looking for a particular topic or a speaker or something you can search, since we do have 10 years worth, you can search through, this will search, title, description and presenter fields of everything on here. So definitely do take a look at our archives for when today's is posted and everything else, all the previous ones. And I hope you'll join us next week when our topic is reading diversely. The Nebraska Library Association, our local, our state library association has a diversity committee. And members from their committee will be with us next week to talk about some books to some more diverse titles that they have come across. And tips and tricks for you to increase the diversity in your library's collection. Anika Ramirez is the chair of that committee and we've got some people that I'm not exactly sure who all is gonna be here, we're still negotiating who is gonna come. So there will be at least a few of them here with us next week to talk about that. So please do sign up for next week's show and any of other other shows we have coming up here. And Kupus Live is also on Facebook. So if you are a big Facebook user, please do pop over there and give us a like. And hopefully there we go, let me hear that. Anything that we are doing, we post on here. Reminders about today's show, reminders about when the recordings are available, we'll post on here. So it's taking a while to load, there we go. When our archives are ready, new shows coming up, we'll all be hosted on here as well. So if you are a big Facebook user, definitely give us a like over there to keep up with what we're doing. Other than that, that wraps up for this week's show. Thank you everyone for attending and we'll hope to see you next time on Kupus Live. Bye-bye.