 Good morning, 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 that might be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. We record the show every week as we are doing today. And the recording will be available in our archives. And I'll show you at the end of today's show where how to get to and navigate around in our archives. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries here. They'll be similar to your state library in other states. So we provide services to all types of libraries in Nebraska. So you'll find things on our Encompass Live show here for all types of libraries. Public, academic, K-12, corrections, museums, archives, anything else I can think of. Basically our only criteria is that it's something to do with libraries. Something libraries are doing, some cool things we think they could be doing, services and products we think that may be of use to them. We bring in guest speakers from around the country and other countries sometimes too to speak about different things that they're doing, cool things in their library, things they want to talk about. Or we sometimes also have an Nebraska Library Commission staff do presentations as we have this morning for our pretty sweet tech session with our Amanda Sweet. But very quickly I'm going to pop over to our Library Commission website, something I'm doing here every week just to remind people. We are still in the height of the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic and things are getting worse as you, if you've watched news as you know. So I just want to remind people here for our libraries in Nebraska, we do have resources that are putting out there to help our libraries figure out what to do with the situation. We have a post here that is pinned to the top of our homepage. We'll always be right there for you to access the resources we have. We also have a list where you're attempting to maintain of libraries in the state. It's mostly our public libraries, who's open, who's closed, what kind of accommodations are they making, Wi-Fi in the parking lot, curbside pickup. Now it's also about libraries who are re-closing as new places we've opened and then there have been new surges as it happens all across the country, places have to re-close again. So we try to keep track of that. Here on our pandemic post, I'll just show you here, we have a link to where our libraries can let us know. What your situation is. So keep us informed so we can keep our Nebraska list going. And then this is our sub page with different resources we have. Lots of things you can use for your patrons or people who come into your library. What about my business? What do I do with my kids? What about homeschooling, et cetera, et cetera, unemployment? The second link here specifically for the libraries, as you were trying to do your business. What you can do about closing tips and guides for reopening, specific resources for school libraries, what they have to deal with. Here in Nebraska have our board meetings, our public board meetings, how is our statutes handle that? Now a lot of the resources on this page could be useful to anybody. There's things that are just out there from CDC, World Health Organization, OSHA, OCLC, IMLS, et cetera, so for anybody. But things like this that have to do with statutes and law. This is specific to Nebraska. Check with your state or your local municipalities about what the laws are there. So we try to keep this page up to date as we come up with new items, new resources, new webinars or information. We'll keep adding it to here. So please do keep an eye on this to help you with your running your library during the pandemic. If you're not from Nebraska, you can use our resources here as well, of course. Just pay attention to the ones that are Nebraska specific. But check with your state library or your state library association. They may be providing the same kind of resources for you. So now let's get into today's show. Amanda, I am going to switch to present your view to you. So you shouldn't see the pop up for that. There we go. So as I mentioned earlier, we are doing today our monthly pretty sweet tech. Amanda Sweet is the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. And she comes on once a month, usually almost exclusively. It's the last Wednesday of the month to do her pretty sweet tech from Amanda Sweet. And talk about anything tech related. So if you are the techie type person at your library, the Technology Librarian are interested in that. This is definitely the show that you'd want to be showing up for. We do other tech related things throughout the month, but guaranteed Amanda's session will always be about tech. And she attended conference this year virtually, I believe, right? Yep. Yeah. So that she's going to talk about computers and libraries 2020. This is a conference I've attended years past as well. Computers and libraries is usually held in Washington, DC, in that area, DC, Virginia, in the spring and naturally wasn't. So I'll hand it over to you, Amanda, to talk about the conference and what they did instead and what some cool things you want to tell us about it. I really miss the Euro place in Washington, DC. Yes, yes. Unfortunately, that's something they can't bring along to when they do, when we go virtual, certain things. It's true. So computers and libraries was all virtual this year. And they used a platform called feed loop. And I'll give you a preview of what that looks like, just in case you feel like gaining access to the sessions yourself, if there's enough of these that you find interesting. If you are a Nebraska library, the library commission is offering a discount for the virtual recorded sessions of computers and libraries, just in case you are super interested in them. And we've always offered that. I should mention that too. Before things went virtual, we've always every year offered a discount through the commission to attend computers and libraries in the spring. And then also Internet Librarian, which is the companion conference that is done in the fall, is usually in Monterey, California. And so we always have a discount on either of those conferences, if you're wanting to actually travel with them in person. But I think this year we did switch it to discounting the virtual version. So you can use this session to find out if it's worth it for you to gain access to those or just find out if there is a session or two that you want to research on your own. And I've also scraped together a whole bunch of resources that were mentioned during a lot of those sessions. And I gathered together some main themes and some major takeaways from these different themes. So we'll go over kind of a building digital skills was a huge one. As with COVID, we all know that the digital skills gap is still here. It's still growing and it's still something we need to deal with. And building partnerships was also a huge theme in this because you can't offer digital skills assistance without building different partnerships within your community. And getting the word out about new and different virtual library services. It was really important to be able to build partnerships for marketing, build partnerships to extend services out and be able to ramp up and make the change that needs to happen to keep libraries going. And virtual branches and expanding virtual services kind of walked hand in hand with those digital skills and partnerships. And website redesign is just kind of a given with all of the above. And then emerging technology kind of happened in two different ways. Waves, emerging tech can be used to improve library services and improve the way the library operates in general. But there's also ways that libraries can help teach the community and help the community gain access to help figure out ways that they can use emerging tech in their own industry or in makerspaces or in a variety of different ways. So you can either use emerging tech in the library or you can teach emerging tech in the library, dealer's choice. All right, so in terms of building digital skills, the major sessions that I attended that kind of encompassed the core and the meat of what you need to know is using social media to engage your community. And digital storytelling was just a huge theme. If you even just Google digital storytelling, you will have a major section of what this conference was all about. And supporting tech integration, a major part of it is a lot of existing libraries. They needed to shift the way that they did things really quickly. You've probably heard this in a lot of sessions already. So I won't go too much into how libraries have changed to adapt to COVID. But this is about the supporting tech integration is about ramping up the digital skills of staff so that they can help patrons adapt to a new digital world too. And closing the digital divide, there is a motley assortment of digital resources that we now need to access. We're now communicating mostly via Zoom. Zoom fatigue is real, and a lot of these sessions went over various different tools, platforms, and resources that you can use to help your community gain access to the Internet, how to learn how to use the correct digital devices, the tablets, smartphones, computers. And once you've learned how to use the device itself, how are you going to use that as a tool in your everyday life? How can the computer and tablet and smartphone help in your job searches? How can it help in learning online upskilling so that you can shift over to a different career and a lot of people, as we know, they lost their jobs or were furloughed during the pandemic. So now everyone's scrambling to find a different job, upskill, reskill, figure out what they need to know just to make a living. And that is what closing the digital divide and building digital skills has turned into. So in terms of resources, I built a... I scraped together a whole bunch of the resources that were mentioned during the various different sessions, and I just compiled them all into a major table. And I also have a digital literacy guidebook for librarians that I've been putting together for the past few years. And I scraped all of these resources and put them together in the appropriate places in that digital literacy guidebook as well. And there is... So these are new things that... Some of these might be new that weren't in there before? Yeah. So Tech Boomers, that was actually one that you recommended to me that I did add to the digital literacy guidebook already, but it's worth mentioning again. GCF Learn and NorthStar were already in there. Grow with Google has actually grown some more. They've added some new tracks, and they've added some new resources that are now available. Microsoft Digital Literacy is new that was not previously on that digital literacy guidebook. Digital Learn is a resource from the Public Library Association that will help people learn how to... Learn what a computer is, learn what a tablet is, and how to use the common different smart devices. And the Tech Skills Checklist for Library Supervisors and Staff comes in handy for library staff who want to get a baseline for where they're at right now and then link over to different resources to fill in the gaps that they need to be able to improve their own library services and to expand the services that they provide to patrons. And kind of an overview of why in the world do people need to know this? And... Sorry, I didn't mute my phone. But... I didn't even hear the mistake. Oh, well, it never marked, it never happened. So a big part of this is libraries have been putting together resources that show people how to make these... how to teach these digital skills, but then every so often no one will show up. So they found out in these sessions that I went to for computers and libraries, and in my own work talking to libraries about digital literacy, marketing is a thing. And understanding the major problems that people are facing so that we know how to market to a target audience and actually get people to know that the library exists and is now providing the service is a big thing. And that's where the partnerships come in, is because if you are going to be offering new services to help people navigate parenting in the digital age, you might want to be able to do that. And the school, the local public schools, they are already overtaxed and they are under resourced. So being able to partner together with those local schools makes a big difference. And some libraries are already doing it. Some computer communities are already doing it. But Yulsa, the young adult library school association, I might be getting that acronym wrong, but if you Google Yulsa, it'll pop right up. But they have a guidebook for how public libraries and school libraries can build partnerships and help each other out and just keep each other going during this time. And just in life in general. And understanding that there is more than one way to learn all this stuff. And understanding that we used to do most things face-to-face in the library and do maybe one-on-one training or just one-shot assistance. But now everything is shifting over to virtual. And people don't actually do all of these tasks while they're in the library all the time. They might need to access it on their own. And I think that's one of the things they might need to access it on the go on their smartphone. They might need to access it right before they go into a job interview. They might need to access it while they're in their grandparents or their grandkids' house. And so these different on-the-fly resources are what digital skills are all about. But moving right along. So a little subtopic in here was rebranding and marketing the library. And helping people understand that in a lot of ways we're more than just books. And peer research did a whole bunch of surveys about how people view the library. And library, like people overwhelmingly over 70% of people wanted the library to start offering more digital skills and digital skills training. And libraries started doing it. But some people didn't show up. So it's just getting the right digital skills training is what it's all about. And that's more about, it has a lot to do with user experience design, which we'll talk about in the website and redesign rebranding. So all these themes just kind of go together. So these were the sessions that were mostly about building partnerships. So library competitors, partners in community value and partnerships and collaboration for public libraries and schools and the examples for building partnerships were three of the biggies that I went to that had a lot like the bulk of the information that had main takeaways for me. But the other ones were also awesome. So in a lot of this they talked about we need to expand access to services but people don't know that we exist that and are now offering these services. And we also need to work together with local organizations to even get the local expertise and be able to understand the market enough to be able to build these services. And rebranding was just, it was everywhere. It was what is the library now in the age of COVID? And this is probably not the first time you've actually heard this because if I could, I cannot count the number of times I heard a similar phrase to that during that conference. And some recommendations were to be able to connect with businesses, schools and try to find out how the library can add value to the community but how your goals overlap with local businesses and how your goals overlap with local schools. Because if you don't have a shared value system and a shared goal system, the partnership is probably going to break down. And it's because when you build a partnership you need to be able to understand what you're both going to get out of it. A major example that they used in the bill like the examples for partnerships was if you're going to reach out to local tech companies or you're going to reach out to your local Walmart or something like that. Walmart needs to know that they need to have more access points that will help people gain these new digital skills. Not everyone is comfortable going to, they're going to work and saying, I don't know how to do my job. So the library can say, we can be a more accessible access point so that people can get the help they need without having to admit to their employer that they don't know what they're doing. And not everyone will be able to express what they need and know what to ask for. So that's one major selling point for being able to say, local businesses, this is why you need your library because your employees are not always going to feel comfortable telling you that they need help. And they're not always going to be feel comfortable in asking for that. And you are not always going to be able to, as a small business, you're not always going to be able to develop an internal training program that's going to be able to give people the skills they need because you're already strapped for resources. And that's why you need your library. So something that comes to mind when you're talking about, before about marketing that it's been an ongoing issue that we are libraries are inconsistent in our marketing. Some do great and some are like floundering. It's a partnership thing. I've been throughout the pandemic on, I've been on various Zoom meetings and calls with libraries, library directors talking about what they're doing. And this reminds me of something that a few of them have mentioned that it relates to, we have our list of who's open, who's closed, what's going on. I just remember last week, I believe it was, there was a library who said, we had someone come in and they didn't know we had reopened. We'd been open for like a month and a half and they thought we were still closed. We did everything we could, we thought we could, we put it out everywhere where we said when we were closed, we had to close down. And they didn't somehow, they didn't see that we had reopened. They said, oh, you're open. We didn't know. I was like, yeah, we've been here for like a month already opened with all of the safety and kit place. So I wonder if connecting more, even more with other places, other partnerships of other places to push out the information that the library is now open, reopened. Local grocery stores are a surprisingly good way to do it. Yeah, they've been open, yeah. Places that you know have already had stayed open and didn't shut down at all. Yeah. That's a good thing. And if you even partner with DoorDash and say, when you deliver food, can you give them this flyer that the library is open and ready to help? Yeah, some local delivery places, yeah. And I skipped that. And we have actually, you know, there's DoorDash, this is national ones, but we have a local delivery service that helps all the restaurants deliver. That would be something to look if you've got that in your community, reach out to them. Cause I know we use them. Right. And I skipped back to this slide because this also kept coming up. People won't know you're online if the people are not online. Digital divide. They don't have the connection. Yeah. You were their connection. So you've got to find a different way to tell them you're back. Yeah. So if you are advertising only on your library website and people can't get, or they have inconsistent access, they're never going to know. All right. So assuming that you've already set up your website and that you are in the middle of updating everything, shifting everything around, how can you build out your virtual services? And is it even possible to just have an entirely virtual branch? That's some, a new thing that people are figuring out just on the fly and just out of necessity. We all had to close our libraries down in a lot of cases and you can do maybe curbside pickup or over the phone service, but everyone's online. So some of the main sessions where some libraries just completely went digital. They just said we're online now and hopefully we can open up one day again, but we're just assuming that this is life right now and bringing collections to the screen, digitizing everything. Even in the library commission, I'm getting calls from public libraries that also work with like smaller museum collections and they want to know if they can start digitizing their collection and putting it on their WordPress website. And spoiler alert, yes, you can. It's a huge project, but yeah, you can do it. And there's also, you can build 3D virtual exhibits. You can set up everything in your library exactly the way we want it to be. You can get a 360 camera and then you can take a 360 of everything so people can navigate it just on your website. You don't need a virtual reality headset to be able to navigate a 360 image. You can just pop it in there using WebVR and then use your mouse to navigate it. And that's another way that you can bring your collection online to the screen. And then you can also start a library podcast if there is some valuable information that you want to get out into the public or if you even just want to write your own story and just keep people entertained. That's just, it's an awesome way to keep the library on people's minds. And also stories, like story style podcasts are just fun to make. So, and I also have a whole bunch of resources for audio editing and being able to set up podcasts so you can feel free to reach out to me and I'll send you over a resource pack if you'd like one. And so people are just shifting over to figuring out what they can do right now and then figuring out how we can get ahead of shifting over to a more digital future later on. Because technology isn't going anywhere. It just, it's kind of here to stay. But, and there's also, and there's also figuring out what's going to shift back to in person and what can't we do online. So there's going to be like that 50-50 split. We have to do everything online right now. What's shifting back and what's not. All right, so some of the major takeaways that were recommended during the sessions were the fail fast approach. So you're probably not going to get everything exactly perfectly right on the first try. But if you've ever learned anything, you already know that's true. And so it's mostly just, this is kind of a story for management and for employees. So management would need to get used to the idea that people are going to screw stuff up. And okay, giving that tolerance level. And employees need to figure out that screwing stuff up is not the end of the world. And getting that kind of symbiotic relationship that says this is what I did. This is what worked. This is what didn't work. And this is how I'm going to try it differently again in the future. And figuring out, am I going to do something like this again or not? And there was one session that was all about how to make your own videos and how to do video recording, put it up onto your website, put it up on YouTube, and just keep the library on people's minds. And knowing that you are developing new resources like virtual story hours, you're developing tutorials for how to use Canva or how to use podcasting. Like the library can develop a podcast and then make a series of tutorials about how local area of community members can make their own. And how this can help them in their job or in their personal lives in the future. So understanding that the library can learn the skills, then they teach the skills, then the librarian gets better at the skills by teaching. And then the community members can start using those same skills in other industries. And they can start using it in personal hobbies and just kind of get that cycle of learning going. And then use that cycle of learning to start making a case for stakeholders and the people who are funding the library to say, we're doing this right now, the library is still valuable even if our doors are closed sometimes. And this is why the community still needs the library. And this is why we need to increase or maintain funding. So it's being able to demonstrate that value and that need. And that's why you also need to update your website frequently because if your value is not demonstrated on your website, then stakeholders are not always going to do the extra work to find out the value of the library. In a lot of the sessions, we found out that the library website might be the first and only access point that people go to to find out if they want to invest in your library or if they want to attend library services. And that kind of turned into your website is the main entry point to your library. And a lot of people already knew that, but it's kind of, it just got reiterated about 20 billion times during the conference. And so there were also some recommended tools that came up and I put in this slide for the number one question that I get for everyone who's trying to do video and audio editing is which tool should I use and what has already worked for you. So this is just a list of different things you might want to try out for your own library. And I also included some major tutorials that, so there were some steps that were recommended during a lot of the sessions, but make use of, they've already put together tutorials that reflected the main meat of what was in those sessions. So I just linked over to what I knew already worked. And there was also tips for how to shoot video. I've put together a whole bunch of resource packs for libraries. So if you want to have access to those, just shoot me an email and I'll get it sent over in about 30 seconds. So there was also a whole ton of sessions about tips for how to redesign your website and how to get to know your audience better. And usability testing and journey mapping was a huge one. Usability testing and journey mapping is you just designed a website. You have a theory or an idea about how people are going to use this website. But a lot of times people don't use the website in the way that you intended it to. So like you think, right? Yeah. This is so important. This is one of my little pet peeves about website design that I know some, some places for whatever reason, sometimes skip. They think they know. And then why isn't anybody finding us? Why aren't they finding the thing we wanted them to find? Right. Yeah. So, yeah. So, yeah. People's behavior is unpredictable. Yeah. And then like it's finding out, okay. So this is how people are actually using our website. How can we reorganize information and how can we shift things around. So that people interact with it more and find out what they're actually looking for and just put it up front and center. So that you can get more engagement with the site and so there's also web design for UX stands for user experience. So anytime you see UX on here, it stands for user experience. So simplifying information architecture goes hand in hand with that journey mapping. When you find out how people are actually using your website, how can you simplify the way that you're organizing your information so that people can access what they need when they need it and why they need it. And so then there was a whole session that was just about a library that was contracting with another company to be able to reorganize their website. And they recommended a tool called Miro and Miro is basically you can put up digital post-its and they use these awesome digital post-its to be able to cluster everything they wanted on their website into different theme groups. And then they were able to, and that was how they organized their information just based on those digital post-its. And they use that Miro instead of using an actual physical board because a lot of the planning was done virtually as well. Because not only can patrons not always go into the library right now, but staff isn't always comfortable going into the library. And if you use that digital tool, that's basically like a giant digital whiteboard, you don't have to. And you can also, it's shareable. So that you can just send over a link, you click it open and then anyone who has access to that link can make adjustments to the board, add new stuff. And it's basically like a project management version of Google Docs. And so user experience in older adults is a session that's all about how can you target people who are not as experienced with technology or not as comfortable with technology and understanding that different age groups are going to be interacting with your website in different ways. So a 25 year old might look at those little three little dashed lines and know that that's a hamburger menu. If you click on it, it's going to open up another menu. But an older adult who doesn't have as much experience navigating websites because they just gained access to the internet is not going to intuitively understand that those three little lines mean that there's a menu that's available. So that's going to change the way that everyone just knows. Yeah. So instead of just putting those three little lines, you put the lines and then you put the word menu or click to open menu. Otherwise people are never going to interact with it. They'll never going to know what you intended from that symbol because they don't know what the symbol means. And so the impact and value of the library, we already kind of went over that with the marketing segment and with the building partnerships. If you don't have the impact and the value added from your library on your website already, it's something you'll probably want to look at. And then what is the key term that people are going to look at to know this is what I need to click on. And this is how I'm going to get the library services and what the library has to offer to me. A lot of times this impact and value will show up in the mission statement, the about the library and the services. So those are kind of your main three categories that you kind of want to bolster that people are looking for, for that information. All right. So I already kind of went over a lot of these, but I'll go over the major takeaways that can be stated a million times and it's never enough. So responsive design, if you haven't, if you don't already know what responsive design is, that's why I have the picture of the cell phone and the laptop over here. And it's because responsive design will help you design one single website that can be viewed on a large screen, a small screen, and a medium size screen. And the way that usually works is in columns. So on a large screen you might have one wider column that has like three little cards that go across in a row. But when you view that same website, the screen is automatically going to shift so that this only showing one mini little card on there. And you want to make sure that the text isn't shrinking down to too tiny of a little font size so that people don't have to keep zooming in on their phone and then shrinking down on their phone. Because the harder it is for people to navigate your website on a smartphone, the less engagement you might have on the site. Because there's a higher percentage of people that are using a mobile phone as the only way that they can access the internet. And that was found during pure research surveys. And a lot of COVID research surveys showed that sometimes people don't have access to the main computer. The library may have been their only access to a desktop computer. And now they only have a smartphone or a tablet because it may have been $100 at the store instead of the $500 computer that they could have gotten. Or the $250 laptop. So if your website isn't responsive, they will probably just close it out of frustration. And they won't get the help that they need. And so the user experience mapping, and I'll click over here. See, these are some website redesign resources that I put together. Smashing magazine is one of the major ones that I recommend because it has pretty much every step that you need it to. And it will walk you through just kind of step by step, stage by stage, category by category. And just let you know what you need to know. And so Adobe also has an awesome resource for learning how to do that journey mapping and experience mapping. So if you want to guide for how to dig deeper into that, that's an awesome resource to go to. This is that Miro that I was talking about. And the awesome thing is that Miro has already created a customer journey map template. So you can read this article from Adobe and then pop open Miro and just start playing with it immediately. And just start learning how to use the tool. They have some awesome YouTube tutorials for how to use it already. And it's free. So there's a free option and there's a paid option. And it just the number of users that are going to be using it. And there's also responsive layout. And this will show you how to design WordPress websites with a responsive layout. I have a bone to pick with the four dummies title because this is probably one of the smartest articles I've ever seen. But I'll take it. And so there's also United for Libraries also offers approving your library's value. It is a course that they have available online. It's a paid course. But if you Google enough, you could probably find a free version. This is just the one that they recommend. United for Libraries. There's some states too that have paid for statewide subscription. I guess you call it to everything United for Libraries offers that's United for Libraries is for friends and trustees and things. We have that here in Nebraska. Actually, we paid for everyone in this every library employee to have access to anything they have for free. We pay for statewide access. And there's 10 or so states that do that. I'll tap my head. Check. But see if yours might already have given you that access to score. I am taking that class. All right. So then the last major theme that I'll go over is emerging tech in the library. And some of the major sessions were augmented in virtual reality for teaching and learning. This was for makerspaces in school libraries, but a lot of there are some major takeaways for public libraries as well. Robots and learning is this has been a really popular theme for years already. So there's already a ton of resources that are available out there. The smart library is about library automation and by library automation, I mean, when you open up the library in the morning, you usually have to walk around and manually turn on all of the lights and light bulbs and overhead lights, which can take a really long time and sometimes you forget one. But if you get smart bulbs, then you can just open up an app on your phone and say turn on like library lights and then everything just goes on and you don't have to run around doing it. Nice. And I can know it is awesome to have that. And there's also so the smart library session just had like a little mess of gadgets that you can start playing around with, but the library lights thing was just one of my favorites. And there's also the gate counter that is a really popular one. So it basically just tracks when people walk in and then when people walk out. And then you're able to just use that as an easy way to figure out how many people had some foot traffic in your library. And in some cases you can find out an approximation of how long people were there. If you add additional sensors, you can also find out which places people are navigating so that even if they don't check out a book, you know which categories people frequent the most and when. And then you'll be able to know, you'll get a better idea of how to build the layout of your library and how to, which resources you might want to improve for collection development. So the smart library is all about using data and sensors to be able to inform how you do things in the library. And it's an easily Googleable thing and the American Library Association also has a ton of resources about a smart library and how to do it. And so there were also about a billion and one sessions about artificial intelligence. So, and this was true last year. It was true this year too. But so this AI insights and info was about specifically how artificial intelligence was going to impact like reference librarianship and how people find things online and how the library can shift what they do so that they can kind of reference proof themselves or like future proof themselves. Because you may have already seen this in your own library, people saying, I don't need to go to the library, I can just Google it. Or I don't need to go to the library, I can just find it online. And we're finding out that people believe they have higher digital skills and higher research skills than they actually have. But it's hard to be able to encourage someone to go into the library if they don't understand that this is a problem. So instead of just being instead of just curating resources, this session recommended that simple access is no longer enough. So it's shifting over not to just this is what the resource is, but this is how you can use the resources in context. And it's helping people take that next step to say, this is not just access, this is application, this is real world problem solving, and this is how the library is going to help me do the things that I need to do. Instead of just handing me a list of stuff and saying, deal with it. And so virtual reality and augmented reality are also becoming increasingly popular in the library. And this is in two ways. So there are library systems like in Nevada that are using virtual reality to develop career resources. So they have this awesome system where they can, you can put on a virtual reality headset and then you'll be able to do kind of like a mini day in the life of a career. And then if you like that career that you just gain exposure to through VR, then you can sign up for a career training program and actually learn how to do the thing. And so that's kind of how they're experimenting with how virtual reality can be used as a service in the library to expand services. But there's also the virtual reality lab that will help people that will provide access to the headset itself to patrons so that they can figure out how they can use it in their work or how they can use it to solve problems or just have fun. So they can gain access to the headset and learn how to use Unity to be able to develop a program and make those research and use it themselves. And we talked about smart libraries a lot so I won't go over that too much again. And there was also Rowanoke library system is a really small library that's in, I want to say West Virginia and they are they did a series of artificial intelligence related programs. So code.org and a whole bunch of different like hour of code they put together some different resources so that libraries can start doing AI activities themselves. And they can start just kind of showing people what AI is all about playing around with it and experimenting with it. So what I put together over the past few years here is a set of resources that you can learn more about all these different high-tech things. And so with the computers and libraries I scraped a whole bunch of the resources that were mentioned and I categorized them. So there's a series of things about so this these pages will tell you what the technology is. It'll tell you how it's being used to solve real world problems. And it'll tell you kind of a collection of different places that you can go to to find out what this looks like in different industries. You'll find out different videos that you'll get video examples of how it's just being used in real life. Then this is the digital literacy aspect that will tell you what in the world can go wrong. What do we need to pay attention to? And what would stop me from wanting to use this? And how can I do more to stop AI from ending the world? Yes, libraries can save the world. And this is a resource about how AI is designed and made. So this is something that will it'll walk you through the different team structures and the people behind artificial intelligence. So this Meet Amazon's core machine learning team it shows you that AI is not just something that lives in a digital world. These are the people that make it. These are the people that are embedded in Amazon's main system. They're the ones that are talking to the supply chain operators and they're talking to them to find out what their job is like and how AI can be used as a tool to help in one small section of that main process. And it gives a better understanding that artificial intelligence and machine learning is not it's both not as far along as you would think it is. It's not a terminator level. But it's also further along which then you might think. And so it's kind of getting a real like a realistic view of what this technology is beyond like ready player one and terminator and it's going into who are the people? Who is it helping? Who is it impacting? And putting people first and try it in the library is a set of activities that you can do yourself in the library and it's just each one of these links will send you over to a set of resources or a set or a tutorial that you can do. And then I'm going to add a little bit of the resources as the code.org one that was mentioned in the in one of the sessions and computers and libraries and so some of these I already had on here. Some of these I just added after the sessions and I'm still adding more stuff on here. And libraries can't be expected to learn everything and anything about how to communicate. So I put together a series of online learning communities that you can send people over to so that they can ask questions and get answers to what they're trying to do. And so this is basically libraries, their main like their strength is being able to connect people with the information that they need to answer the questions and solve the problems that they need in life. So in the real world solutions, they'll be able to articulate a problem that they're facing in their real life. Find out the truth about how technology works and then be able to articulate a problem and a question that they might want to ask and then you can send them over to a learning community to ask that question. So this is just one way that libraries can help people navigate the changing world of technology and tackle high tech. And so there's a page of for every one of these that'll just show how all this stuff works. And most of them have videos already but I'm apparently need to add a couple more. And if you want to experiment around with the tech kits in the library I also have some tech kits you can get through the mail and so if you want to hold a robot or hold augmented reality or drones or learn about AI through Google Nest or virtual reality you can also tell people that high tech exists and then let them hold it. Now these tech kits would be just for Nebraska libraries, correct? Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for mentioning that because I always forget to mention that. I was wondering if you were doing these again. I know this is something that you'd started working on like just before the pandemic started. I think getting things really together. And the funny thing is I have everything together. Everything is updated. But I'm not sure when I'm actually going to be cleared to send but so I open this up because you can click through and find out what's available to you and you can start doing some prior planning to find out what you might want to use what you need to do to get prepped up for it. And so there's a getting started guide that'll show you this is the librarians preparation guide that'll tell the library and everything they need to know to get this little bot up and running. And there's also an introductory lesson plan system that'll say if you are trying to find an entry point into how to use this, start here. And then if you want to do some more stuff, try these. Well, even if we can't send the kids we're not sure about sending the actual kits out yet. There's a lot of good info here on at least finding out what actually can it do what will it do what how could I use it in live within the library with something. Yeah. And even if you're not in Nebraska you can also take a gander at these and if you want to buy the same exact model you can use these resources. And just thinking about this whole your whole page here your whole site. All of this is I mean it's done on our it's by the library commission but it's for anybody to access it's just everything except for requesting the actual kits on this whole your whole on digital history site is open and available to use. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you can anyone can click this open and find out any of this these activities and you can use the getting started guide. I'm still putting together the safety policy on here because blades, but this is the only one that actually isn't quite done yet. But the rest of them are done. So there's that. And if you wanted to find out more about the computers and libraries platform to see if you want to try to gain access to it. This is what the platform looks like. What you'll probably mainly wind up in is the sessions was the name of the one that they used a feed loop. Feed loop. Okay, that's a note one that I had not heard about yet. I guess I guess I haven't encountered using it any at a lot of times yet. There's lots of them out there now that are either I've popped up or always existed, but now are becoming more prevalent because of everybody going remote, but there's so many different options just like you're talking about zoom being the thing that people use. There are so many different options for online like here we use go to Webinar. There's Web X and Adobe Connect. There's so many different ones out there. Hard to decide what do we go with. This was a weird one because like you can go to feed loops website and you can log in as an attendee. But then as a when I was the speaker, I had to log in to zoom and then zoom forwarded over to feed loop. I've seen that with some when I attended the ARSL conference association for rural and small libraries last month. I think they used Huvva and then connected the zoom though. So it's kind of like zoom within Huvva and you could attend either using the Huvva software or if that wasn't working because sometimes that didn't work for people. Just go directly to the zoom link instead and just. Yeah, so they I think that's nice. It gives options. For people. And on here, so if you are trying to decide whether or not you want to invest in the recorded sessions for computers and libraries and this is what you would be getting yourself into. These are the major tracks that are available. So there's content discovery management, libraries, communities, the tech covered a lot of the emerging tech stuff. If you are a school library or you're interested in maker space stuff, then there's a ton of resources on there for that. And managing marketing and change was all about the adding value to your library and how people need to shift and slide the way that they do things so that you can shift over to. A new way of act of like operating. And you can also search by specific. Hey, there I am. Hi, my specific speakers. And. There is also just hundreds of sessions on here that you can click open. And when you click one open. It'll give you the. Recording that you can play on here. And then some of them have the additional information down below. And it's a 5050 split whether. The presenter remembered to load in the presentation files or any other additional handouts. And it looks like they don't have being delayed in doing that when I presented at conferences. I'm not like, as I say this, I'm thinking, did I load mine? It gets there eventually. But. So this is an option to see if this is something that is important for you or if you just want to dig deeper into one of those topics that I've just mentioned. So that is up to you. And this. I'll also, what I'll do right now is to. Go back into my Google slides. And I will put in the link to this presentation in case you want to access any of the different resources. Or have a review of. What's available. And I'll mention when we will also include the link to Amanda slides, when the recording goes up for our archives. So. You'll have access to that as well from through there too. If you don't catch it right now, and that's fine. And I just put the link. In the chat here. And as anyone have any questions for me. Let's see. Does anybody have any questions? Go ahead and type into the question section. We're a little after 11 o'clock, but that's okay. We did start a little after 10 with the show as well. So it's not a problem. And we will answer any questions that you may have. As long as it takes to get through all of them. And I'll do this over here. Okay. You can type into your questions. There we go. We did have someone say someone did say that Roanoke, you weren't sure it was in Western Virginia. So it's in Virginia, but in, but not West Virginia. I guess. I just Googled Roanoke at public live or library system. And it came up. Yeah. No, there's session was on some. Yeah. And just some thanks from, I know, Rebecca Jones was involved in the. Thanks for sharing about the conference. So that we can get some from out there and information out there. And I said at the beginning, I've, you know, obviously Amanda's attended and presented at computers and libraries. And I'm not sure if you did internet librarian. Have you gone that way? No. I should mention, this was actually a merged computers and libraries internet librarian. Yeah. Usually they're separate. Yes. Usually. Yeah, they're both done by information info today company. And there's computers and libraries on the East coast in DC area. And then internet librarian on the West coast in Monterey, California, a confusion libraries in the spring usually March, April and internet librarian October. But due to COVID this whole year, they, as you said, merged them both into one virtual event for all the presentations that would be at both. What I really like about these conferences is. Merging in this way, I think was a smart move because what I've noticed and I've actually presented myself at these conferences, they repeat some of some of the same sessions, the same speakers at each conference in the spring and the fall, which is great because if you're like on the East coast, you don't have to travel all the way across the country to attend if it was in person. You've got that, you know, the half the country can go to the East coast, half go to the West coast and everybody is nice, you know, spread out there. But now that it's all together as one, we're able to turn it online. And the resources alone are worth doing it. Yeah. Resources, connections, networking, the usual things. Yeah. That you get, what did you say, Eros? I know when I went to DC, when, when location they had it, there was a really nice sushi place, walkable. Yeah. And also Jane Dicer. Hi, Jane. It's a great presentation, Amanda. Look forward to publicizing the recorded version. I guess we will have that out there for you. It doesn't look like anybody has any desperate questions they want to ask right now. And that's, makes sense. You just got a lot of resources here, great from Amanda. I'm going to pull back, present your control to my screen. There we go. There it is. Yeah. So yes, we are recording the show and it will be available to you in a week. As long as go to webinar and YouTube, cooperate with me on getting everything processed and up. Everyone who attended today and everyone who registered for today's show will be sent an email from me letting you know when it's available and ready for you to watch the, we'll have the recording of the actual show and the link to Amanda's slides will be in there. And this is our main Encompass Live website. If you use your search engine of choice and just search for Encompass Live, the name of the show. This is what you'll, you'll find us. That's the only thing called that on the internet so far. And these are upcoming shows right underneath them. There's a link to our archives. Top of this list is where today's show will be. This is the one from last week and there will be two links. This one only had a recording. We just did a live showing of the site, but there would be two links there. Let's see me, this one. Yeah. For the recording and went for the presentation. The same kind of thing will be there for today's show. While we're here, I'll show you this is the archives for all of our Encompass Live shows. You can search here for any topic, name of a presenter, whatever you want to look for. You can search the full archives or just most recent 12 months. We just want something recent. That is because this is the full archives. I'm not going to scroll all the way to the bottom because it'd be too far. This is our full archives going back to the very beginning of Encompass Live. Encompass Live premiered in January, 2009. So we've got over 10 years worth of shows here. We do the show every week, almost every week of the year. So there's a lot of topics here. So just pay attention when you are going through our archives. If you're watching something old, pay attention to the original broadcast date. Some of this information may stand the test of time, reading lists, things like that. How to read your library collection, of course. But some things may become outdated and old, certain services and things may changed. We have Google Forms for your library. Google Forms have probably changed since 2017. So watch that one at your risk. So just pay attention to things that might have changed. Services might not exist anymore. Services may have changed. Links and things might not work anymore. But we are librarians. And so we do archive and keep things for historical purposes. So we always have our full archives up here. Just pay attention when you are watching them. When they actually originally broadcast. So that will be our archives. We do a Facebook page for Encompass Live. I've got links to it and it's open over here. We post reminders, log in for today's show. Here's the recording from last week's show. So anything that may be of interest to libraries. So we do have on here, if you'd like to use Facebook, give us a like over there. Otherwise you can follow us anywhere online. We use the hashtag as I was, as I mentioned earlier, Encompass Live for the show. So you can look for that anywhere. So that wraps it up for today's show. Thank you everybody for attending. Thank you, Amanda for telling us all about what happened at computers and libraries, Internet Librarian virtual. This year. Next week, our topic will be letters about literature. This is an annual writing competition for students. That we are hosting here through the Nebraska, in Nebraska from center for the book. And we will talk about the writing contest where students can write to an author about how his or their book affected them. And it's a great, really fun program that we have going on here. So please do sign up for next week's show and their future shows. Got all the November dates here. I will note here, November, the second show in November, we do usually do our show on Wednesdays. November, the second Wednesday in November is actually Veterans Day holiday. We as a state agency are closed that day. So the show has been bumped Tuesday. So just be aware that, that we show November 10th is actually Tuesday, November 10th, not Wednesday. And that wraps up for today's show. Thank you everybody for being here with us. And we'll see you on a future episode of encompass live. Bye bye.