 All right. So first up on Big Talk from Small Libraries 2018 is At Your Service, the library as a community hub. With us from Fremont, Nebraska, very nearby in our home state of this conference at Midland University is Tim Lentz. Good morning, Tim. And Dave Miller. Good morning, Dave. Morning. Thanks for having me. And Tim is the library director there. And Dave is your IT program manager at both at the library, I believe? For the campus. So. Okay, awesome. His profile is the entire campus, but I have his office just down the hall from me, which is extremely convenient and. Absolutely. Yes. Nearly necessary actually, so. It's for running a library. Yes, I totally agree. It's nice to have him close by. Yes. Yeah. All right. So I will just hand it over to you so you can take away and tell us about what you've been doing at your at Midland University. Sounds good. Just a little bit about me. I am relatively new at Midland University. It's been an incredibly welcoming community to come into. One of the things that I noticed that was unique from the moment I got here, all of campus IT is housed right in the library. And there were some built-in partnerships that I saw, some of which already exist and some of which I hope to capitalize and build on as we go forward. It's not just IT though. And that's one of the most important things that we'll talk about over the course of this presentation. One of the things that Midland does is as a small college, you have to collaborate to make it work. And that's been really wonderful. So I was previously right in the same town as Chris to working at UNL at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln and was offered the opportunity to come here. And it's just been, you know, it's been sad to leave UNL. I like the work that I did there, but it's been wonderful to be here. So I'll let Dave say a little bit about who he is. He's got a little more seniority around the institution as well. Thank you, Tim. I've been managing the help desks since I arrived here in August of 2014. For one or two of those years though, I moved on to other projects, but this past year I've come back and I'm almost fully engaged in managing the help desk here at Midland. And I think overall it's been a great opportunity. I love the help desk here and the services it provides and the successes that we've been having. It was established back in August of 2013. So it was before I got here that it was beginning. They started by combining the library circulation desk and the IT help desk. So they had two separate entities through the work study program. But they realized that they gained a lot of wins by combining the two and creating two different levels of students. There's a level one, which is mainly, well, mostly library services, but they can also help with communication throughout the campus. Level two students provide the same services at level one, but they have IT skills added on top of that. So therefore they get a few extra hours per week that they can work. And so by August of 2014 when I got here, it was established that all 30 students were at least level one and 10 of those were level two. Then by mid-year of August of mid-year of 2016, we added security and maintenance to our ticketing system. So we were truly becoming an all campus support group and we're adding more departments as time goes on. So by becoming this one stop shop, as well, you know, sometimes we refer to ourselves, the help desk became known as a great place to work and a great example of customer service. We refer to our patrons here as customers because that's who they are, whether they're students who pay tuition or faculty or staff, we serve them. It was established because there was a need to provide better service to middle and students by using the students themselves that were available for work. But the reason we added what we created the 30 students in the level two was that back then the work study job at the library was known to be a pushy job that allowed students to do their homework while they were on the clock, which work study was the, with too much of the emphasis on study, unfortunately. And we've slowly, you know, weeded out a few of those students and I think in general this past year we've provided much better service. But now we're going to take it to the next level, almost thinking about creating some sort of internship out of it, because we are teaching them job skills and work ethics that will continue on after they graduate. We're going to need to train them to be much quicker in the fall so that incoming students can get the same level of service in August that they would say in January or February after the year's been going on. And when they're on the job they're going to learn training and maybe some leadership skills. We had one student this past year who graduated in December who's been at the help desk since I was here, since I started, and he was offered a job before graduation and that was due to his experience here at the help desk in the IT department. So we've been very proud of him. He'll be working in Albion. This actually has probably started already. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, that's already there. So the biggest change over the years has been the mindset of the students going from that cushy able to do their homework at the help desk to being customer driven, customer service driven. And it's interesting to see that those students that still kind of think of it as the cushy homework job and sitting there next to someone who is driven, it's interesting to see some of the chemistry that goes on that sometimes you have to, I don't want to say there's conflict, that's a little extreme, but those that are driven get it. They get the norm that we're trying to establish here as customer service. And Tim has been great in helping the students and keeping this norm going and adding on to it because we want to add a level two service more, not just in the IT world, but more in the library as well. So those students that wish to excel and put extra time in to serve the library, we want to give them that opportunity as well. The campus has been able to make a change from having a library with books and some computers to really using the building as a resource as a learning commons. So the more and more as time goes on, we refer to the building as a learning commons area rather than just a library because it's become a central hub on campus. And that's another reason we're very proud of what we do here. We've, and we might not see, we've been seeing students get hired right after graduation. Or we have an automated ticketing system, which has been key in getting communication quicker. People can send an email to our helpdesk at billinu.edu and it creates a ticket in the system and all of our students know how to assign that ticket so the communication goes much quicker. They're not expected to fix a leak in a bathroom somewhere, but they know to send that ticket to maintenance. And so far they've been very great at being on top of these tickets. We also watch those tickets after hours as well. So we're almost a 24-7 shop. And another reason we brought in students is sometimes we're a little tight on full-time staff. We have just a few people full-time in the IT world and having these students be able to service the customers and start taking on some of the IT tasks has enabled the full-time staff to work on the other needs around campus that are met for the full-time staff. We've also moved, this has been a big win over the past several years, the Learning Commons has had the Learning Center and the IT kind of mixed up. And this past summer we finally moved all of the Learning Center areas, the Writing Center, the Tutor Lab, and the Quiz Lab to the front of the building. And the IT work has now moved to the back of the building. So any noise that might be generated from the work back there is taken away so we don't disturb the students. And that's been another big win is to be able to utilize the building better. That's something that just predated my arrival here and it is really wonderful. We've got IT folks who are going to take care of you, but for student services immediately for our Quiz Lab, for our Math Lab, for our Writing Center, for our Tutoring Center, those spaces are right up front and then you pass by those to the help desk or kind of one-stop shop. Both in terms of ticketing and in terms of just walk-in customer service, then if they can't help you there then it refers on to the back of the building where the IT folks are housed at this point. Not that I want IT driven to the back of the building exactly, but it does make it that when students walk in they find their immediate services right up front so they're not walking past each other trying to get their computer fixed or something like that. And I believe that if we stop moving around in the learning commons that people remember where we're at. I think every summer we develop these projects because it's pretty quiet that we move around. But I'm thrilled to be here today and I just want to say in closing that it has been an honor to serve Midland University and what I've heard is over the past five years the help desk has been a service that is more likely to be utilized today than it was five years ago because we are more customer driven now than we were back then. So that's all I have. Thank you very much. Dave kind of gives you what it is in a nutshell and I may pick his brain a little bit as we move forward kind of into our second section about how we get here. Yes, that is a talking heads reference. This is not my beautiful library. This is not my beautiful house. And I'll touch on that more when we get to that point. There are some things that we do need to think about. What does it mean? What are the benefits and implications of this setup? And then what are some practical considerations and applications, ways that hopefully this model would translate out not only to academic libraries but I think finding it it seems like it's something that would translate well to a lot of small rural libraries. Assuming you can get some buy in, assuming you can get some of the partnerships that I've been fortunate to essentially inherit here. So I'll move through this part pretty quickly. But in a nutshell, it is a campus hub, as Dave said, a destination, one stop shopping. It is a homegrown learning commons. And it is something that that is I think actually pretty unique for a campus of this size. The physical space has been effectively weeded thanks to one of my library predecessors. That was something again that I just inherited. There was I am told a certain number of raised eyebrows from some of the faculty and professors around campus. But as a librarian, I can tell you that was very good work. We have in terms of volumes, a relatively small collection. But in terms of content and relevance, we have a really high quality collection in that regard. So that again is something that I am just fortunate to have inherited. One of the things that they've done here that I really like. And again, this is something that happened with it. They have white noise generators. So out in that learning commons space, you have relative privacy, you know, you might hear that there's a conversation at the next table, but you're not going to hear what that conversation is. Nor will that table hear what your conversation is. And looking at it inside, it really has become something that is popular for group projects. And honestly, for socialization, I want my library to be as it is a destination on campus. We don't have a student union per se. We have a student center, which does provide some of those things. I believe in some regards, our hours actually run a little longer than theirs. And so the students will come over here just to socialize to work on group projects. But then the remaining areas are very quiet and solitary for really nice, just quiet studying as well. So right now it is a situation where we have the best of both worlds. One thing I liked about that, as I mentioned, I had been at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln just before that. And the Dean there, Dean Nancy Bush, did a really wonderful thing over the past few years to build a really state of the art learning commons here. Now, the fact of the matter is coming on board at Midland, we simply don't operate at the level that the University of Nebraska does. But in our own way, we have many of the same high quality services provided. We do not have a Dunkin Donuts inside of our learning commons as do the learning or as does learning commons at UNL. But we do always have coffee ready for you. It's just something that again, our student workers have ready to go. And so that is, that is pretty wonderful as well. So right up front, we have that learning commons area, a little bit further back, we do have some really wonderful quiet areas as well. One of the things about that that I absolutely love is that if Dave and I were to walk back there, talking even at the volume that we're talking during this presentation, the students would pivot up, they would give us the evil eye. And even those who absolutely know that I am the librarian would be like, Tim, shush, I'm trying to study. So I never have to be that shushing librarian, so to speak. And I really like that that's much stronger. And then it's peer driven, the students kind of enforce and encourage each other to make sure that that area remains very quiet. And again, even though it's not particularly far away from the more open, more socialized area, because of those white noise generators, it is incredibly effective. You go back there and you really feel like you were deep in the stacks, even in a relatively small space like ours. If I may, the white noise is self-adjusting so that if the noise up in the social area starts rising a little bit, the white noise will come in a little stronger and help modify or sedate the noise. So it's very effective back in the quiet area, where you I cannot hear anything in the front of the library when I'm back where this picture is. And that is something, again, that is all IT. I have not worked in the library that had these white noise generators before. I did not know much about that when I came on board, but I will tell you as a librarian, man, if you can talk to somebody about the budget for that, that is a neat, neat piece of technology. It very positively influences our library, both in terms of that socialization space and in terms of having an adjacent space where really, truly we do have quiet solitary study going on. That's a pretty fantastic thing for me. Yeah, that is something I've not heard about that white noise generator in a library. That is really slick. I like that. Yeah. And again, these are things that, I mean, there's been a bit of fortuitousness in this whole situation, but I have Dave's email at the end of our presentation as well. So if you're interested in learning more about that, he can tell you more about the technical end of it, but I can tell you as the librarian here, that is an excellent, excellent piece of technology for libraries. It was a big win. Yep. A win. I don't know if you had mentioned, because someone actually has a question while we're talking about that since I brought it up. What kind of machine do you use? There is a server that resides back behind my office, but then there are speakers that are installed all throughout the ceiling tile. They're actually above the ceiling tile. They're placed about, I think it's every 15 feet all throughout the library. And there are, in several places, there are sensors. They're probably about maybe the size of half a pinky that stick out of the ceiling. And we can log into an application that we control the various geographic areas of the library based on, well, this is going to be the social area. So we're going to make sure we have total adjustment, the right amount of volume. Oh, this is where the office area is. We want to be able to hear each other. So let's reduce the amount of white noise that's coming out. And then we have a computer lab partway back that as well, we reduce the noise generation that's coming through there so that we can hear back there. And then back where the full-time guys work, we don't want to hear a thing that they say. So we have it cranked 100%. Okay. Is there, you said you use certain stuff. Is there a brand name or what is the software package? What are you using? Off the top of my head. You caught me off guard, but I'll be glad to share that information if anyone wants to email me. There you go. Email somebody because somebody wanted to know. I was going to say, you're probably going to get a lot of questions about this, a lot of people reaching out about that. So yes, if you want to know, we'll have Daisy email at the end and you'll be able to reach out to him and ask him to give you all the details. Krista, when I send over the slideshow to you as well, I'll try to add that into the slideshow. Obviously, we don't have it right here as we're presenting. Oh, sure. I'll make sure that I plug it in to the slideshow when I send that along. So that'll be in the PowerPoint in its final form. Yeah. So then afterwards too, for everyone, when we do post the archives of each session, excuse me, we will also include a link to this whole slide presentation to have that as well afterwards. Great. Thanks, Tim. And Dave. Absolutely. All right. I'll let you go ahead. Yeah. So again, we do, I'm not going to say that we do everything on campus, but we do an awful lot here on campus right out of this space. We house IT, as I mentioned, we also house a quiz lab tutoring center, math lab, writing center, and archives. Our quiz lab, the model there is that we have proctors there during the hours of operation. So we have an awful lot of athletes on campus and they tend to be traveling frequently, may or may not be able to be in class if they're traveling for team sports. The proctors then guarantee the integrity of the tests for the professors. If students cannot attend on the day that the test is given, they can take those tests in the quiz lab. And then one of the things that we've been tinkering with since the quiz lab has been created is really just saying, don't waste your time in class on taking that test, but the students take it at their own time in that proctored environment. So you know that the students are not cheating and go over and take that there. So that's a piece that lives right here in the library. That's something that is a strong partnership with the rest of campus. Likewise, our tutoring center is here. The math lab where they really focus on math tutoring is here, our writing center. Those are some really wonderful folks. The archives are housed here in the library. That's a common shared space, obviously, but that is another space that lives right in this same building. So Dave talked about it a lot, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it, but the service desk model does provide services for a wide variety of needs. As Dave mentioned, that once you get started with a maintenance ticket, if your dorm room just needs something fixed up on it, if the plumbing is going out in the administration building, you can file that ticket online. You're also welcome to walk right over here and know that you're going to get high quality customer service, speak with a human being and get that process started in a way that's really going to meet your needs effectively. And that certainly applies to IT, financial aid, and of course library tasks. Those folks are also, amongst everything else they do, they are also frontline library workers for me as well. So that is something that's pretty wonderful as well. So how did we get here? History, ingenuity, necessity, a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work. IT has partnered, this is my co-presenter here. IT has partnered with the library for many years. Dave touched on that in more detail, but they did actually, and Dave won't necessarily tell you this, but when there were some gaps between having a full-time librarian here, just in terms of getting this space staffed and getting the position filled from time to time, they kept that space running for me so that what I inherited was more continuity than I might have expected in some ways. And as Dave talked about in his section, they added IT tasks to the student workers portfolio. That was obviously good effect for all involved. Matt, the student that Dave mentioned, he's one of our first success stories, but I don't expect him to be the last. He basically started out as a level one student for IT, became a level two student where he really had a lot of skills, moved on to a number of internships, and as Dave said, has had a job waiting for him before he graduated. They already knew who he was and they were ready to hire him. So again, with that talking heads reference, it is not a matter of letting the days go by. I've been here just since last semester, but Dave and all of the folks from IT were not letting things go by. They had things already running right at the moment I came on board and they were already building towards that partnership. The only piece that I'm going to claim any credit for is kind of recognizing that that partnership already existed and building on that partnership. That's been something that I've been very pleased with. So Dave gave you that brief history and outline talking about when it was established, why it was established, what changes have occurred, and then one of the quotes that he had that I really wanted to highlight when I was kind of working through my part of it, everyone on campus is now far more likely to utilize the help desk than they would have five years ago. We are constantly looking for ways to improve our service to the Midland community. So there's a couple of things I want to pull out on that. That quote refers to the help desk, but when we're talking about the help desk, we are also talking about the front desk of the library. So when traffic is driven into that help desk, that also drives traffic into the library, drives traffic into the front desk. It builds relationships and establishes a first-rate customer service experience with the same folks who are also going to be providing library services when students come in for those as well. So that's something that's really wonderful. They came over maybe once upon a time for an IT question, got to know some of our student workers. When they come back in the library and they just need to find a particular resource, a particular book, they already have that relationship established. Again, that goes in naturally with just the size of the institution that Midland is, but that is something that was there naturally, but the campus, IT, I hope myself, all of us have just recognized it, built on it and run with it. The other thing that I really like, as many of you probably know as librarians, the discussion of whether we call our users patrons, users, customers, whatever we call them, I will tell you, coming on board here, I have embraced the model where we call our patrons customers because we treat them as customers. We treat them as folks who, you know, they are students here. They are paying for a service and we expect to provide a high level of service for them. They're not paying at the point they receive those services, but they've paid tuition to the university and as part of that, they should expect to be treated as very important customers. So that's something that I've just embraced. Again, that's been something that I've run with and rather than getting hung up on calling them patrons or users, as is often kind of library terminology, customers has turned out to be a very useful term and a very useful concept for our student workers. But what does it mean? Benefits and implications. And, you know, it is not all double rainbows, but it is still pretty good. We are a destination. We do have shared staffing, which is incredibly important for me, important for IT as well. It does build in partnerships across campuses and just speaking from a purely self-interested fashion. And this is something that I recommend out to all of you thinking about this model. It makes a clear value proposition for the library and for the space that we occupy. That also hopefully does provide for stable funding. I feel very secure that the library is supported across campus from administration on down. And I know that my funding will be stable. It's not, I don't have any administrators who have this attitude of, oh, well, Tim, everything's online. We're just going to go ahead and shut the library down. No, they understand that this space serves multiple purposes. It serves as a hub. Again, it serves as a destination. And it makes sure that the future of the library, along with the future of Midland University, is very strong and very stable. So talking a little more detail in that, if anybody caught the reference, but what does it mean? There's a YouTube video out there and you all are library workers. I'll let you Google it if you want to. It's pretty funny, but maybe there's a little tiny bit of language in there, so maybe not entirely safe for work, but what does it mean? He asks this question multiple times. For us, what it does mean is shared spaces and shared staffing. That means that this is not my library. I do not come in as sort of the sole proprietor of this operation. And that also means that I need to work with people to make sure that I have the quiz lab staff properly. I work with the math professor. I work with the fellow who leads the writing center. I work with them and share this space with them. Obviously, I work hand in hand with IT. That's kind of, IT is where this all got kicked off in many ways. So it does build in partnerships with faculty. Again, it makes a destination for many different reasons. It gives us that strong value proposition. Everybody on campus knows why the library exists, not just in terms of providing electronic resources that they can access from anywhere online, but also in terms of being a space that is central and crucial to the campus and does give us that sort of stable funding. And I think that's something that does cross apply to other small libraries as well. Again, it is a shared space. We do share space with the math lab, for example. We do want to make sure that we're respectful of folks who are running those areas, partnering effectively with them. And it does give us kind of pivoting to some of the things that we have to think about with this. It does give us very high gate counts. Those gate counts are not necessarily reflective of library traffic per se. Not everybody who comes in our door is coming to check out books or even coming to find online resources or looking for library instruction. They may be using our classroom. They may be coming in for the quiz lab. They may be coming in for an IT consultation for a printer. Yeah, there's a lot of traffic in for printing, for example. That's not a library function per se, but having them come to the library to do that gives us very high gate counts. The thing that I need to be mindful of is that those high gate counts are not a measure of my success necessarily. It does not mean that the library is doing everything it needs to just because we have high traffic. Again, it does mean shared responsibilities. That is a benefit and a challenge. I would not want to make unilateral decisions, but even if I did want to, I would not be able to do that because I share this space. That means that I do have to work with a consensus orientation. It does necessitate partnerships. Now, that's never been a problem on this campus, but that is something to be mindful of when you're thinking about working with a model like this. One of the things then, kind of reflecting that notion of very high gate counts, but not necessarily translating to are those library numbers per se? No, I'll be working to drive up circulation numbers to see that more of our electronic resources are being used, more of our physical books and magazines are being checked out, and that will start to track it. So I do have to track some of my library statistics in a different way. I can't just rely on that easy number, which I never think is really a great number anyway on gate counts. Of course, it does not reflect online usage. People could be in this space all day, and if I'm not educating them about our online databases, about things that they can find and use, whether they are here or off campus, that is not reflected in good traffic numbers here. So that's a piece that I need to be mindful of as the librarian. It also doesn't reflect classroom instruction. I can have a great impact and have already had a wonderful impact with some of those partnerships that have been built. I've been into quite a few different classrooms already, even in the short time that I've been here, giving instruction, walking students through in a live environment. How do we go to the website? How do we find scholarly peer-reviewed journals? How do I find nursing journals? How do I find English journals? How do I find the physics or chemistry research that I'm looking for? Whatever that is in those classrooms, they will take those lessons and they may not come into the library as a physical space. So that's something, again, that it ends up being very important for me to track my impact in quite a few different ways. So again, drifting into the idea of practical considerations and applications, it does take a lot of collaboration and buy-in and absolutely requires some shared systems and it does require support from all stakeholders. For buy-in, again, this is something that in many ways was essentially built in for me. My strength was choosing to embrace that to say I have great co-workers built in here and I just moved into that and rather than having, you know, I have seen, and if any of you work in academic libraries, I'm certainly sure that you've seen as well, various quote-unquote turf wars, whether it's kind of a turf war of ideas or in some cases, essentially a turf war of space, you could create a turf war over this and have a number of essentially Byzantine feudalistic little kingdoms where this territory belongs to the writing center. This territory belongs to the tutors. The center belongs to IT. This center belongs to Tim. We needed to not do that. It was not done before I arrived and I certainly looked at the situation and said this is excellent. Let's build this as partnerships. Let's share this space and so that buy-in was already there but me choosing to embrace it then I think has made the entire campus stronger and those partnerships just kind of arrived as soon as I was ready to welcome them and take that approach. One of the things that I will mention, of course, you do need some shared systems. That ticketing system is shared and that's nice. I actually had a couple of tickets just in the past couple of days. Something came through to that ticketing system which is in this case initially monitored by IT but they were library requests. So Dave piped them right over to me. I was able to field those. It's something again that in an online fashion mirrors that physical approach where you walk up to the help desk and it almost doesn't matter what you're asking for on campus. They're going to get you started and if they need to refer up they're going to refer you in the right direction. Likewise that ticketing system they're going to get you or you're going to get started at the minute you file that ticket from anywhere on or off campus online and then it's going to get fed over to the people who need to see that. Now that does have to be shared. That's an important thing there. That is not a library piece of software. It is an IT piece of software but it functions as for my part a library piece of software because something that comes in there comes over to me. Likewise if there's a maintenance request it comes into that ticketing system but then it is referred on to maintenance so that they get that in a really, really tight-knit fashion. IT is close by. As Dave said you know we have moved them to the back but that is that is actually really wonderful. I have talked to colleagues of mine who have a different relationship with IT than I have. I am just fortunate to have that so that is something to be mindful of as well. You may need to really build some of those partnerships and kind of persuade some of that buy-in before this is something that will really just get up and running for you. It also does require support and advocacy from up the hierarchy as well. That is something again that is relatively easy to achieve on a small campus. We do not have a bloated administration layer at Midland University but it does mean that I can talk to my hierarchy and know that it is going to go to other folks at that same level. I am going to have the finances, the support that I need in that regard that even though I am reporting to academics finances is going to follow what is going on that is going to move pretty quickly. But it does require that. That is a change that could not have happened without support up the chain of command. The other piece of the puzzle is it does require training of front-line staff. I would encourage all of you even in small public libraries to think about the benefits that you can get from this because again you can get really stable funding, you can get shared staffing and that is something that I really want to highlight in this entire presentation. One of the things that happens there is small libraries are often saying wow I can only have hours from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and I wish I had more hours but I get those hours and I do them four days a week and I am the librarian or I am the librarian and there is an assistant. You would end up needing to maybe cross train some of your front-line staff to also be able to field tickets for other city services for any other stakeholders or partners nearby. And that can be a challenge. Now in this case we are working with student workers. As Dave said we really are driving some norms forward in terms of having them be deeply customer service oriented and then also being cross trained. Some of my most knowledgeable sort of library component student workers are actually IT level two so these will be students who are very very knowledgeable and may actually take your laptop or your tablet into the back and work on it for you or they may be right at that front desk there and they are going to tell you this and this about the library. If you need a deep dive on the research I am going to refer you up to the librarian and they will get in touch with me. But that cross training is really wonderful and one of the things that I see and I think Dave can verify this. When that cross training happens you see the really first rate students have a tendency to excel in both aspects. They are going to be rock solid on IT and they are going to be very quickly adept at a lot of different library side tasks and able to share information effectively there. And they will become your rock stars. Yep. Yep. There are students who are already, having been here just since the middle of the fall semester, there are students who are already emerging rock stars on the library side. Hopefully in a fashion we will mirror what we are already seeing on the IT side where library jobs are not maybe so plentiful as IT jobs but I would like to have that same potential for a pipeline where you start out, hey you are working the front desk, you are checking books in and out, hey you know what you are really starting to get this, I am going to put you on some interlibrary loan tasks, hey you are doing a deep dive, let's do an internship over the summer, let's start cleaning up some of the archives, let's pipe you through so that by the time you graduate not only do you have a first grade degree from a good, from a great liberal arts college but also you have a skill set on the IT side and then on the library side if that is the direction that you want to go where you walk out of this institution with not just the education but a set of job skills that are going to be immediately attractive to whatever career it is that you pursue. Yes, stuck more of the mentor into our career, yes, absolutely. Create more librarians. Yes, yes, I mean not to further glut the job market but to make sure that our profession is supported and will continue effectively going forward. So we wanted to leave a... Yeah, join our profession, they understand what libraries are for and what we do and will be supporters and advocates for us wherever they go. Exactly. That's awesome. And Christy, you had wanted us to leave a little time for questions so we've got the emails posted there, you can grab those but yeah we're happy to field any questions, any follow-up here or via email. Sure, absolutely great. Thank you very much Tim and Dave. If anybody does have any questions now if you want to go ahead and type them into the question section of your go-to webinar interface. I've got my screen up here, I can grab questions for either Tim or Dave, whichever, whoever you want to talk to, the library director or the techie person. Be careful the spelling of my email because there is a Miller with an ER on campus and once in a while he gets my emails so make sure they are. I did yes and then Tim did make sure that I understood that it is pronounced Miller but it's the A yes so be careful when you're typing it everyone. Okay we have questions coming in now finally people are typing away. What kind of square footage do you have in your physical space? It sounds large since you can house all the various areas. It is probably not as large as it sounds. Again in terms of volume we have a relatively small collection of print on the shelves. It is high quality but it is not extensive and that's again thanks to a predecessor of mine. I honestly don't know the square footage right off the top of my head at this point. Maybe the size of a gymnasium but more square, maybe a little bigger than that. Yeah think of a large, square-ish gymnasium for the main space. The way we have that built right now is divided into that kind of learning commons area and then further back are more of the traditional stacks and then the stacks also provide the quiet area and then to the left as you walk in is where you're going to have the service desk, the help desk, the IT folks, there's a classroom along the left side so maybe a gymnasium and a half. Yes so it is surprisingly a small space. We work closely with each other physically and literally in that regard. Okay great. Someone has a question here. I'm not sure if something you guys can even answer but it is an interesting question. I want to talk about if there are grants out there for cross-training librarians or assistants in IT. If that would be something that you've ever heard of. I know that we in Nebraska we sometimes do offer continuing education grants and other grants for various reasons and I'm sure that's something that your state library or agency does that could be a use for one. I have to believe that there are. I don't know of them specifically yet but one of the things that will happen is my goal is to increase demand for the library. As demand increases that's going to give me grounds to go back to my administration and say look I need another full-time staff. As I bring a full-time staff person on board I know that I'll get a part-time person here in the near future but if I can expand that to full-time I mean that person is going to have to be cross-trained from the minute they walk in the door. In some ways I cross yeah but yes I have to believe that there would be grants out there for it and I would look for those grants not only in library land but also in other venues. I would see if there were you know small city grants for that kind of thing when you present to your city and say you know listen you have one swamp secretary down at city hall I have one swamp library assistant but how is those services in the same space make it the same starting point cross-train both of those folks and then expand the hours of operations for both city services then right for library services. Does it have to be the library or at the university or something yeah absolutely. I would look in a multiple in a variety of venues for grants along those lines and I would bet that they are out there. Okay next question we have um have there been any concerns about investing so much time and effort into staffing that will move on in a relatively short time? That's a great question and that is honestly par for the course with student workers. True we know. We know that no matter what we are only going to have them for four or to max five years and the more training we can get the better they are going to be by the time they're juniors and seniors and immediately when they're really good at their job we're going to lose them. But as soon as you've made them perfect yeah. But they do the older or the veterans do train the newer folks as well so we have a constant cycle of learning and training going on so in that respect we're also developing leadership and you know we do have you know education students so this gives them a chance to once they learn something to share it or to teach it. So you're right they're not here very long but in the short amount of time they are very effective. Well and I know I know Matt the example that you mentioned I mean I hated to see it go. We all did. And I was also thrilled to see him have something waiting for him while he was still working for us. His next job was in line he finished up his last semester of school was still working for us as as a really exemplary student worker and we knew here's this great team leader here's someone who drove the norms forward about being really customer service oriented and we knew we weren't going to have him this semester. That was that was wonderful and you know a loss but also a loss that we were expecting and happy to see. Okay well one last question here before we wrapped up and it's a good question here. How do you pay for the work study students does the funding come from library's budget or IT's budget or is it something shared? It's government it's the work it's a work study program that's government provided so all students get nine dollars an hour level one they work about seven hours a week IT we can't pay them a higher rate but we can give them two more hours or so. So they actually get I think it's level one gets two thousand dollars a year that they have to allocate on an even basis throughout the semester or the year and then IT or level two gets three thousand dollars a year. So at its base it is financial aid it is federal work study money at its base one thing that I want to touch on that is really an important hallmark of everything that we've done here those students are technically paid through IT so they are not technically my students per se they are not library students but they are IT students again with that whole approach of wanting to wanting to share the space I I did not see any need to create a turf war over who the students reported to those students do very very good work on the library side they do very very good work on the IT side and rather than divide them up and say oh okay well half of you are going to be library half of you are going to be IT I said let's keep you all right in the same group and let's just make sure that we're training you to all the tasks that are needed. So yeah that is that is a very great question and that is actually something that's been a decision making process between myself coming on board and IT that has been a real hallmark of that whole partnership synergy approach that we have here. I think it goes to what you talked about too about getting um having buy-in from stakeholders administration other people beyond you both that need to be on board with what you want to do. Yeah that is absolutely correct I I mean you couldn't have done it without that buy-in. Exactly exactly and I couldn't have done it if if I didn't have a strong relationship with IT from the minute I walked on this campus I couldn't have done it without you know if if I had one of those more troublesome relationships between library and IT side it simply wouldn't have been possible. Yeah so thanks Dave and everybody in IT quite honestly. All right thank you very much then I think we'll wrap up your session thank you very much Tim and Dave and just a reminder yes we are recording everything so both this and the slides that Tim will send to me will at a later date will be available to you on the website afterwards.