 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. 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 could be of interest to libraries. The show is broadcast live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. And we do record the show every week as well, so if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's okay. You can watch the archives on our website and I'll show you where that is at the end of today's show. Both the live show and our archives are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with your friends, neighbors, family, colleagues, anybody who you think may be interested in any of the topics we have here. We do a mixture of things here on Encompass Live, book reviews, interviews, mini training sessions, demos of products and services, basically anything that we think may be of interest to libraries and librarians out there and library staff. And as the Nebraska Library Commission, we are the state agency for libraries here in Nebraska, and this is for all libraries, so we have sessions that are for publics, academic, K-12 schools, correction facilities, museum libraries. We're very broad, anything and everything. And we have things that are things that libraries are doing. We bring in speakers from libraries across the state and across the country to speak. We have Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes do presentations about things that we are doing here at the Library Commission for libraries. But as I said, we also do bring in guest speakers and that's what we have this morning. Today with me is, all the way over on my left, you're right there. And the end there, Aaron Willis, who is from the Lincoln City Libraries and is the curator of the Heritage Room of Nebraska Authors there, which is, she'll explain more about all that and get into that. We're talking about here today. And Karen Delzeal here, who is from the UNL, University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. Good job. I keep that up here. And they're going to tell us about the new Nebraska Authors database, which just debuted officially this past weekend. It's right. All right. All right. Take this down here. You can take this too. All right. Well, thank you all for being here and for tuning in today. I hope you've all had a chance to look at the website. And they can see this right now, right? Yes. So the website that we are going to talk about is Nebraskaauthors.org. You should be able to see it here. And I'm going to go back a little bit before we start getting into the website and talk about how the website started and why it started. But first, I'm going to explain the Jane Pope Gezki Heritage Room of Nebraska Authors. We are a special collection of Lincoln City libraries. We've been a publicly accessible collection for 50 years, 50 years this September. And so the collection is a physical archive, but the mission of the Heritage Room is to preserve, promote and celebrate the work of Nebraska Authors past and present. And so part of the way that we do that is by maintaining vertical files. So individual files for individual authors of information that's been discovered by our volunteers. And we discover information about authors several ways. We have newspaper clippers who scour Journal Stars, Omaha World Herald, smaller newspapers that are sent to us. And then we also rely on public patrons, librarians, people who send us information about Nebraska Authors. And that information, after it's clipped out and copied on acid-free paper for preservation, we have been, for the last 30 years, inputting it into a database, which we called the Nebraska Author Information Link Nail, is the acronym. We called it the Nail File, which is very huge. Always like our acronyms. But we didn't think that was the best name for a website. The information on that database two years ago was when we stopped inputting information in the database and switched over to the UNL Center for Digital Research and Humanities. Karen, who's with me, will talk a little bit about what they do. But we passed off all the information that we've been collecting for the past 50 years, gave it to Karen. And she'll tell you maybe just a little bit about what the CDRH does and how that happened. Okay. So, yes, I work at the Center for Digital Research and Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. And we are a center, as the name implies, that works with all things digital and humanities. So this project fit in very well with that. We have a Nebraska portal. So if you go to our website, I think, yeah. Oh, there's Karen. Yep, there's me. And Jessica, and the person that helped was Greg Tunney, which I'm going to scroll down a little bit and get him in there. There's Greg. So we are the ones that kind of built it. But if you go to our website, you can see we have a Nebraska portal. So I haven't actually added this yet. I should have done it before today, but it'll be added to this. And these are all our projects that have to do with Nebraska. So this project fit very well into that family of products. And so my boss, Kay Walter, who is the co-director of the Center, actually was researching for a different website. And she went to visit the nail file and was very frustrated by the searching limitations on it. And so she kind of said, this would be a great project. It fits in very well with our Nebraska themed portal. And we should make this more accessible. Because before also, you had to go to the library or else you had to call a librarian and have them search in the database. It was intro only, yeah. So people couldn't just search it online. And so that's kind of the origins of the project. Right. So this is a cooperative project of the CDRH in the Heritage Room. And I'm going to go back a little farther now just to explain the librarian's role in understanding Nebraska authors and Nebraska literature. 100 years back, in fact, to the first resource that was available to librarians. It was published in 1918. And it was called a provisional list of Nebraska authors. It was published by a librarian, a public librarian, Sophia Lemmers. And I'm just going to read a little bit from the introduction. The introduction was written by Malcolm Weier, who was also a librarian. And this explains, you know, the first attempts to sort of keep track of Nebraska authors as a group. And he says, this list of Nebraska authors has been prepared to answer the many demands for such information that have come to this library. The frequency with which this reference inquiry appears not only in our library, but elsewhere is shown from the fact that manuscript lists of Nebraska authors have been compiled at Lincoln City Libraries, State Library, Library Commission, State Historical Society, Legislative Reference Bureau, et cetera, et cetera. The introduction goes on and on. In every independent library, the Library Commission, the Historical Society, we were all trying to gather information on Nebraska authors. And doing it separately. And doing it separately. Yeah, I mean, there was a whole lot of redundant effort happening, and there was no one really aggregating this information and coming up with a authoritative definitive list of authors. So the 1918 book was the first book to really collect all this information. And what he says, I think, brings true today about Nebraska, or librarians receiving a lot of requests about Nebraska authors. I know at the Library Commission, I've talked to your librarians and that, you know, that's always a question of like, what Nebraska authors published a book in 2017, or, you know, whatever, who were the Nebraska authors who were from Wymore? Or, you know, I mean, there are different questions that come up, and there isn't, to my knowledge, a way to, until now, to answer those questions. And I will say it's still a work in progress. We still can't, you know, be sure that we have all of the information that's out there. But this will be a living website for a while. So we're hoping to have more contributions from everyone, from librarians and the public. But moving forward a little bit, there was another guide published in 1934 by a librarian, Alice Harvey. And this is the funniest bit for me is that in 1934, Willa Catherine had already published, you know, quite a lot of, I mean, she'd already won the Pulitzer Prize. I mean, she was a big deal, and we had great literature coming from Nebraska. But Alice Harvey writes in her introduction, Nebraska is still in its infancy as far as literature is concerned. It takes many hundreds of years to produce the background and traditions of a nation, and little can be expected in the short time this western country has been developing. But we are proud of our beginnings, of our literary work here in Nebraska. So that was in 1934. She published a reissue in 1967 saying, whoa, we've got a lot of great authors in Nebraska. And then later on, you know, there have been several less official guides published, but in 1967 for the Nebraska Centennial there was a literary map and author guide published in this literary map is now at the Library of Congress. And so there are literary maps for most states of the Library of Congress. That was updated in 1998 by Jerry Cox and Carol McDaniels with a new literary map. And Dr. Brooke, who Karen probably knows, the Center for the Nebraska Writing Center. He wrote the introduction to the book. And I love this, I love this piece. So this is from the very end of his introduction to the guide to Nebraska authors, which was the 1998 edition. And Robert Brooks says, they're a diverse set representing a range of fame, occupation and purposes for writing. They are all members of Nebraska communities, folk who live or once lived just down the street. You'll find someone you know in these pages. Writers, you might say, well, here in Nebraska, they're folk just like us. And I think that's something that's kind of unique to Nebraska is that we have this closeness to our authors and to our literature. And I think we identify so profoundly with their themes and with the authors themselves. And so I'm hoping that this website... And the authors are just like, I mean, it sounds like they're just regular folk, even though they're not. I think it might have been when you and I went to ALA years ago, Brandon Sanderson was there. Along with other, you know, big sci-fi authors. Cory Doctor of the family and a couple other. And we went to him to get side. And he's like, oh, Nebraska, hey. And we were in, what, D.C. or something. Why should you say I think it? I was just like, oh, hey, from home. Yeah, Brandon Sanderson is a good example, actually, because he's still very loyal to Nebraska. And I, a couple of times, we have librarians at Lincoln City Libraries who know him and know how to get in touch with it, you know. Yeah, I'll just give him a call. Yeah, yeah. And I've never personally talked to Brandon Sanderson, but I have talked to Rainbow Rowell, who, you know, I was really excited about that. But that authors are people and that, you know, we can connect with them. And especially on the website, we'll show you how to submit information about Nebraska authors. If you know Nebraska authors or you know something about Nebraska authors and it's something we're missing, we want to know about it because we know they're people in your neighborhoods. They're people who visit your libraries and we want those people to be acknowledged. Before we move on to the website, though, I do want to acknowledge the final or the most recently published book, Physical Guide to Nebraska Authors. And that was another extension of the Guide to Nebraska Authors that was published by Jerry Cox and Carol McDaniels. And this one was the Sesquicentennial Guide to Nebraska Authors. It was just published last month by Infusion Media, and it's the Guide to More Nebraska Authors by Jerry Cox and Charlene Neely. And their comment, you know, for bringing this thing up to present time, their comment in the introduction was that, history tells us the number of Nebraska authors publishing every year is not diminishing. It's only getting more. And that readers are interested in local authors who produce compelling stories. And so we know that there are readers in Nebraska who want to read the indigenous literature of our state and they want to read from authors who are writing right now. And so we hope this can be a resource for you to help find those books. All right, so should we move on to the website? Are there any questions or anything about this part? Or should we go ahead and show people? All right. Yeah, if you have any questions, comments, type in your question section. We'll grab them and then as you do. All right, so this is when you go to Nebraskaauthors.org. This is where you land. And this will tell you just a little bit about the history and some of the more famous Nebraska authors. And then let's go straight to the browse feature. And Karen can tell you how our featured authors. I've tried to explain this several times there. Every time you refresh this page, you'll get a new set of featured Nebraska authors. You're just, you know, if you want to direct somebody to the page, maybe, you know, you might say, oh, Christopher Lash, you know, who's this guy? And then you can, you know, you can click on it if you don't quite know who you're looking for, but just want to learn something about Nebraska authors. This is the place to just browse. And that's automated. It's not like each month somebody picks. No, and it's actually it's authors who are collected by the Heritage Room because that's a metadata fields that we have in there. And then whose bios are longer than a certain number of characters. I think it's like a thousand or something so that we know that they're going to be long enough to actually be interesting. Yeah. So really featured, you know, they're featured in that they have a fleshed out profile and collected by the Heritage Room. Yeah. Well, so just using, we'll just click on Christopher Lash for an example. This is an author who is done well, whose profile is pretty much fully fleshed out. We don't have this isn't true for all the authors in a lot of cases, even some of our more important authors. We don't have a great complete bio. We don't have we don't necessarily have them linked to everyone. This this is a process that takes quite a lot of time. So we started working. Well, we started the process of doing this website to almost two years ago. And so the Center for Karen and her staff have been have been developing the website and then the library staff and volunteers and student interns from the university. We've been working through Nebraska author profiles and there are 4,000 more than 4,300 individual author profiles. So even with the staff of people working on them individually, it still takes quite a lot of time to flesh flesh them out, especially with authors continuing to publish information and continuing to receive awards. And this is this is a process that takes time. But but Christopher Lash is a is a well done author. I think this one was done by Lincoln City Library's employee Stephen Floyd. He wrote the introduction and the introductions where we have them are original unless they were submitted by an author directly. So we don't want to be a Wikipedia site. We don't want to be just copying what's already with you know or some other national author. No, we don't we don't want to do that. That's that's what we're absolutely trying to avoid. So any information that you see on the website, we want to reflect the collection holding. So if we have a vertical file on an author writing an introduction like this, if you know Stephen Floyd has some personal knowledge of Christopher Lash, for example, he was a student of Lashes. And so he knew knew some things about him. And then we also have these great files that are great resources for us that we can we can craft a pretty complete or, you know, a good picture of what what you would find in the Heritage Room collection. And so, like I said, this takes time. So we have a couple of student interns whose entire job is to to look at, you know, to make creative biography, a bibliography and sort of separate out all these associations on and honors. Just from from Heritage Room materials. This will necessarily change a little bit because I think we've all seen enough of Christopher Lash. We can we can go back to the browse and see who else comes up. Oh, Minion Everheart is a good one. But what's happening now is that we are we're accepting new author profiles. And so anything that comes to us now, if an author sends it to us, we we use as our source author submission. And so it's possible that you'll also find this on their Amazon profile and on their personal profile on their website. You know, so I think for a lot of these authors, these older authors like Minion Everheart or like Christopher Lash, these are our own original. But any modern authors, we're not going to be able to keep up with with creating original content for them. That's great that they'll submit it to you to help you. Yeah, yeah, but they'll submit it to us. But unfortunately, a lot of those are going to be unless we get a lot of funding to really to really create these things on our own. You will see probably some some redundancies with with author websites and author profiles and Goodreads profile, you know, things like that. But would you then be indicated on the entry here? Well, so this is librarians will have a privileged view. There's there's a field that that you don't see here. And Karen can explain. Well, I don't know if we're extending the research. The researcher will. So we have when we're putting information in, we have several fields that are hidden that that we that we see. So one of them is the source field. And part of that part of the reason that's hidden is because we haven't we haven't we're not using APA citation style. You know, we don't have that. Yeah, yeah. So we have our we have our citation. We've fully sourced everything, but we haven't used a uniform citation style and I didn't want to put up on the website. Anything. Exactly. Exactly. So if someone does want to do more research, they can contact you. Right. And you and librarians can get access to that other role, which also gets you access to the unpublished authors. Because there are a number of authors that have not been published yet because they have to be vetted in this process takes a lot of time, a lot of volunteer work. So we don't want to put it out there for the general public, but this is also something that if you if Aaron can make you an account and. Right, right. And you can use it to view all of those types of things. And so that is an option if you find that you're answering a lot of questions for Nebraska authors. There is there is a way for you to to have greater access to the website and to be able to see to see some of the some of the fields that are privileged librarian access. So, so, so get in touch with me. Well, I will let you know how to do that at the end or actually I'll just show you on the website how to get in touch with me. But let's look at Mignon Eberhardt just for a minute. She was one of the great mystery writers. She was a former librarian at the Union or I mean at Lincoln City Libraries and. And I don't know if it says it on here probably says it in a hidden field that she she got bored. I've decided to write mysteries. And so she was prolific in her time and had some really great fans. Harry Truman either Stein or Gertrude Stein, I'm sorry, more fans of her work and her biographer Rick Cypert if he hasn't changed jobs is still is still working at Nebraska Wesley and I believe. And so this is one of the cool things that you can do in this website is we are trying to make connections between authors. So like authors and their biographers or authors and their teachers or their students are. So so if you can link from Mignon Eberhardt to Rick Cypert, who is still here in Lincoln and writing, then you can if you want to learn more about Mignon Eberhardt you can learn a little bit about this or Dr Cypert and. And that'll you know that I'll just get you one step closer to to more information. And then we use this associations field that you can see right here to to to link to different, you know, to just expand the web. So if you know now that you're at Rick Cypert, you can also see that he worked with Bill Clefkorn, who was our state poet and built from Bill Clefkorn. You can link to other state poets or people who wrote about him or wrote with him. So just by going from one record to another, you can really you can really go pretty deep into into the rabbit hole of Rick Cypert and his connections from Mignon Eberhardt or whoever. So that's so you can do all that. But we just we started at the browse screen and you know, you can you can do quite a lot from there. Just if you have free time in this I imagine this is probably falling through. Yeah. I imagine this would be acceptable desk time, you know, activity just to, you know, to expand your knowledge of Nebraska writers and literature. I'm just going to be asking and meeting readers advisory on some topic. Yeah. And it's pretty fast. I mean, it's a pretty interesting and enjoyable way to spend time, I think. So so those are the featured authors. And then there are different ways to browse if you are if your patrons are looking for fiction by Nebraska authors and you just want to know who's writing fiction. You can I mean you can just search for fiction. It looks like there are 651 authors and surprise that number's not bigger. I'm actually right. I'm authors writing fiction in Nebraska. Possibly. We haven't updated all of the author profiles and published them yet. Let's see. Let's try music and audio. We do include people who've written screenplays or or musicians or whose poetry has been turned to music. So if you're looking for a musician who you might want to have for a library program who might be in your area, you know, this would be a good place to go. If they don't have a death date, they're probably still living somewhere. Yeah. And so you can you can use the search feature that way. One of the ways that or I'm in the browse feature. I'm sorry. One of the things that we did this year at Lincoln City Libraries was for the Dio Dio de los Montres in October with the downtown Lincoln Association. We needed to find any authors who had recently died so that we could celebrate them with a with an offrenda and celebrate their work and their life. So we needed to find authors who had died within the last year. So I asked Aaron. Alright, I'm going to ask Karen specifically for this research, you know, for this Lincoln City Libraries. I said, let's let's make it an option to browse by death date. So she set up the death date feature for us so you can see, you know, these are authors who've died within the last 10 years. Yeah. And and then you can see their you can see their death date. So it limits it quite a lot and then you can find specific death dates like that. So do we have any are there any questions about browsing seems pretty simple, I think. So if there aren't any questions, we can move on from there. Okay. Let us know if you want to see anything or anything you're wondering about. And then first letter of last name is, you know, if you know there was an author whose last name started with L, you know, I mean, that's like, it's pretty simple. That'll just bring up any anyone whose last name begins with that letter. Okay. So that is browsing searching. Alright, so Karen made the comment earlier that the featured authors are are sorted first by whether or not the Heritage Room collects them. And so this is something how to sensitively explain how we how we decided to do this. So if by clicking this button that indicates that the Heritage Room collects this author and our collection policy has had to change a little bit in recent years with self publish and be published. We, we have. There's quite a lot of people publishing. And I'm sure your your libraries have similar policies, but we the Lincoln Library. Different libraries. Yeah, yeah. Well, it won't take local and self published depends if they're from our town. Of course we would. Yeah, so we have a similar we have a similar policy and we write we that it allows for local authors, but published authors certainly we collect. And so if you want to search for authors who who fall within our collection guidelines then you can you can click Heritage Room selects or Heritage Heritage Room collects so what looks like without selecting that there are two thousand three hundred and seventeen authors that are in the earth that are available right now but if I do the Heritage Room collects it. We knew something would break. Yeah. I think she did. Yeah, I did. So okay, so. So I will write that down. I think to look at we just launched this lesson there. So we're going to be finding problems or maybe we just collect actually this is this might not be wrong because we have prioritized authors whose work we collect. And so it's possible there are two thousand additional records that haven't been published yet. So it's possible that everyone who's published our authors we collect. So I'm just going to say that it's not that it's not probably a collector problem at the website, but that anyone up there right now is our authors that we've prioritized, which means that we collect. That's out into the database first. Yeah. Right. Right. Eventually though there will be more. There'll be more ours. Nebraska authors but not not collected by the heritage. But their work is not collected by us. Right. And so so that. So I guess this will be more important in later searches after we find out after we've updated more records but so let's just use this field right here first and this there are several as you notice with with the records. I'm I'll just click on the first one here so you can see there are different categories place lived. What kind of work they do the author of keywords education. These are all individual fields that you can search in. But if you want to search all of those fields to find let's say you want to search for. I'm just going to say botany because I saw in the last browse that Bessie came up and I'm hoping he comes up with botany here wasn't. Yeah, maybe that's it. There we go. Okay wireless keyboard has. Okay, there he is. So I'm searching for botany right now and it's searching anywhere in the field so it's saying you know in the it might indicate botany in their bio or in their degree you know it might be their educational tree or yeah maybe that botany in their title. I'm just going to use Charles Bessie because he's kind of the father of botany at the University of Nebraska. And so you can search. You can find any botanists from Nebraska and this will you know within any so if you don't if you don't see all of them just by searching botany that way within in any individual author record you should be able to find your way around botany publications coming from Nebraska. So, so there's Charles Bessie. He has a he has a pretty good can learn a little bit about him from his bio but then you can also learn about Friedrich Clements from Friedrich Clements you might want to go to Roscoe Pound, and then from Roscoe Pound you can you can just you can talk about law you can talk about government you I mean so. There's a lot of crossover here, but that's just you know that's just from searching for botany in the general field. So let me say mentioned to for that researcher role that searches those hidden role role hidden fields if you're logged in so for the public when they search this they're going to search the non hidden fields. If you were to have that researcher role it searches all of the fields including the hidden ones so there might even be some additional information. So that's another good reason to try to get that one. And I would say the first people that probably contact you are going to be our beta tester so just be be aware of that. We're going to try to break this. It's okay. So do you want to give any other examples should we find any other examples for like I'm terrible at thinking of things to search for. Anybody there was to search for something particular type it into your question section let us know and we'll type in any. I'm going to just type in like a date for example. 19. I'm going to try using these keys. I'm not sure that this is my keyboard is working great. Does your keyboard work. Well it's not. It's totally different. Okay. Yeah. So that's okay. Okay. There it goes. There it goes. Okay. So sort of. Okay. So I'm just going to try a year because this will search anyone maybe who was born in that year. A book was published in that year like if 19 let's we're just going to try 1918 because I'm sorry guys I'm pushing numbers here it's just not working very well. So if any of you want to try on your computers typing in 1918 and then this is the you know if you need to celebrate in your library 100 years of something you typing in 1918 you'll find any books published in 1918 anyone who died in 1918 anyone who's born in 1918 and you'll find 100 years of something to celebrate in your library by typing in 1918. But since the keyboard's not working we'll go back to that and maybe. So while we're getting that set up. Let me. Right now all of the records are are available so let's look at. Grace Abbott a lot of Abbott's there are a lot of Abbott's yeah they're they were all. They're all a lot of Abbott's reading and writing so Grace Abbott was great social worker. Or you might come back to Grace Abbott in a minute if this keyboard works okay. I'm going to go back to search 1918. Yeah it works okay. So is there what can disconnect it looks like. Yeah. Okay. Keep going. Okay so there are 69 results and this is what you'll have to you'll have to kind of search the 69 results to see. What is important about 1918 and some of these. Okay you know it'll be obvious like Lucia. There we go. Right. Nope. There we go. Okay so if you want to celebrate the 100th birthday which is actually just in a couple of days. It looks like Lucia was born in Omaha who wrote the book ballad of the marauders and Nebraska legend. This would be the year to celebrate her 100th birthday. But if you want to be more specific about your search. You might say you want to find books that were published in 1918. So in this case you would go to the bibliography field because in the bibliography we have works and I'm hoping my antennae comes up here. Should. Finger crossed. Willa Cather. Okay so if you type in 1918 you know you're probably going to find a book. The either has 1918 in the title or it was a book published in 1918. And so this is a good way for you to celebrate this and Henry of a book so. And I want to mention real quick that the illustration for this website up at the top comes from. I was wondering about that. Yeah it comes from my antennae. It was obviously a public domain now because it's published in 1918 so I could use the illustrations that are in that book for. Illustrating website so. I like public domain. Very much like. Being out on the. And there's. And these are also the illustrations on your poster so I hope everyone who was tuned in in Nebraska has posters if you don't get in touch with me but the. Humanities of Nebraska gave us a generous grant to print posters and book works and. All that illustration that's on the poster comes from this as well so now you'll be able to. Tell your patrons the origin but. So this is this is our profile for Willa Cather. And this is a picture that we have in the heritage room. So going down to the bottom just to see where you. But there's my antennae 1918 and so so you know. You know that. We can celebrate the anniversary of that. So that's that's one of the you know one of the great features we can also use 1918 or you know just using 1918 again you might want to see anyone who. Graduated from college in 1918 for example I don't know if. Find anyone but. Yeah 13 people. That have 1918 in the education field so in this case. Mr Alexis got his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1918 so so that's how you can use the. The search all fields and. The search single fields in more specific or productive ways and so one of the things that I've found should be really helpful is. Finding associations between authors so for example last year we did the Nebraska one 150 books it's becoming hard with that website is no longer we had a one year. Grant for that website so it's not up anymore so I don't want to questions about the Nebraska one people so if you want to find any authors were included in Nebraska 150 books you might. Type that in here if you don't know which field it's in you can just type it in here and. Okay so it looks like maybe it's sort of like a. If you want to search for the phrase I think you can put quotes around. Okay yeah we should probably add a little search help yeah okay so we're we're learning as we go. Figuring out. These all look about right so John is a G for example and I would have since we put the information in here I know that it's the rest it's in the honors on the rest of. The rest of the people's honor for strange people so you can and you'll have to do some searching within fields to find. Where is the big one what does this big book. Yeah okay so we're learning as we go. Figuring out. Okay so now you to. These these all look about right so John is a G for example and. I would have since we put the information in here I know that it's the rest it's in the honors on the rest of the rest of the people's honor for strange people. What does this big book was but at least you have an option for finding anyone who was in Nebraska. One of the future author in the Nebraska what people twist but you can also. I'm going to try something like Nebraska writer skills. What did I do there. Okay. See comes up. And there should be more of these in a lot of cases if Nebraska when authors submit their information to us they don't they're not always complete about what they what they submit. So at some point when we are when we have more time to work on right now we're working on individual authors but when we have more time to do things like we want to. Know who's been in Nebraska you know the whole history of the Nebraska writer skills we want people to go to a website and see anyone who has ever been a writer skill will will assign that might be a good task for a student in terms of. Research history of your writer skills but at least you know you should be able to find some authors who belong to the guild or who have belonged to the guild in the past. And so this so this field can be used for for any searches like that. I have a question about the search results. Okay, can we sort the change with search results can you click on like one of the headings name first thing birth date and then have it to change the sort to that. Yes, order. Yeah, okay. If you wanted to sort them by birth date you can just click that and it will sort which all the blank ones are first so that's. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah and actually if you click it again, it'll sort in the other direction so you can if you wanted to get the. Yeah, the most recent first you could. And one thing to note about the search is normally when you search. Well, you search in some websites you get what's called a relevancy ranking which means the most relevant results might be the first at the top we don't have that we rank everything by last name we just sort by that. And I certainly in the future would like to add some fancier search options to this but that's that's what we have right now so you might need to you're getting a lot of results you might need to narrow down. You can click on any of those. Yeah, yeah, any of these headers will. And again, going back to that that researcher role that they get additional columns to sort on to I can't remember it. Yeah, so you can. I think they added to the database is one of them which can be nice because you can see all the newest authors that have been added to the site. Yeah. So yeah so there were a couple of extra sorting options. If you get them in searchable. All right. So, let's see, we have 15 minutes. I'm not where would it be. 11 will go as long as it takes we can show what we want to and anybody have any questions. Okay, so we'll, I think you guys can figure all that I mean I think there's enough information here that you can you can figure out most of it. One thing to know to be aware of is that you right now we've been searching anywhere in these fields but if you know a last name, let's say it's. Mac, you don't know if it's Macintosh or Macintire or not, you know, like, I know these things happen all the time, or you don't know if. If Christiansen is spelled Christiansen or Christians that you know so listen actually that's it that's a good example let's try that. Let's start. Let's find any Christians and we're just going to start with Christ at the beginning, and we're going to start at the beginning of last name. Okay, there are the Christiansens and you can see that there are a lot of Christiansen. Actually, I really like the profile for Frank Christiansen so we're going to start with him. He's an interesting guy. And this is some inside knowledge we had from one of the volunteers in the heritage room is the is the son of Rudolf Umland. And so we, a lot of the images and information we have for the Nebraska Federal Writers Project has come from this collection. And so this is one of the pictures that Eric Umland took and I love it. But this is, this is what I love about the, you know, about the site that you can, that we have information like sometimes on campus you would fall over and it was well known that he must be allowed to get up himself. Do not. So he would strike it. So we do have, you know, we do have some unique and fun information, but this is the Nebraska Federal Writers Project. We rarely link outside of the website just because author author websites, for example, are not always, they don't keep them current they let their URLs last, you know, we're worried about what I mean we don't have the staff right now to make sure that our links are always we don't want to have a whole bunch of So we link within the website so we can see Lowry Wimberley was in charge of the Federal Writers Project. Or we do link to our own website so this, for example, will take you to the Lincoln Library's Federal Writers Project so you can learn more about the authors who are part of the Federal Writers Project so some of those links do take you outside of the website as a rule unless it's the University of Nebraska, the Historical Society, or the library, you know, unless it's a Nebraska agency or a website that we don't really link outside. So, so that is, I guess all that to say that's how you would find Christiansen if you don't know how to spell. If you just know at the beginning. I would not have thought that I would make the promise one of them need different versions. Yeah, yeah, that's one of those. Those names. And then, let's see what else can I show you. Okay, so if you want to search for Let me think of a good example here. What if we just went to, and we need to, these are some of the browse features too, but just journalists, or you want to find a specific Oh, we still have Christiansen. Oh right, so you got a clear. So you find a one person? Yeah, one person, so let's just, you can always just do that, but you know this is a browse feature. So you can use any of those, any of those browse features to search something within, you want to know a journalist who wrote about I don't know. Water, maybe. Water, okay, yeah, water. Let's see. Let's see if that brings up. Yeah. Yeah, 66 journalists who wrote about water, okay. I think this is all, I mean, fairly, you guys can work with this and those are just, oh, and let's see if there's any authors. Just people with images, you journalists who know. Yeah, let's just see if anyone wrote about water, who has a picture. So the, oh yeah, Paul Johnsberg obviously. But we're working on getting images up on the website. We need to have permission for every image we use. So it's not fully illustrated yet, but if you need an image for the author you're searching for, you can limit it that way as well for authors with images. And that's Paul Johnsberg, who is a famous ornithologist and writes quite a lot about waterfowl or waterbirds and other things. This is his bibliography. Wow. This was one of the semester one projects for one of our, one of our interns. I think he has more than 90 publications. So it took quite a long time to find them all and note them all. But he is an important author in Nebraska. And I think probably only documented online and on this website. So great person to feature. Okay. I'm going to go, unless there are any questions right now, I'm going to show how to contribute information. Yes, that's another criteria. Yeah. So within an individual author and we'll stay here with John Skard. If you are looking at an author and you know something about them that we don't have on there, let's say their bibliography isn't complete. You know that they published two books since the last one that we have noted or if you have some interesting biographical information or in a lot of cases, we don't have maybe a birth city or you know, there are things that would be helpful. And oh, actually, before I do this, I do want to show birth city because this is so, you know, since we're a statewide website, you might want to know who, what authors were published from your city. And I should have shown this right away. So we're in Lincoln right now, who was born in Lincoln. So you can find out where authors were born by searching the birth city. So we have 146 people from the born in Lincoln. But if you want to just know if anyone's lived in Lincoln, you can change that to places lived. Then we have a thousand people who've ever lived in Lincoln. Yeah. Or, you know, you can see who has died in Lincoln. Death city. And that's 132. And if you just, you know, if you leave a lot, you might as well leave those grounds before they die. Yeah. Let's just bear this out and do. I know there's also various and it was a whole separate one too. Yeah. So they might where they were buried. And that's where the fields that we don't have information for a lot of phones that my favorite contribute. Yeah. And that's, that's actually really valuable information for that. I'm hopeful to know where grace are at various sites. So we want all this information. So let me show you how to do that. Let's just pick somebody here. Let's go to somebody we haven't looked at yet. I've never heard of this. This is an example of a person who could use. We could use, we could use some more information on Elmas. Have been in our, have been not our. So if anyone has information on this person, please click on this button, add information about this author right here. And this will tell you a little bit about how to do it, what, what we want. We would like to have everything sourced. If you give us a big biography with no citation, it's going to take us a long time to figure out where the information can't, you know, make sure that it's not that you haven't copied and pasted something from Wikipedia from another site. We have to be really, really careful about not, not privying information from another source without citing it. And so it'll take us quite a lot longer to get information up on the website if it's not sourced. So if you're submitting anything, please, please source it. And so here you'll give your name, your contact information, and then, you know, whether or not you, like, would allow us to contact you, you know, if we have any questions about what you've submitted. And then this is pretty self-explanatory. Karen has given you all the little hints you need to, yeah, to tell us what we need. So if we've missed some important pieces of information, this is the place you would put them. So this is, I'm just going to do this. These come to an email address that I checked. So my name is Erin Willis. And this is the website, or this is the email address where all the information goes. You would type your own email address here so that I can, I can contact you. And we love to generic it, contact for a reason. If somebody like just goes, you know, I just really don't use email, even though they use this website somehow. Yeah, yeah, you know, if they want to put a phone number in there. Right. It could be anything. Yeah, you can, right. So you can just make a note. I mean, you can, you can just make a note to contact you. It's not, this is that the emails that we get are, there's a physical person who reads them and checks that, you know, so you can make notes. It's not automated. Right. Yeah, we didn't do that on purpose just because we didn't want people adding junk into the database. So it all has to be vetted and Right. So you could even, you could just say there's information about this guy from Wikipedia. Here's the website URL. Please add information. I mean, so you don't have to, you don't have to necessarily type everything in there. You can show us where to go even to find information. So I'm going to go ahead and submit that. And it doesn't change his profile. And there should be a note here to say, please wait for a couple of months. It might. You don't tell you that we don't. This is important to include. So one of the things where staff expect corrections or additions to take time, sometimes up to three months. Right. It's a bullet second from the list. Yeah. Yeah. And then a lot of times, authors will want us to put their website up there. We don't do that. We will put that in a hidden field. So anyone who has researcher abilities will be able to see there's a hidden biographical field and that's where we'll put anything like personal author websites, things that, you know, things that we don't want to have to maintain. And there are, there are things that we tend to talk in past tense or present tense. Like we're not going to say the author lives with his wife and kids in Utah, because we don't want to have to think we've been changing. Yeah, we just, we don't have a, we don't have the ability to keep up with where people are living now. And we're, I mean, so everything, everything that we put on there has to be past or past tense. I'm like, I mean, if you're, if you're alive in writing in Nebraska. Yeah, the city's lived. Yeah, even if you're living in Lincoln, it's just going to say, we're not going to say the author currently lives in Lincoln. So, so those are things that if you submit that information, we might put it in a hidden field for a researcher library. But we're not going to probably put that up for the public because we don't want to. We don't want to. We don't have to, want to have to maintain it. Yeah, that researcher access would use that same email address in Nebraska authors. Yeah, so if you want researcher access, if you'd like to have access to those fields, just email and my, my email address is in several places on the website. This is one of them. They're Nebraska authors. Oh, yeah, it's a long. You can also find it. Um, here on the about, I think it's on the page to the contact. Maybe there's not a contact. Um, am I on the contribute page? We should. Yeah, there's okay. So the contribute page for sure has it. There's the contact. Yeah. So you can, this is me. I'm Aaron who contact me at the library at that phone number or that email address or stop any time. Um, and while we're here, this will be the last thing I show you. This is, uh, this is what we're hoping you guys can all help us out with. It is an incomplete. We'll probably always be a complete website, but we want it to be as complete as possible. And we need your help to do that. So if you go to this contribute button, you can even tell your patrons, if you have patrons who come in and say, I wrote this book. Um, we put it in your library or we'll, you know, how to why we've known me in your website. You can direct them to this website, um, to the contribute field. And it's very easy. And these are the instructions about how to do it, why we do it, um, limitation. And that's what I want to know is that what is the criteria for being in this database. Um, so, so this is, these are the criteria that we use. These are based on, um, these are based on the books that I was referencing at the beginning of the 1918 guide. They have, um, kind of, uh, an evolving definition of a Nebraska author. Technically anyone who was ever born in Nebraska, whether they moved away or, you know, the community young age, if you were born in Nebraska, they're a Nebraska author. Um, we also believe, you know, we use 10 years as a significant experience. You know, so because it kind of limits anyone who just maybe just was here. Just here for college, just here for college, right? Unless they wrote a significant amount of work when they were in college in Nebraska. And so it's, um, it's pretty loose. Um, and then the significant life experience in Nebraska. Yeah. So in the case of somebody like, um, Tom McNeil is the example that I like to use. He was here during summers as, you know, we was here with his grandparents, but his books are thoroughly Nebraska. You know, I mean, it's good night in Nebraska and everything has, or not everything, but quite a lot of what he writes is it has a Midwestern Nebraska. And, um, and he did, even though it wasn't a sustained 10 years, he's here often enough for long enough that we still, we still call him a Nebraska author. Um, and a lot of, in some cases, and I can't think of an example right now, but if somebody's not in Nebraska, if it's clear that they're not a Nebraska author, we might say in their mobile, he doesn't fit our definition of Nebraska authors, but we included here because of his association with the exception. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not a, it's not hard and fast. Um, but we, and again, going back to that researcher role, there are a few people in there that have been rejected from the public website, but kept in the database. And so there might be people that don't meet the criteria, but we don't delete the entry because maybe a researcher might have a reason to find them. Right. So there are a few entries like that in there too. This is all types of writing because this isn't just fiction. This is all types of writing. Yeah. Yeah. There are some artists in there, you know, whose contributions were significant enough that they were written about, you know, that there's enough literature about the, um, so I don't know if Henry's up here right now, but somebody like, um, you know, so Robert Henry was an artist and actually he did write a book too. So, um, but he was also written about by Marie Sandos. He was Dwight Kirsch is another Nebraska, um, author. But so he did write the art spirit, but also his, you know, Marie Sandos wrote the son of a gay woman based on him, right? Um, but then somebody like Dwight Kirsch, who's also an unknown for being an artist. Um, he's connected so deeply with the, you know, with the Nebraska literary community. So he doesn't have a good biography. Um, but Oh, no, no, no. I'm sorry. This is an outside. Um, so good to demonstrate. Yeah. This is where they don't even leave the outside. And that's from like longer, really? Yeah, it's possible. That might be our mistake. I don't want to, I don't want to blame you on that. That might be our mistake, but, um, so it's not, um, so there's, there's a broad definition of author and includes. We do have a question about adding to your, um, which is a good question. I think should there be a note sent to the Nebraska writers guild for their members to update their information? Are you ready for that influx of new contributions? Uh, yes. So we, um, we originally, we were very ambitious about, you know, I have, um, we've been updating, um, email addresses. For example, in this Nebraska, um, Nebraska offers email address. Um, and we have maybe 800 masks to offer email addresses. And I thought, okay, when this, when we do, you know, when we take the passwords off the website, I'm going to do an email blast and ask them to all submit information. And then I realized, wow, there's no way, like that. That just kind of sets up the expectation that then by two weeks, we're going to have, uh, all of their elevated, um, and that is not, uh, not possible for us. So I would say yes, go ahead with the understanding that, um, we're a small staff and it'll take a little bit. I mean, is there up to three months? Yeah. And so, um, so yes, we send it out. We want authors to have their information updated, but they should understand it's not going to be immediate. So go ahead and do that stuff. If you want to. So I went ahead and put down that green button. Well, let me just go back here. So at the end of the, or the bottom of the contribute page, what I'm contributing, this is where you suggest an author. And this. Thank you Karen has made, this is very easy. This is the submitter information. So the submitter does not necessarily have to be the author. So if you're a librarian submitting a name on behalf of a patron, for example, you would put your information as a librarian here. Um, and then this is the author information and you just fill in those fields and it makes it really easy for us. So, um, and these are just the fields on the website as you see this, you know, like that has the definitions and explanations, but what's in each of those fields, right? Right. So that should be, that should be easy. I don't think I really need to. Um, and again, those won't appear on the website instantly. It goes to somebody who has to. Everything. Yeah. Yeah. This information on the website. Um, and so it does. And it might happen that somebody contributes one, but I was actually one of the 2000 authors that you haven't been able to publish yet, but that's a good indication that, Hey, someone's interested in this author. Maybe we'll move them to the front of the queue. And that's good. It helps us to prioritize. Cause in a lot of cases, we probably will have the author profile and we can just, this will help us fill in any information we don't have. And then realize that there's public interest in this author. We will go ahead and put that at the front and get it out there. And those are, unless Karen has something to add, those are the important features of the website. You can go here to see anyone who's worked on the website. These are, this is our team. Um, seems like it's like a lot of people. It's a pretty big project. Yeah. I'd like to say thank you to my team. I mean, Erin has kind of been referring to me as if I built the website. I did the design. Um, but most of the actual almost all of the actual programming and building of the website was Greg and Jessica, the two programmers and Laura weekly has helped with, um, just metadata cleanup a little bit and proofing and offensive things. Okay. And K Walter and our, um, our dean to the dean of UNL libraries, Nancy Bush has been a big supporter and, you know, this, this wasn't, a lot of our projects are grant funded. And this was one that's kind of, you know, snuck in there. People believed in it. I wanted to see it. So it is, um, I'm also a former. Our, my library director in the city libraries, we just, um, given some of my staff time and, um, allowed some of our, like Jeff, for example, is the library's cataloger and he does a good job to ensure that everything is uniformly, um, uh, accurate in the website. And we have a lot of writing. Um, Jordan's and doing a lot of that. She's a fantastic reference librarian and she's great at sleeping dates and other important factual information. and the students and the volunteers have been really helpful. And I haven't mentioned yet the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association, and I do need to mention them. The NLHA is the funding arm of the Heritage Room. The Heritage Room is not a publicly supported collection. We're supported by an endowment grant that's through the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association, which is under the umbrella of the Foundation for the Human So funding for the collection and the work of the collection comes from the NLHA. And it's great for getting a lot of support from them as well. So thanks to them. And I like to have the technical details, so if you are really into how there you go. If you're a programmer yourself, I'm wondering how does this happen? There's a shout out to open refining, which I use. I'm like initially cleaning up a lot of that data. That was a huge, you know, getting those dates in the same format. Yeah, it was very, very useful to me. Awesome. All right. Unless there are questions, I think we have any time to start on it? Yeah, we're a little after 11 o'clock. That's OK. Anybody have any last minute and desperate questions they need to ask? If Erin or Karen, you can type it in right now. Otherwise, you're contacting for was on the page there. And you can reach out at any time you need to. Just more. Use the database to become a researcher. Yeah. Thank you for having us. Yeah, thank you so much. I'm glad you're on there. Kind of came about coming on the show and promoting this, which is great when you really as glad to get it right in right after you went live. Of course, when the errors might still be there. It's in beta. It's all right. It's all good. All right. But isn't there any desperate questions to come in? So I think we'll wrap it up. Thank you very much, guys. Thank you. Thank you. We take the mouse and the keyboard, the good keyboard. We have our wireless keyboard sometimes has charging issues that it was left on by accident. So we have a backup because you always have to have. You never know. Well, thanks to the library commission. I did not flip that in there. Yeah, the library commission has been very helpful. And in getting, you know, proving a lot of these things and telling us the authors we've missed. I know we do get a lot of context, but because we have our book club kits with people getting involved in different authors. And you never know who they're going to want to focus on for their book clubs and their discussion groups and things. So this will definitely help with that. I'm sure finding, like you said, we want to do a book. We have a reading group in our town. And let's read somebody from here. Does anybody know who's from here? Ta-da! There you go. You do it again. All right. All right. So that'll wrap it up for today's show. And I'm going to go over here and show you where. So far in the world, yes. And Compass Live, we see all our shows, the only thing called this. So if you Google or use your search engine of choice to segment and Compass Live, you will get the library commission's website and Compass Live page. The show has been, is being recorded and will be posted on the website later this afternoon, I'd say as long as the YouTube and everything cooperates. Our upcoming shows are here, but to get our archives, they're right here underneath the upcoming schedule. And you can see this is one from last week's. This week's will be here with recording as well. There's no presentation, there's no slides or anything. If there is slides for a presentation, they're included as well. I think we have this one from last week. Yes, so there was a presentation for this one and a handout. So whenever there's anything on that related to a session, we include all of that. So most recent ones will be here at the top of the page. So later this afternoon, today's show will be posted down there. I'll let everyone know who registered for today's show and attended today when it's available and ready to watch. This is our full archives here. And Compass Live is actually, this is the 10th year of Compass Live, which was a little stunning when I realized that didn't matter, figured it out. And I'm gonna scroll down here. Anyone who gets a little, where to go, close your eyes and then scroll all the above. This is our entire archives are here for all 10 years. So if you go to the very bottom of the list, January, 2009 was our very first show. So yes, you will find old sessions here. We have all of the archives. They're posted to the Ladrasco Library Commissions. The recordings are posted to the Library Commissions YouTube account. And they're all there. So you will find things out of date, old information, outdated information, potentially incorrect information 10 years later, but they're all dated. So you know exactly when it was done. What we are librarians, we archive everything. So that's the deal. It's all on here. I'm gonna scroll back to the top now. You can also search this. We do a search features just recently added to it. You can limit it to the most recent 12 months if you want to, or search the entire archives. And you can search here by anything, any information that's listed in a session here. So author, presenter, anything in the title in the description, all these fields here about who the presenters were listed down here. This will be all be included when we do a search in our archives. Oh, we do have a little comment. Oh, somebody commented about the date about you guys, about the rest of our database. Thanks so much for this project. I know a lot of our libraries are going to love having this resource. Thank you, thanks, I hope so. Yeah, hope it gets more out there. So that'll be the archives. And I hope you join us next week then when our topic is another UNL session. Your partners in service accessing UNL libraries resources. Dana Baden and Joan Konecki from the University of Brassville, Lincoln. Also, you'll be coming over here next week to talk about the resources we available at the libraries even if you are not a student or affiliated with the university. They have services available to you. So they'll be on the show next week. So please do sign up for that or any of our other topics we have here coming up. I've got all of my books and posted working on sessions for June. So our sessions are very posted very immediately. So I'm always on top of anything new that might be coming up. So I don't have like things looked out six months ahead of time. I have breakfast much ahead of time. So keep an eye on our schedule here to see if anything new comes up. Sign up for any of those that are on there. Also, End Compass Live is on Facebook. So if you are a big Facebook user give us a like over there. There you go. And you'll be notified of when new sessions are being posted. Here's your reminder to log in to today's session when we, I don't wanna log in. When recordings are available. So if you are, if you like to use Facebook a lot, like give us a like and you'll be notified over there of what's going on in the show. Other than that, that wraps up for this week's show. Thank you everyone for attending this morning. Thank you guys for coming over today. And we'll see you next time on End Compass Live. Bye. Bye.