 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event where we cover anything that may be of interest to librarians. The show is free and open to anyone to watch as are the recordings that we do, so afterwards you can go on our website and see any of those. The sessions go live at 10 a.m. central time on Wednesday mornings. We do a mixture of things here, presentations, book reviews, interviews, many training sessions, all sorts of things are out there. We have commission staff, Nebraska Library Commission staff that will do presentations, and we are bringing guest speakers sometimes. And this morning we're sort of a mixture. Once a month we do, as usually the last Wednesday of the month, the last show of the month, Tech Talk with Michael Sowers. Michael Sowers is the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Hello. He's here to sit next to me. And he talks about many new techie things that may have come up in the last month, and sometimes brings on guests to present and talk, and that's what he's got today. So I will just hand over to you, Michael, to do your intro to what you're bringing to us today. Thanks, Kristen. Good morning, everyone. As Kristen said, my name is Michael Sowers, the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission, and this is the November 2013 Tech Talk. Just to give a little bit of a back story, recently we hosted the ARSL conference here in Omaha, Nebraska, and I bumped into a lot of different people that I haven't seen in quite a while, some of them from Kansas, as our guest is today. And so as I was going through the program, I always look for things that kind of catch my eye and sound really interesting or out of the box. Chris Ripple from the Central Kansas Library System was doing a presentation about using Excel to help rearrange your library, and I kind of looked at that and went, huh? And so I attended his session at the conference and then thought this was a pretty interesting topic, and I think he convinced me. And so I invited him onto the show, and when I was mentioning this in our department meeting yesterday, another one of our co-workers, Alana, kind of heard that description and went, huh? And hopefully some of you did too, kind of, as to why you're here today. So, Chris, you're with us on the line? Yes, I am. Well, good morning, and I guess what we're just going to do here is Chris has his presentation for us. So, Chris, why don't you start out by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do in Kansas, and then let us know what you're doing here with Excel. All right, thank you, Michael. I wish I wanted to thank Michael and Krista to give me a chance to give, share this tool I've created with librarians around the country. I use this tool to design better libraries. I work for, as Michael said, I work for the Central Kansas Library System. We're headquartered in Great Bend, and I'm on a team of consultants who evaluate libraries. And one of my jobs on this team is to draw alternative floor plans, and I use Excel spreadsheet and Excel spreadsheet to draw these plans, and I call this Excel spreadsheet of Shelf Shuffler. Shelf Shuffler is a free spreadsheet which is available at this address, and can you see my arrow? Can you see my arrow when I move it around? Yes, we can, and I'll just remind everyone that anytime Chris mentions a URL or a link to something, we'll be sure to put it in the show notes, so if you miss it during the presentation, it'll be available afterwards. All right, thank you. So, if you type this URL into your web browser, it'll automatically download Shelf Shuffler. I created Shelf Shuffler in Microsoft Excel. If you do not have Excel, you can use OpenOffice. OpenOffice is a free software suite which is available at this address, and you use CALC. CALC is OpenOffice's version of Excel. When you download Shelf Shuffler, you'll get this document that you're looking at right now, and along the bottom are a bunch of tabs. I'm going to go through the tabs to give you a tour, and then at the end, I'm going to actually draw a floor plan to show you how Shelf Shuffler works. The first tab is the blank grid, and it's this grid that I use to draw out my floor plans. Each square is 12 inches by 12 inches to scale, and I use this conversion table over here to create numbers that I put into my objects to actually put them to this scale. The next tab is the basic ideas, which introduces the principles that I use for drawing my alternative plans, and so I just want to give you a basic idea of what those principles are. I use the grocery store model for drawing my plans, and every customer in a grocery store, the most common products they buy are milk, meat, and bread. And to get to those products, you draw a power path around the store, which takes you to those products. Those products are located away from the front door and scattered around the store. When you take this power path to reach those products, you'll pass the primary display areas around the store. You'll also pass all the aisles. In the aisles will be signs which list the major products down that aisle. So by buying just these three products, you walk the entire store and you get a chance. You get exposure to everything that the store has. And then you go to the checkout registers, and at the checkout registers, you'll maybe see some more displays. But basically, this is the model I use. This grocery store model is what I use for designing my libraries. The parts of this model that I use for designing my libraries are first to the power path around the library. To move you completely around the library. I also put the major popular media such as new books, DVDs away from the front door to attract people to move around, to follow the path around the library. And I recommend signage to tell people what is available in the library. I have three examples of the layouts that I have drawn. Let's just look at one of them. Right over here on the left side is the front door of the library. And I begin the power path at the front door. And you can see the power path, the red line goes around the entire library. And it's past all of the major areas of the library. It goes past the younger books, the reading area. Here's nonfiction over here. Here's fiction. The restrooms are down here. Here's the meeting room, children's area, and computers. I have moved some of the popular media along the path but down away from the front door. Here are the new book sections. Here's our rotating books in our library. Our system has a rotating book collection. And so the rotating books are placed here. Here's the DVDs. Large print is over here, computers, et cetera. So you get the idea of the layout. Over here, if we move over here to the steps, I take you step by step through the six major steps through the process of creating a layout. The first step is to use black lines to draw the walls of the library. I use little squares right here, like little squares like here, to draw my windows, to place my windows. And I use the same squares but I get rid of the line, the contour line to create my doors. Right over here are the written instructions, basic instructions for doing each of these steps. So when I start drawing my floor plan today, later on in this presentation, you will probably get confused and forget what to do. And so I want to tell you that you can come over here to these steps and it will give you the basic instructions. So you have, after this presentation, you have two ways of learning how to use Shelf Shuffler. You can watch this presentation that I'm doing now, and you can also come and see written instructions step by step through the process. So step one is to draw the walls, the windows, and the doors, and to place them around the walls in the proper locations. Step two is that I draw my power path around the library. The power path would be a red line, and the way I design my red lines would depend on the shape and the size of the library and where the front door is located. If the library would be, say, a long narrow library, I'd probably just draw a power path straight down the middle of the library. But in this case, the library is a square, it's a fairly large square, and the front door is off to the side. So I'm going to draw a power path kind of a racetrack around the library. My racetrack, my power path is about 6 to 10 feet from the outer walls so that I can place objects on both sides of the power path. And I keep my power path about 4 feet to 6 feet wide. I want it to be at least 4 feet wide so that it is wider than the space between the aisles so that it becomes a wide path that is easily identifiable and will attract people and allow them to move easily around the library. The next step, step three, is that I, in my mind, I imagine where I want my major spaces, my popular media to be located. Usually I do this when I'm measuring my library and looking it over, and I usually don't write down where these are, but I've done it here so that you can see where I'm going. The next step, step number four, is that I draw out my furniture and my, I draw out the furniture and I arrange the furniture around the library. I draw the furniture and I make it to scale using that table, which I mentioned in the grid earlier, and I will show you how to use that in just a moment. So I draw out my furniture. I usually write in something in there to tell what the furniture is. So right here I have written that DS means double-sided shells, SS means single-sided shells, tall or tall shells over 6 feet shorter or under 6 feet. So that if I blew this up and made it larger, you would actually be able to see the size and you could see that it says DS tall. Here's a book cart, here's a magazine rack, there's chairs. So identify what the objects are, and then I arrange them around the library where I want them. Step five is that I highlight the cells and then I color them. There we go. I color them. I use the fill and I can color it in so that I can color my areas, and then I actually then write out and label each of the areas. So that is step five. And step six, I add in some call-outs to identify where the signage is, so that right here, for example, there's I put in a sign to tell what is on the sign and identify where the signs are. I also point out the important features, unique features in the layout. One of the things I am pushing, I'm trying to get my librarians to do, is to put chairs in the stacks. So I'd like to talk about that because, just for a moment, I feel it is ridiculous that patrons are allowed to sit for hours maybe at a computer, but they have to stand up to browse the stacks. So I think we should put chairs in the stacks so that people can sit down and spend time browsing. This also has another advantage in that it lowers people down so they can browse the lower shelves. It has been known for decades that libraries have observed for decades that the lower shelves do not circulate well, and so by allowing people to sit down, they can browse the lower shelves, and the circulation of the lower shelves will go up. I recommend putting little casters, putting casters on the chairs so they're easy to move around, and then you can sit down and browse the shelves. The libraries that have done this say the patrons really like it, and so I recommend it. And so I talk about this idea on this page right here. So are there any questions so far? I have covered, I believe, everything that I want to cover. And so are there any questions? Have any questions come up yet? Well, we don't have any from the audience yet. I know I have a couple, but mine can easily be at the end, or I can share some of them now if you'd like. If anyone does have any questions or want to know more about anything that Chris is showing us here, just type it into the questions section and we'll pass it along. Okay. Do you have any questions you want to ask me now, Michael? No, I think I'll let you keep going. Sometimes they get answered anyway. All right. I have now gone back to the blank grid, and so I'm now going to draw out a floor plan, show you how that it works. I have written right here, I have written the six steps that I just showed you to keep both of us focused on what we want to accomplish here. So I'm going to begin by drawing out the walls, windows, and doors. I say on step one right up here, I say to measure your walls in feet and inches, and to measure everything else in inches. I'm going to show you why you do that right now. So I'm going to draw out a library, and I'm going to use this grid here. I'm going to go over a little bit, draw out the grid, and so I use the black lines. So I come up to Insert, Shapes, and click the line here to draw out a line. So each number represents one foot, and so I'm going to make my library say 40 feet this way, and notice it is a blue line. I want a dark black line. So if I come up here and do a right click, come down to Format Shape, and I'm going to choose the line color, and I'm going to change it to a black line. Now I'm going to go to Line Style, and this is .75. I'm going to make it a thick black line. I'm going to change it to 2. So if I click Close, there I have my line, and it's 40. So if I say 40, if my library is 40 feet and a half, 40 feet 6 inches, I drag out my line halfway, and there I have a 40 foot 6 inch line. And now I'm going to drag it down here, and there's one wall of my library. Now if I have another wall at the other end, I do a Control-C to copy, and Control-V to paste, and it pastes another line. And so I'm going to move it down, and my library is going to be, say, 30 and a half feet this way. And there we go. So now I can come down. So now I have the other line. I have the other wall. I'm going to go Control-V again, and I produce the line, and now I'm going to produce it. I'm going to come over and get this line, and I'm just going to get this thing and just drag it down, and make it vertical. And then Control-C, Control-V to create another one. So there are my walls. If I want to get rid of this part here, you can just highlight the area, do a right click, and do clear contents, and it clears the contents. And I can do the same thing right here. Actually, I can just backspace that one out there. So there's my walls. I'm now going to do some windows. Now I would normally measure my windows and then place them correctly. But I'm just going to make some windows up, so I'm going to do an Insert, Shapes, come down and get a square, and I'm just going to draw out what I think would be about a two-foot window and make it a little wide. So each one of these is one of there's 12 inches, there's another 12 inches, so there's a two-foot window, and I made a little square. So I'm going to do a right click, come down to Format Shape, and I'm going to change the line color to black, and the line style. This time I'm going to, it says 2, I'm going to make it a .5. I'm going to make it a very thin, thin, oops, and then I do one more thing, Format Shape again, right click, Format Shape, I want my fill, I want to put in my fill, I want my fill to be white. So now I can place my windows. I'm going to make this left side my front door, so I'm going to put windows, and I have one window here, but I'm going to put a bunch, I have a bunch of windows along the front of my library, so I'm going to make a whole bunch of windows. I'm doing Ctrl C, Ctrl V to paste, I drag them over, I spin them around. You can also spin a bunch if you just highlight, and then hold down the shift, you can highlight a bunch of cells, and then when you spin them, they will all spin at once. I can now drag them over, and I can place them. There's one, there's two. Let's see, I'm going to make my windows even. So I'm going to put my window is two feet from this corner, and then the next window is two feet from that corner. So there we go, so there it's pretty equal. So I'm going to do the same thing here, I have two feet and two feet. Now in actualality, in reality, when I did it, I would of course measure my windows and place them exactly where they're supposed to be. I have now windows in the front of my library. I'm going to change this window to a door. It needs to be, I'm going to make it a six foot wide door. So there's two feet, there's three feet, there's four, five, six feet. It's a six foot wide door, so it has two doors. One, two, three, one, two, three. And I am going to click it, and then what I do is I'm going to now get rid of this line so it becomes an open space. So I right click, come down to format shape, and for the line color, I say no line, and there's my door. So I have an open door. So now I have, so I've finished step one. I've put in my windows, and I've put in my windows and doors and my walls. Now I'm going to draw my, this next step, if we look over here, the next step is to draw the power path. And I'm going to draw, I use my red line, so I'm going to get another line. Actually what I'm going to do is I'm just going to copy this line. I'm going to control C, control V, and paste it. I'm going to drag it down. My line, my power pass always begin at the front door. My line is too wide. It's too long. So I'm shortening it, and I want to change it to red. So I'm going to do a right click to bring up format shape, go to line color, and change it, click down here, and change it to red. So there's red. So my power path begins at the front door, and my, since my door is in the middle of the library, I have a power path down the center of my library, but I'm going to put, I'm going to extend the power path around so I have both power path through the middle of the library and also around the edge. So I'm going to copy this again, control V, control C, come over here, paste it. I want it to be about six feet from the outer wall, at least six feet. One, two, three, four, five, six feet from the outer wall. And this is too long. So I'm going to shorten it. One, two, three, four, five, six. This is too long here. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. So now I'm going to copy and control C, control V. I'm going to bring it down. Put it about six feet. One, two, three, four, five, six. So there's my power path around the library. So I've done my power paths. The next step, step number. Step three is that I locate the main area. So I don't actually write out. I do in my mind. I decide where my areas are. So I'm going to have, let's say, my children's area over here. Or I'll repeat that. I'll make my reading area over here. I'll do a children's area here. I'll do the computers over here. And let's say I'll put fiction over here and nonfiction here. So now what I need to do is I need to make the next step after I decide where I want stuff to be. I now need to draw out my furniture. So I'm not going to draw all the furniture. I'm just going to draw some of the furniture. So I'm going to come back. I'm going to make some shelving. So I have a plane. Now here's where I show you where I use this conversion table right over here. Well, let me get over there. There we go. So my shelving, let's say, is I'm going to make, first I'm going to make double sided shelving. And so it's 12 inches on each side. So that's 24 wide and 36 inches long. So 24 inches wide and 36 inches long. And it produces these numbers right here. So now I'm going to show you where I put those numbers. Do a right click and I come down to size and properties. So it needs to be one side needs to be six. My height needs to be six. And when I say height, I'm not talking about height from the floor up. I'm talking about height along the floor in one direction. So we're doing a two dimensional thing. So I need to change that to six. And I change this to 0.9. 0.9. There we are. So there's the size. Six by nine. And now I'm going to make it a change the color. Fill. And let's make it a little lighter. And there it is. And now I'm going to label it. Edit text. And I'm going to center it. So it's a double sided shelf. Double sided shelf. Let's change the double sided shelf. Double sided shelf. Now, so I've created one shelf. Now I can make a whole bunch of them. Control C, Control V. So one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Nine of them. 10, 11, 12. So now I can move them out here. And I can locate them in my space. I'm going to do a whole bunch of them. I'm going to hold down the shift key. And I can highlight a bunch of them and rotate it. Now I can move them out. And I can use these squares to measure the distance between them. Whoops. Whoops. These squares are to measure, make sure there's three feet between each of the shelves, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm not going to spend a whole time. I think you get the point here. So those would be double sided shelves. And I could go ahead and put them out. Hey, Chris. Yes. We got a question. Could you just maybe more slowly demonstrate how you're doing the rotating of the shapes? We just got a question about that coming in. What was the key strokes or whatever was used to make it spin? OK. I click on it. And then I move. You can see a little lever going out with a green ball. If you put the arrow on your green ball, it allows you to spin it. Can you see that operation? Yeah. I don't know what. And then if you want to do a bunch, you hold down the shift key and you can click several shelves at once. You hold down the shift key. You can click a shelf, click the next shelf, click the next shelf, click the next shelf. Then you put the cross on it. It comes and you can then rotate all of them. OK. And you do need to hold down your mouse button while you're doing that rotate? Yes. I'm sorry. Yes. Yes. You need to hold down the mouse button when you do the rotate. Cool. The person who asked says awesome. Thanks. OK. OK. I don't know what it looks like at therein. It's the problem with, so I don't know how much they can actually see what I'm doing. We're seeing it exactly as you're seeing it coming through. OK. Yeah. I just need to explain everything. OK. So there's the shelving. So to do small shelving, to do single-sided shelving, you would do the exact same thing. Whoops. You do insert and you draw it out. Except your single-sided shelving might be 12, it would be 36 inches long, but it might be only 12 inches wide. And so you would produce a smaller shelf. I right-click, I do the size of properties, and so you can see I changed the to 3, and then 9.9, 0.3, 0.9. And that produces the single-sided shelf. I can then, you know, I can do the format shape, change the color. I keep the lines, I do not make. One thing I have learned is not to make these lines and the shelf the same color. If you make them the same color, it's very hard to get them lined up. You need the contrast between the line around the shelves and the shelf color to actually be able to put them in a row. It gets very hard if they're the exact same color. You can't tell how long, where to exactly place it, and you stumble a lot more. But then to change the color, so I just change, I go format shape, I just change the fill color to some other color. And then to draw, to put in the label of what this thing is, I do a right click, I click on edit text, I do some centering, and I do single shelf shelf. Whoops, and I, you always have to change the color, so then I can go, if I don't change it, I can then, whoops, I can then highlight and then change the color to black. And so then again, I can, you know, I can just, and just lay them out there along the side. So that, so you get the idea of that. To draw a table, I do the same thing. You can draw two tables. You can draw a square table. I'm going to show you a round table. So I can draw a round table by choosing the round one. Just draw the round table. And let's say my tables are 36 inches. The diameter is 36 inches. So if I do a right click, I do the size. I change both of them to this 9.9. Whoops, yeah, well that doesn't matter, 0.9. So there's my round table. Now I can make things, I can, instead of just doing a color, I can do, if I come down to the format shape, instead of just choosing the fill color, I can come down and do a picture. So I can make it a wooden table. See, if I come down here and then click down here to my texture, I have a bunch of textures. So I can make it a wooden table. And then I do edit text. So now I say it's a wooden table. And if I want my letters to be, to go across properly, I can change. If I highlight it, I can then lower the font size a little bit. So now it's, and then, I can highlight it and I can make it a wooden table. So then I can place my wooden table where I want it. I can make, I do, I don't do the chairs around the table. It just ends up being cluttered. I just leave enough space. I use my 42 inches around to make sure there's enough space around my tables. If I, if I had shells, if these shells were against the wall, you, you should not do, you need, ADA requires you need enough space between the shells so that a wheelchair can spin around. So that's what I use this 42 inch square for. I use, usually do the 42 inch square. If I were to put shells out here, I quite often try to make 42 inches around the outside of the aisle around it to 42 inches or four feet around so that I create enough space to move around the outside of the wall, unless I'm putting it up against the wall. So I've shown you basically these are the, the, I use the rectangles and the rounds to create all of my furniture and then I put it around the library. Now, if I wanted to do the spaces, now we're talked about the next step is to color and label the areas. So I can highlight an area. I said, I think I said this is going to be the fiction over here. So I'm going to give it a color. And so I've highlighted the area. Now I do a right click and I go down to format cells and I choose a color. And then I'm going to label this fiction. See how I'm going to do it in my time. Okay, fiction. Whoops. Well, there we are fiction. And I pump up the size to about 26. I think is, oh, 24. So there's my fiction. If I want to do nonfiction areas, I can come down here. Format cells, choose a different color. I can click on more colors and come down here and choose a different color. And I can say label this nonfiction. So I can label if I want to do that. I said, I think I said this was children's area or whatever or the reading area. You would do the same thing. You just label the areas and you put in, you fill them up with what you want and then you label them. Whoops. The last, the last thing I do step number six is I do the callouts to identify where signage goes and the unique features. So again, I come up to insert, come to shapes and the callouts are down here at the bottom. So I draw a callout. I do a right click. I go to the format to shape. The fill, I change to white. I used low line color as red, but you can do any color you want. And then I click close. And now if I right click again, I can go edit text. I need to change this. It always wants to go to white and you change it to black. So now I can type in sign. I quite often use hanging signs for the major areas. So I tried to use hanging signs, a big sign. And then to, if I go copy, if I go copy and then paste, it'll create another one. So then you can put in your signage and pretty much we're done. Now, quite often for our libraries, and I do these callouts, I do several things. The purpose of the callouts, you as the creator will not need callouts generally. What these callouts, I put in the signage, I need the signage ones, but I also put out distinct features. If I have unique features like the chairs, if I put chairs in the aisles, I might put a callout explaining why I'm putting chairs in the aisles. The purpose of the callouts is to help people who, other than you, your board, other staff members, maybe the public, explain to them what all the features are of your layout, the things that aren't obvious. One last thing quite often, I make multiple copies. Sorry. What often I do is that I make one layout. I may present to my libraries several alternative layouts. It's easy to make alternative layouts to make multiple copies. If you come down here on where it says Blank Grid and do a right click, you can go move and copy. You click there, you decide where you want it to be before ideas, and I create a copy. It now makes a copy. Now I have the original, and I have this one, a second one I can rename it as alternative two. Now it's easy that I've got it. I can now change things around. I can have the shelves run this way. I can just rearrange it and make a second. Just make any changes. It's easy once you have all the furniture in. It's easy to create alternatives by just making copies and then rearranging the furniture. It's easy. You can do it within minutes. You can make a variety of alternatives. I have completed my demonstration. I would like to remind you that the things you saw, if you forget them, that you will have this presentation. They're going to send you a link to this presentation. Plus, I want to go back that they have the steps right here, a brief description, instructions for each of the steps, a set of instructions for each of the steps. Thank you very much. I now will accept questions. All right. Thanks, Chris. We have a couple questions that have come in from the audience. We're going to get to those in just a sec because I'm going to start out with the question that usually comes from everybody who I say, this is what Chris is going to be talking about. I mean, I see it makes sense, but whatever gave you the idea to do this in Excel, I guess, where did this come from? Well, originally what happened was a librarian asked me to make a layout, and so I drew a bunch of furniture to scale, and I printed it out, and it cut out about 70 or 80 little pieces, and I put them on a pile on my desk, and what happened was as I was putting the grid paper on my desk, the pile fell off on the floor, and it fell right among all the computer wires, and I decided I didn't want to pick them up, so somehow it occurred to me to just draw it all on Excel. So that's how it happened. It was just, I didn't want to pick up a bunch of little pieces of tiny, tiny pieces of paper among a bunch of computer wires. It was just too lazy to do that, and those pieces of paper sat there for several months. I mean, truly, they sat there for several months, it's just a pile right there all among my computer wire. Well, I just went ahead and drew these things out, and it was so easy. This necessity is the mother of invention. There you go, there you go, our laziness. Well, okay, that too. Okay, Christy, you said we got some audience questions. Yeah, one person did give a suggestion when people were asking how to move things around. Yes. That you were clicking on dragging them. Someone says also, if you click on a shape, you can also move them in small increments using the arrow keys so you can move them. Oh, yes! You certainly can. That's right. That's right, you can. You can. That is an excellent idea. I knew that and forgotten that. That is an excellent idea. Thank you for mentioning that. That is true. Give a little more control to as you're kind of down this way a little bit, over to the left a little bit, yeah. That's true, I had forgotten that. Thank you for mentioning that. Yeah. And then someone did have a question, going back to when you were first, your first example of this, that shelving that was in the center of the library, there actually, I think this might have been answered with your spinning things around, could they be moved to the opposite angle so that the desk can see across the floor of that area? Sure. Sure, you can easily spin them. Sure, you can easily spin them. Right. That's all I've got so far. Anyone does have any questions or comments or want to see anything else? Let us know in the questions section. And in the meantime, I've got a couple more. So, Chris, have you mostly been using this for designing from scratch or rearranging existing layouts? I use this for rearranging existing layouts. So, I end up using the furniture, the shelving that they have. And for our little libraries, a lot of them had homegrown shelving, so I draw up about 15 different sizes of shelving rather than the simple shelving I drew here. I have drawn shelving that is literally 18 feet long. One board, actually it was 12 feet long, one board. They did one board horizontally, and they just put boards in between it to prop it up. So, I end up having to draw shelves like that. And so, quite often these libraries end up drawing about five or six or seven different sizes of shelving and then trying to rearrange them. It's very tricky. And I realize, like we are here in Nebraska, you're generally dealing with smaller libraries, but what's the largest square foot that you can think of that you've done this for? I don't know the, I can tell you the library, but I don't know what the square footage would be. It'd be about 60 by 40, I think, would be about the size. And actually, I just did half of that library. So, these are for small libraries. I mean, 60 would be the, that half. 60 by 40 would be about, would be the half of that library. Okay. Well, I mean, you could scale this, just what's your patience level, I suppose, is. Yes, yes. And I don't do, I haven't done any multi-story libraries or more things like that. And clearly, it's for, I do it really for rearranging. Sure. Basic rearranging. It's not, you're not producing a blueprint that an architect can actually use to, or to actually build a library for scratch. Okay. And the other question I have, and this is my last question, is kind of more of a, taking a step back. You're definitely a proponent of kind of the, the grocery store model, as you put it, with the important stuff around the outside edges. And I'm well aware of that model. But we also hear a lot of the bookstore model, which I would maybe over-generalize to say that all the really important stuff that everybody wants is right up front. Right. So, I mean, maybe, I guess my question is, is why did you end up, why do you lean towards the grocery store model? Do you have a pros and cons? Kind of, could you just expound on that in general? The reason I have the grocery store model is that many of our libraries put the new books right up front. And people will come in. They'll walk 10 feet inside the library. They will pick up a new book. They will then go to the circulation desk, which is in, which is 12 feet inside the library. And then they won't go within the side of the library further inside the library. And then they wonder why people don't walk to the back of the library. So, the reason I distribute things around the library, the most important stuff and put it toward the back, is to pull people and give them an invitation, a reason to move further back into the library and see what everything the library has. The bookstore, bookstores don't care whether you visit the back of the bookstore. But libraries should. So, that's why I distribute them, I distribute them through the library to give people a reason to walk toward the back and see everything the library has. And I agree with you in principle, have you actually had a library put the new books in the back? Yes. And people do go back there. I have had libraries that were the board or the patrons are so insistent that the new books sit right up front that they will not move stuff back. I understand that. But if you can, I recommend moving the popular fiction or popular materials, that lose DVDs, everything, to further back in the library and draw people along a power path to the back and then put up displays of other stuff. If you display other stuff, people will check it out. Have you gotten a sense of the patrons' reaction to doing that? Patrons, the ones who have made the change, the patrons like it. At least they claim to like it. They claim to like it. The librarians tell me the patrons claim to like it. I don't, you know, it's indirectly, I hear from the, through the librarian. Well, I'm sure if the patrons didn't like it, you'd hear about it. Yes, I hear the librarians who say they didn't like it. Generally the librarians seem to like it because the patrons do. Interesting. Okay. We do have a question related to that setup about where do you suggest that the circulation desk we placed then in that model? The circulation desk can be, I'm not sure it really, I'm of two minds about it. I don't really have a, you know, if you put the new books up front, then I say you need to put the circulation in the back. Circulation is in the back to pull people back. I think you need to get some way to pull people to the back of the library. But generally, I don't really have an opinion of where the circulation should go. I've seen it successfully in several different places, many different places. Well, and I'm just thinking off the top of my head here, although I kind of did think about that when you mentioned it, I mean, even in the grocery store model, the registers are up front. The registers are up front because you're pulling people around the store with your milk and your bread and your meat are scattered around and people are shopping all over the store. And I realize this will vary from size of library and staffing levels, but there maybe is a certain level of, the circulation desk always has staff at it and there's maybe a minimal amount of security with seeing the front door and being that, that you might need to take into consideration. Yeah, that desk can serve, can serve also as not just checking out the books and things, but also keeping it on the front door and that kind of thing. Right, right. And, you know, we do not have, libraries don't have a product that everybody wants, like the milk and the bread. I mean, people come in for the new books, or they come in for the DVDs, or they come in for the computers, they don't come in for everything. And so, so, so you have to, you have to make adjustments for it. But yes, security is an issue and you need to keep that in mind. So probably on this one, I probably should have put the shelves one the other way. And I have no problem with that. All right, and I think we have one more tip that has come in for the audience. Yes, someone did say when we were talking about designing and drawing lines and things that if you hold your shift key while creating lines, it will hold them at a 45-degree angle as you're doing it. So if you need things that's, you know, exact that way, that's another tip for Excel use. Right. Okay. Yeah, we can. Well, thank you. Yeah, well, thank you, Chris, very much. That was wonderful. And I think definitely for me on the second watching of this presentation, I think I definitely got a few more things out of it. And, you know, I don't think I'll necessarily have the need to rearrange a library in the near future. But if somebody calls me about it, this is definitely something I will point them to. So, Chris, thanks once again for joining us today and sharing this with you. We will provide links to all of this. And if you weren't able to get the short URL for this, this will be in the show notes. So we'll bring that up for everybody. So, Chris, we're going to take control back just for the last couple of minutes of the show here. And go ahead and meet Chris. I just have a couple of news items that I want to share. So let me, okay, Chris has muted. I have to make us the presenter. Yes. There we go. Okay. So I just have a couple of links I want to talk about today to wrap up the show here. One is I know we have a lot of Pinterest users that watch the show on a regular basis. I have an account. I use it every once in a while. I don't use it all that much. But I was pointed to this service called Pinstimatic. And the idea behind it is that you can more creatively share content to Pinterest. So, for example, say you have a quote that you want to share. You click on the quote, and it will allow you to kind of customize the text and be a little more creative with it. Of course, it doesn't seem to be coming up right this instant. If you have a tweet that you want to share, of course, you know, hey, not working. But the idea is that you say I want to share a location or I want to share a picture or an event or a note or a quote or a website. And you would pick the type of thing you want to post. You would put in your information and it will kind of reformat it and make your post a little prettier, a little more interesting. Hopefully to get a little more traction out of that. That's Pinstimatic.com. I will just kind of back out of that because it was... It finally stopped trying to load. Okay, it stopped trying to load. But something is, let's see, quote... No, it's still not working. But try it again maybe later today or tomorrow with that. The other thing I want to mention is kind of more of a security news sort of thing. There is a new bit of... It's not really a virus. It's more called ransomware out there that you can get called Cryptolocker. It's very interesting. It's very scary. I don't want to make everybody really nervous. But what it does is it takes your computer and encrypts all of your files so that you can't get to them unless you pay a ransom. And then once you pay the ransom, it encrypts your files. Long story short, this is very scary. I've got a link here to a short 8-minute video that kind of explains it and a web page from Sophos that talks about it. Basically, a lot of the same recommendations for avoiding this is with almost anything else. One, make sure that your antivirus software is up-to-date. Two, make sure your security patches are up-to-date for your software and your operating system. Three, make sure you have backups for at least your data files. Really, if you get this, the only two ways out of it are to pay the ransom, which usually runs about 300 bucks, or to wipe your system and reinstall everything. But if you have a good backup, that won't be necessarily as much of a problem. So just kind of some informational articles and videos there, something you may want to be aware of that is circulating out there right now. So that being said, that is it for Tech Talk for this month. Okay, cool. All right, then. Thank you very much, Michael and Chris for being on the show this week. That was the spreadsheet, or Excel to do your library. That would have been great for me. When I was in library school, I had a library administration class that instructed us to redesign, reorganize a library space. And I did it similar to what Chris was describing. I had a big piece of poster board and little things that represented that I could have little pieces of paper, tables and chairs and shelves, and I rearranged them on my floor. Your parents had a store. They bought. They had chairs and circles and ovals to have things built on. So you can shuffle them around and stuff. But this is even better. This is great. You can get it all online and saved and shared with people. Wish I had been about this back then. But anyhow. So that will wrap up today. The show has been recorded and the links are already in our delicious account. So when this is all done and processed, you'll have all that information. So that will wrap it up for today. When our topic is the best new youth books of 2013, our usual speaker about children's and young adults library books. Sally Snyder here at the Library Commission will be doing her book talks. This is a combo repeat of her. She has two individual sessions at our Nebraska Library Association Annual Conference, one for children's and one for youth. And she graciously for us smooshes them together into one session and then presents it here on Encompass Live. So next week, all the new books that she came across for 2013, she will do a show on starting as you can see there preschool all the way up to teens. So hope you'll join us next week for that. And if you are a Facebook user, we are on Facebook Encompass Live is. So I hope you can like us there. We post when our new shows are coming up and the recordings are ready. When a show is ready to start for people to log in on the fly. Related or of interest to people attending Encompass Live. So like us on Facebook if you want to. Other than that, we are done for the day for this morning. Thank you very much and we'll see you next time.