 Sounds good. All right. Off you go. Okay. Okay. Good morning, everyone, 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 across the state and across the country. We cover anything that may be related to libraries. We'll put it on the show. We are not very picky here. We do these sessions live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time, and they are recorded. So if you are unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. You can always watch all of the recordings that we have available on our website for all the shows we've done. And we do a mixture of things, presentations, book reviews, mini-training sessions, whatever. We have commission staff that are on library commission, Nebraska Library Commission staff that do sessions, and we bring in guest speakers sometimes. And today we have what I call a mixture. The last Wednesday of the month, so traditionally we do the tech talk with Michael Sowers, who is the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Say hi, Michael. Good morning. And he updates people on techie news of the month if he's got any, and sometimes brings in guests to interview, talk, have their own presentations, which he's done this morning. So I will hand over control to Michael, and have you take it away for what you've got for us this morning. All right. Thanks, Krista. So welcome to this one's tech talk for January 2013. We apologize just a little bit for getting started late. Krista is snowed in at home. I'm in the office, and our guest speaker today is in Boston, Massachusetts. So we're kind of spread out, and that makes coordinating a little more difficult. But today we have Jennifer Korber, the Web Services Librarian from Boston Public Library, who has been on the show previously. Good morning, Jennifer. Good morning, everybody. And she's going to be, although this is tech talk, we're going to kind of be really broad on our definition of technology today. I saw Jennifer give this presentation back at, was it computers and libraries or internet library and one of the two? Both, actually. Oh, OK. I've seen it once. She's given it twice. And so we're going to talk about being funny when it comes to your library. So Jennifer, I'm just going to go ahead and let you go off with it. Introduce yourself a little more. Give us a little bit of your background, and then let us know why and how we should be funny. Well, why you should be funny? That answer varies depending on the day. How is where I'm going to take most of the discussion? So good morning, everybody. My name is Jennifer Korber. I am a web services librarian at the Boston Public Library. And I have been at the library for just over 14 years and in libraries for 14 years. I've also done retail. I've also done publication, editorial in turn. I've worn all sorts of hats over my lifetime. And as a librarian, I have been everything from a children's librarian, adult reference generalist, branch manager, and now web services librarian. So I use, and one of the things I always talk about is that I use every single bit of all of my background in everything that I ever have done. I am also involved in theater. I used to be a technical director. And as such, I've gotten to watch a lot of theater and watch a lot of extremely funny people onstage, offstage. I tend to hang out with people who are natural born comedians. Hi, Michael. And I find that when you're thinking about what you do in libraries, when I think about what I do in libraries, I tend to bring in all those bits and pieces. And bring back the funny is one of those focuses. Because I think that in a lot of ways, particularly, I first came up with this idea for this presentation back in about 2009, when Life in Libraries was a little dire. And it's not that I wanted to make light of the situation. It's certainly not. There's no impetus to try and be inappropriately funny or bringing humor to a situation that clearly needs to be serious and on the level. But things got really dark for a while. And I started to see a whole lot of libraries, and librarians, and library staff of all sorts really go inwardly focused. And I wanted to show them different ways, small and large, that they could bring back some of the joy and the laughter and the effervescence and the positive feelings that so much of our public and patrons and students and staff associate with libraries. So you'll notice I do actually occasionally slip into thinking all libraries are public libraries, just because that's my background. So I apologize. I do mean this for everybody, academic, specials, corporate libraries, medical libraries, law libraries, you name it. You can figure out a way to bring contextually appropriate humor to your libraries. And actually, some of the special libraries have it even better, because you can do all sorts of in-jokes. You can play on words. You can use references that outside folks might not necessarily get. You can play with your context in a way that is much more focused and targeted. But let's start. And I am going to start with physical stuff. But I am going to quickly bring it into the tech world. But since this is an encompasses usually for everybody, I felt absolutely no qualms about starting with the physical. Signs, simple signs can be a great way to inject small bits of humor, particularly contextual humor, into a library space. Near as I can tell, this library, Kent Public Library, moved their romance books from a bunch of shelves over to another set of shelves, which were by the library's fireplace. And instead of putting some boring black and white block text sign saying the romance novels are now over by the fireplace, they spruced it up a little bit. They made it red. They added the Curly Cue fonts, which should never be used anywhere except in a sign about romance novels. And they used word choice that was contextually appropriate and just a little bit cute and just a little bit funny. Find romance by the fireplace. It can start just that small. It can start just that particular. It's not even a particularly great sign. It's just a piece of paper with a good font on it. But it's a small place where you can do that little bit of test run of funny in your library. Similarly, we have a lot of signs in libraries that say, no, you can't do this. You can't do that. And there's been a pushback on that over the past several years that I've seen in library posts and Twitter feeds and what have you. To start spinning this more positively, and a good way to do that is injecting a little bit of humor. Again, it's small. It's contextual. The lightness of loud. We promise not to shush you thereby playing on the librarian's stereotype if you promise to be considerate of your fellow library users. Small. Just a little bit of humor just to get things rolling. And contextually appropriate. And takes what would be a no cell phones sign and turns it into something positive. And it's that shift. It's that small perceptual shift that can make all the difference. Now, you can still say no and you can do it. But now you can start to play with going even further. Taking a funny moment and committing to it. And you're going to hear me say that a few times today. Committing to it. Really taking it as far over as you can. So instead of just a no food or drink near the computer, you stick a skeleton crossbones on a big fat danger sign and beware the wrath of the library director. Which is funny either in two ways. Either the library director is really a sweet human being who would never have wrath of any kind. And so it's funny that way. Or the library director would really come down on you like a ton of bricks. And therefore, you have very good reason to be not taking food and drink near the computers. And this is where you can use both what's generally funny. Because this sign would be funny in every library. But it can become a little more contextually funny depending on the situation you've got where you are. Now I'm going to jump outside of the library and outside of libraries entirely. Because again, take a sign that would otherwise be boring. We're still open during renovations. And play with it and make it a little bit more. Open and still stunning during our less than extreme makeover. This is a hotel around the corner from the main library in Boston. And they had this up for months. And all I could think of, it was last summer. And all I could think of is I need this for the presentation. I need this for bring back the funny. And so I finally came in and had a bright sunny day and got the good picture. Because this is a perfect example of it. It could have been a really boring sign. But by choosing words, and they didn't even make it the sign itself any different. But by choosing language that takes it in that funny direction, you can do just that a little bit more. So that's the physical. And you could do that with bookmarks and flyers and checkout cards if you're still using those or receipts. You could have something. We've totally moved to digital receipts at the printed receipts at the Boston Public Library. And we could have something in the bottom of the receipt saying, have a nice day, share a book or something contextual there. You could find all those little physical places to insert a little bit of humor into what you're doing. But I am now, since this is Tech Talk, I'm going to bring it to the tech. And so imagine, if you will, this was an ad on the subway system here in Boston. And it's an ad for a sovereign bank. And as you might know, we have more than a few college students in Boston. And so sovereign very rightly targeted an ad at college students and soon to be graduating college students. And then they wanted to include a QR code that college students could zap and then go to a website and get more information about this deal. But they didn't just stick the QR code in a box. They had a designer come in and stick it onto a mortarboard and then add the diploma underneath because we want this to be a positive thing. They made it. And so if imagine, and as I was looking at this, I was like, well, imagine if you will that you're a library that uses QR codes in your internal signage or on your external flyers and ads and things. So inside the library, let's say you had your signs for your different subject areas or parts of fiction or parts of the nonfiction collection and you have a QR code on them that links to an item in the catalog or links to a search in the catalog or links to a page on your website for a book list. You can have a sign that's a subject sign saying cooking and then have the QR code. But if you've got somebody on staff who's a little clever with Illustrator or another program, they could take that QR code and start putting it into icons that are relevant to the subject you're talking about. So for cooking, you could have it as the front of an oven. Or for gardening, you could have it as the side of a gardening shed. It's those little things. It really can be just the little things that bring a smile to somebody's face, make them notice, make them take a picture of it maybe, and then interact with your library on that level. It's those small little feel-good moments that can increase the positive feeling at your libraries. Now, we are going to the next few examples. I hope you have all seen already, but I'm going to share them anyway. Several years ago, I was first turned on to the Hillsdale Public Library's sandwich board signs. And what's great about this is it's a sandwich board. It's an informational board out in front of the library. We all have something like it. It's just out there. But someone on staff decided to be a little funny one day and stick a humorous message. Still library can be appropriate. It's still about the library. But it's funny. And in this case, it's a parody of the first line of an extremely popular and well-known song called Baby Got Back, which is, I'm not going into that, but it's funny. And anybody driving by would see that and hopefully not drive off the road as they start laughing because it's just great and it's funny and it's appropriate to the library. But then, and so they started making this became a thing and they would take pictures of their various signs. And the one on the right, Netflix keeps changing. Our DVDs are still free, great, funny, and current events appropriate. It's reflecting current events. The one on the left starts to show how you can push the edge a little bit. This is in New Jersey, so it's a little, maybe a little less, a little more liberal and more people will be OK with this sort of thing. But if your reading selection lasts longer than four hours, see a librarian. It's pushing the edge. There are probably some people who objected to it. But it's not offensive in any specific way and it's not too far over the edge. It's just catching that edge of darker humor. And you have to be careful with darker humor. We'll look at some of that later and unintentionally darker humor. But with a very judicious use of darker humor, you can get those folks who are cynical and a little bit jaded and who will look at something kind of fluffy and go, eh, whatever. But then they'll read if your reading selection lasts longer than four hours and go, wow, they just did that. OK, then. And Jennifer, I almost wonder if it was intentional that the one line doesn't quite fit on the sign either. I have to believe that it is. Having put together my fair share of sandwich boards, I'm sure that it was also they just wanted to fit the whole thing. But that particular line, almost assuredly. You know what? I never thought of that. I will freely admit that. But so they went and did this. And then now here's where we cross over. And here's where you can do it. They have a Facebook page. And they started posting their signs on Facebook, on their Facebook page. And that's when it exploded. That's when it went from just being the sign that they had out in the library and everybody in Hillsdale thought it was great. And then all of a sudden they put it out on Facebook. And then the world knew about it. And people saw it. I was getting people were sending me this from outside. Friends and family were sending me these things. Did you see this? Oh my god. And it was great. And it was really engaging. And lots of people saw it. And now it's a thing. And now there are tons of people have seen all of these. And it's taken on a life of its own. And again, you can be contextual. They clearly had a flood out in the parking lot. And they decided to turn it into something funny. And that's another place where you can play with this stuff. Don't do an out of order sign. Take something negative that's happened and spin funny on it. I once had a door that, when I was working in a branch, one door out of six was broken. And instead of just putting door broken, use other doors, I put, this door is having a bad day. Please use the other doors. And little arrows pointing to either side. Because it's, and people stopped and read it. It was great. It was watching. You'd watch people come up to the door. They'd stop. They'd read. They'd chuckle. And they'd move on to another door. And again, it's that what funny can do is break people out of whatever they're in. They could be deep in their own heads. They could be thinking about how awful their lives are right this moment. Or they're just having an awful day. And then you inject a small amount of funny into their life. And it's not going to change their lives. It's not going to make everything all better. But it might break them out of it just for long enough so they can hit the reset button on their own. And isn't it more awesome that we're doing that with libraries? And isn't that just playing back into that positive nostalgic feel of libraries that I talked about at the beginning? This is where we can support that and encourage it and expand on it. Another thing that has become medically strong on the internets, as it were, is the Craighead Jonesboro County Library down in Arkansas. And did I screw that up again? I always do. Ben Bizzle has been pushing this idea of the advertisements and making the funny almost as much as I have. And he's actually gotten to do it at his library in a very large way. They took an internet meme of taking cartoons and adding funny captions to them and made it all library relevant, romance novels, cheaper than cats. It counts as a book if you turn on the subtitles for a film program they were running. And these were flyers. These were bookmarks. They were billboards. He did a whole publicity campaign with this idea. And he threw it out there. And it really took off. And it really did well. And it did even better when they started using them as the cover photos on the library's Facebook page. Again, it's Facebook. But you could be doing this on your library website. You could be doing this on a blog. You could be posting images to Twitter. Pick your poison. Wherever you're doing this stuff online, you can inject this funny. And make the connection from the billboard that they saw driving to the flyer that they saw on the coffee shop to the Facebook page when they went to go check the library's information. Which of course all tags into another presentation I give on creating consistency and creating a consistent online presence. But this is what it does is when you use this funny, you now have made that connection between all the places that somebody interacts with the library. The third one is something I'll admit I didn't see this until this year. But I think it's been a thing for a little while. The idea of going on a blind date with a book. As we run up to Valentine's Day, instead of just doing yet another display of heart-shaped books and chocolate recipe, chocolate cookbooks, and romance novels, go on a blind date with a book. If you search for blind date with a book on an image search for your favorite search engine, you will find tons of ideas. This is two. Hillsdale's there again with their full display. But I like the captions on the outside of the paper ones from Rockville. Love at first read. Dream date question. And again, it's a little bit of, it's unexpectedness. Humor is about the unexpected. Something happens that you didn't expect. And it's funny. And it tickles you inside. It gives you that momentary woo. And you just kind of are shocked awake a little bit. And that's a thing that again, helps people stay aware of where they are and who they're in. And that is you, which is to say your library. Now, Hooksit up in New Hampshire, I was looking for this. I found this this morning, actually, has taken it a step further. So they have the blind date. And they're going to have a display. And they say, librarians are selecting your blind dates and preparing them for you to borrow during the month of February. Please visit the library to select your date. Great. But then they give you a form. And to talk about it and to do a book review about the book that you've picked up is your blind date. And even better, and there's the form. So rate your date, loved it, bad match. And then you can enter to win a raffle prize. But the best part is, just for fun, try writing a personal ad for your book. Now you've got people really engaged. You've taken them all the way from this display in the library for a hallmark holiday, which they may not even personally have any connection to or dislike even. You threw them the curve ball of the blind date with a book, which is just enough unexpectedness to tickle people's interest. They may have picked up the book. And now they've got the ability to give a review of that book in the online form. And now you're asking them to contribute to the funny by writing a personal ad for the book they've gotten. That is a complete sequence of absolute comedy gold. And I love it. I think it's magical and beautiful and free. There's nothing in here that costs anything but time, which yes, we have precious little love. I get that. But it doesn't take that much. That's a Google form. If you have Google Docs or Google Drive or whatever they're calling it today, that's just a form that you can set up in about five minutes. It takes no effort whatsoever. And then you get back all this comedic response. And we have a comment from Dave in South Sioux City who said they're doing the blind date this year. Sweet. Awesome. Try doing this. You still have time. Get the online form going. Or even if you don't want to do an online form, if that's not your population, if they would not do well with that, then just give them quarter sheets of an 8 1⁄2 by 11-inch piece of paper to write the personal ad or stick it in the bookmark, make it a bookmark, and stick it in there when they check out the book. And give them that ability to give it on paper as well. It doesn't have to be a technological solution. You can do it in the physical as well. This was just wonderful and this made me so happy. But now we are on Tech Talk, so let's bring it totally online and off of the physical entirely. I'm going to run through this a little faster because, Michael, what time is it? I don't have a clock handy. It's 10.30, but we started about 10 minutes late. So you're fine. OK. That's cool. I'm just gauging things. So I can't do a show of hands as I normally would, though I know you can do it on. Oh yeah, you can. I can see you. So who's actually managing a website? If you want to click in and do the show of hands thing. Who has any input onto their website at all? Who's listening? I see one. Hi, David. Excellent. Two, Anika? Anika? Couple more, maybe? Cool. Awesome. So the next section is all about things that you can do on the website. And again, it will go from simple everyday types of stuff to big, bold, and brassy. The very first thing is so a recent trend and a good one is to try and get staff to have photos of themselves or images of themselves online so that there is a face to go with the name even in an online only environment. So as staff blog as they do programs online, libraries want to try and get more visuals on there of their staff. And some staff are extremely resistant to that. They don't want photos of themselves out there. What could be fun is if you've got any budding comic artists or graphic novel artists anywhere nearby or if you're near an art school, ask them to draw avatars. Ask them to draw comic book graphic novel versions of staff and use those instead. It's still a visual image. If you walked into the, oh, she just changed branches. If you walked into the branch where Laura is teen librarian, you would absolutely recognize her. She is unmistakable. And the avatar absolutely does her justice. We had the great good fortune to have a writer and residence at the Boston Public Library who was a graphic artist, a graphic novel writer and illustrator. And she made these for our teen librarians. But you don't need that. You don't need to have a writer and residence program. There are plenty of extremely talented artists in every town, anywhere in the world. And you can find somebody who can do this sort of thing for you. And this might, A, inject that little bit of humor and that little bit of fun. And B, get staff just that half step further to be uncomfortable with their online selves and their online presence by doing it in a way that is not a photo, but is also not nothing. Another way to do this, if you wanted to, particularly around Halloween or any other costume related event, is to have them dress up and put on the funny mask and put on the Groucho Marks glasses and eyebrows and nose. And that way it's, again, a photo of them, but not in that, hi, I'm right here, kind of way that a lot of folks might still be less than comfortable with. So use this little bit of humor as a way to ease staff and their comfort levels. You could also do this with kids if you wanted to have some kind of a kid program. And oh my goodness, I just thought of this. If you wanted to have kids blog and you wanted to have kids give online book reviews and they wanted to have avatars, they could draw a picture of themselves. How adorable would it be for a five-year-old or a six- year-old to be doing an online book review and have a picture she drew of herself as the avatar? Seriously, just there. Somebody take that run with it, please. These are all ideas to play with. Can you tell I'm an ex-children's librarian? It comes through in the weirdest ways. Let me tell you. I do not sing Rafi, however. OK, pulling it back. So sometimes on a website you need to throw up an error message. You need to present people with a oops message of some sort. This in particular, this was the Apple Store. They had a page under construction, which is to say the Apple Store itself was under construction, because they were about to launch the iPhone 5 and had taken down the entire Apple Store in order to present, after Macworld, present the entire thing with all the new technology in it. And so for the day that they were making this announcement, they had this sign up until the moment that they turned the store back on. And it's not particularly funny, but it's also not boring. So we'll be back. We're busy updating for you, and we'll be back soon. You can almost hear that little ring at the end. So on the one hand, it's not going out of its way to be particularly funny, but it's also not just sitting there going under construction, come back soon. Again, it's word choice. It can be really small. It can be very, very minor. It can be very subtle. But it can still make the difference between an experience and an experience that has just that little bit of fun in the bottom of it. Now, if you are creating websites, working with websites, visiting websites, you have inevitably run into a thing called the 404, 404 Not Found Error Message. This is a thing that happens when you click on a link or you visit a URL or type one in. And the page or the file that you were looking for is not there anymore. Either it was taken down, it's been replaced, the URL has changed, something has happened. And so now the screen is showing you this error message. And usually it's something in computer code looking font that says 404 Not Found, Page Not Found. And it might even be useful and say, you can click back to the home page here. Have fun with it. You can actually change the text on those things. Have fun with it. BoingBoing.net is a major geek news source out in the world. And so they are dealing with geeks. And every geek knows what a 404 error message is or should. And so they don't need to do much explaining. So they can just have fun with it. And nope is all they need. Because that's the sort of thing where their average visitor will just go, oops, OK, hit the back button and go to town. So they don't need to do much more than that. But if you're dealing with folks who are not regular visitors to your site or who are not as tech savvy and may not know what a 404 message is, you can still do the same thing. You can say, hi, the file or the page that you're looking for is not here. But you can do it in a way that is friendly and, well, funny. So you can see it still says 404 in the background on this one. It looks like you're in the wrong room. And then a sea lion at a podium with a lanyard and a badge. Sure, it's all about a professional speaking clearinghouse. So absolutely, this is contextually appropriate. And then down at the bottom, they give a search field so that you can now, OK, you clicked on something. That page isn't there. So now you can go ahead and go down to the bottom and search the website for what you're looking for. It both tells you that the thing you've clicked on doesn't work, and gives you a resource and a recourse to solving your problem and looking for the thing you actually want. One of my all time favorites, and I unfortunately don't have the link handy, bad me. Here's it does say page 404 page not found, but it does so in a wonderfully visual way. And right down to the Hawaiian shirt, I love this. I adore this 404. And it does tell you if you're the site owner, one of two things has happened. If you're a visitor and you're not sure what happened, do this. And it gives you suggestions. But even the language down there is funny. The link you use to get here is faulty. It's an excellent idea to let the link owner know. Now what would be even better is if they gave you links to do such a thing, but you can still just hit the back button and get to the website some other way. But again, just have fun with it. You can do this with things like contact forms. You can do this with the little search status bar or file upload status bar that goes across the screen when you're doing something that requires more than two seconds of page time. So the one in the back is a contact form from a wedding website, but they're still having fun with that. And then the front is a search status bar. And it could have just said search continuing or search going on or search doing this. But it says searching content from across the universe. And that's funny. So again, take the boring things, the things that are part of our lives every day of the week, and add a little bit of fun. But then there are specific days that you want to have more fun with. And I'm going to use two big examples. But you could have, again, local examples, contextual examples that are relevant to your individual organizations or locations. And we're going to start mateys with talk like a pirate day. And talk like a pirate day is in September of the year. And on talk like a pirate day, I can't do a pirate accent, talk like a pirate day, you're supposed to talk like a pirate all day long and inject lots of a-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h- and shiver me timbers and all sorts of things to great effect and to sound like you're an extra from Pirates of the Caribbean. And in the past, I've done book displays for talk like a pirate day, we've had flyers, you might even have programs for talk like a pirate day. But let me show you Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. And every year, for the past several years now, on talk like a pirate day, they redo the library's, the University Library homepage, into talk like a pirate. It's awesome. And they actually, they have a link. The link at the bottom is to all of their various pirate days and what they have done. So you can get a good idea of how they've, some years they've clearly had more time and more energy and can add more to it. And some years it's just redoing the front page and then everything else is the same. So it's an amazingly good example. But you just read through it and you sit there and you just start laughing your buns off because it's great. And the frontalology is giving me mild amare, steer me back to the path of the landlubbers. In other words, I can't deal with this pirate talk. Get me back to the regular page, please. And so they can, they have a link back out to the not talk like a pirate day. But they go deep. And here's where I'm going to start talking about when you commit, when you decide to do this, commit to it. I would say go big or go home, but that's only half the story because that very first sign, the find romance by the fireplace, is very small. It's not big at all. But it was fully committed to. When they did it, they went and they took it as far as it needed to go. They made the font the color it is. They chose the font they chose. They went with the right language. They put it in the right place. They fully committed to what they were doing. If you want to go big, go big but still fully commit to it. So it's the language on the front page. It's the choices for all the menus and the navigation. It goes all the way down to the various bits of navigation down at the bottom of the home page. And they just took all of their usual bound parchment, unbound parchment, sea shanties, and jelly tunes. In other words, where does the music live? Where does sheet music, sea views, maps, olden things, the archives, the cap and special things, special collections. You take what it is and you take whatever theme you're running with and pull it down into every detail. And again, they took it all the way down to all the website folks out there, all the way down into that secondary navigation, tertiary navigation, contextual navigation. They did it all. And they just kept on moving it over. And yeah, it's going to take work. It's going to take effort. It's going to take time. But for the people who are now visiting your website, it's going to be so much more fun. And just another example of even just the catalog search. The database is the second one and then journals and that sort of thing. And now back to that engaging. So back at the blind date, you had the write a personal ad. You can take your reference questions and turn them into pirate and actually submit the reference questions in pirate. So ahoyemi bani las. Have you any godforsaken reading things? What books do you have? Ahoyemi prambuti, do you know where lies here? This stashed away jelly tune. I'm looking for a song. Can you help me find it? Again, just if you can, take it as far as you can because you could have a lot of fun with it. And then your visitors will have a lot of fun with you. Speaking of fun, now there is one giant target on the calendar for doing fun stuff with your website. And that is April Fools. And unfortunately, I have not yet found, I have heard they exist, but I have not yet found evidence of a library that does a really good big April Fools Day hack with their website. If you have an example, please send it to me. I would love to get it into this. So the examples I'm going to show are all from the web, the commercial web or the web out in the world. And so we're just going to run through them because I don't want to linger too long. But again, you're going to see a lot of examples of go big or go home here. And it's just fun. Whole Foods. Now Whole Foods doesn't necessarily strike you as the kind of company that would do this sort of thing. But for the past several years, they have turned their homepage and even some secondary pages into not taking themselves seriously. They know that a lot of people think of them as whole paycheck. A lot of people think of them as bread and wallet still in some places. They know what people think of them. They know what perception is out there of them. And that they're for hippies and anybody else who's all about the eco-conscious friendly. And I am. So I'm saying this with love and admiration and looking at myself a little bit less seriously right this second. So I shop at Whole Foods all the time. But if you know what people think of you, you can play with that in your comedy and in things like this. So save money with refurbished spices. Favorite flavors that won't break the bank. On the right-hand side, they've got featured recipes for any Californians out there, banana slugs, burnt offerings. I mean, they know what people think of them. And now they play with that on April Fool's Day. Recycle your e-books here for a cleaner, greener tomorrow. Did I mention the unexpected? Comedy is in the unexpected. It's in taking something you think you know and turning it on its head. That's where fun is. That's where comedy is. And so in things like April Fool's, you can take, again, those perceptions and turn them on their heads and turn them right around. So this is a free e-books.net is the website. And now they're talking about recycling e-books. Have I got that one? Kodak, print your own live kittens. If you're going into CVS and you see the Kodak kiosk there to print your photos, now they're going to have a new service, you can print your own kittens. Does not work with elephants, though. That's coming in large format next year. No, I'm serious. They had that at the bottom of the page. It was just too far down. I couldn't get the screen capture of it. Just use what people know about you and turn it on its head. WebEx, a very popular online learning tool. WebEx plans new integration, angry birds in meetings. Make lots of the meetings I know so much better. Google Maps, Google has really gotten on board with this whole April Fool's Day hack. And most recently, back in 2012, did a hack where they gave an 8-bit option. So in other words, old timey arcade games, old timey video games. And they turned all the displays for the Maps into 8-bit versions. So it looks like you're playing and 1980s are a video game. And I know there's someone my age. I am hitting a very large birthday this year that has a four in it. And I know that someone my age who came up with this idea because this is exactly targeted at me and the people plus or minus five years on either side of me or even better, or their kids, because now their kids are actually all playing these things too, which is great. If you saw Wreck-it Ralph recently, then you know exactly what I'm talking about. That's a film. Anyway, so here's Boston. You can even do a quest. You can play the video game of the map. And you can start a quest moving through it. And they went all the way down to the street view and rendered it in 8-bit. And so again. Now, I want to know if you could have died. And take it all the way. I want to know if you could have died from dysentery during this. This is what happens when the presenter knows the clown behind the control panel. Anyway, so speaking of taking it all the way, to date, my all-time favorite for sheer committed to the concept-ness group on the daily deal site that's gotten so popular over the past couple of years. Last year, acquired, I'm using air quotes here, acquired April Fool's Day. They patented it, April Fool's Day. Not a particular prank, not a particular hack, the day. And they took this all the way. They had everything up on their website. They had more information. They had a standard patent line drawing and patent packet of information describing the patent and what it included. And all the technologies and the methodologies and the processes involved in it. That's what's on the right over there. And it's all in patentees. And it's eight and 10 pages long. And it's all in a PDF. And it's fantastic. And they had an entire section on the legal precedent of them owning the patent and copyright on April Fool's Day. And giving people the information they need to determine whether or not they're in violation of the patent that Groupon now owns on April Fool's Day. And then, of course, because they want to now capitalize on this, there's a prank shop where you can generate pranks. And there's little audio clips that we could do. And then you could download a prank phone call that you could then play for people over the phone. I mean, really, they just took it all the way. And it was perfect. And it was wonderful. And it was very, very deep. And if anybody wants the patent document, I can totally send it to you afterwards, because I'm not sure if it's still available. But I downloaded it in a heartbeat, because I thought it was great. If you want a good historical view of April Fool's Day website hacks, April Fool's Day on the web.org. Is that org? Lists all of them. And you can, or not all of them, but all that they could ever find. And there are hundreds of there that you can look at for reference. Meow Book and Happy Owls, as opposed to Angry Birds, are just two more of those. So I'm very quickly going to show you. You can do this as well. So we've talked about websites. We've talked about the physical space. We've talked about special occasions. We've talked about all sorts of things. You can also, of course, play with video. And the prevalence of YouTube and Vimeo and all of these just makes it even easier. And you could do it one of two ways. You could either generate the video yourself. So again, there's Craighead County. And they have the library TV show, fake TV show that they've produced at the library. And it's a comedy, and it's a sitcom, and it's historically and very darkly funny. And I highly recommend taking a look at it and poking through a couple of episodes. But this is actually created by the library itself. You can also, if you're a little more stately and serious, like the New York Public Library and specifically their US History Division, you could do something with a little bit more polish and panache because you're the New York Public Library and you can throw money at the problem. And actually do not a book trailer, not a movie trailer, but a library trailer. They actually created a trailer for the library experience as if it were a suspense film. And for US History, though. So again, I'm not trying to offend anybody, but what is popularly perceived to be a dry subject US History, they are now turning it on its head and turning it into a suspense thriller, turning it into a movie, and a movie that anybody can engage with. And so, again, you're taking this view, this perception, this stereotype, and flipping it around and turning it on its head and playing with it. And that's where the best comedy comes up, is when you flip things on your head and then one with it. You can also allow others to be funny on your behalf. And here's where the last few bits of advice I have on this topic are going to go. If you don't feel either your staff, your management, your administration, your governing bodies would appreciate the library being funny on its own, for whatever reasons, doesn't matter what they are, allow others to be funny for you. This is from the Harold B. Library at Brigham Young University. And clearly, this was created by a bunch of students, and probably in partnership with, but for the library. And it might have been the library's idea, it might have been the student's idea. I don't know the full story there. But it's clearly a bunch of students who are having fun and making life fun for the library. All of these slides are going to be available either directly through Encompass, or I'll have them up on my slide share account as well, this current version of this presentation, within the next 24 hours. So you'll have all these links as well. But I definitely, it's a short little video. It's only less than a minute long. And if we have time, I'll play it at the end. But definitely check it out, because it's, again, taking what was then a popular old-spice commercial and turning it around and turning on its head and incorporating it into the library. More recently, you might have heard of Gangnam Style, which is a Korean video, a video by a Korean rap artist that just absolutely took the internet by storm over last year. And everybody was making parodies of it. And the McKeldin Library at UMD took it. And again, I don't know whether it was officially sanctioned by the library, whether it was simply tolerated by the library, encouraged by the library. But this one student, the guy in the front, got together a whole bunch of his friends and eventually the marching band and put them all together into this parody video of this rap song, of this music video, and using the library as a center point and as a focal piece. And so it was absolutely student-generated, that much I know for sure, and student-created, and was done wonderfully and beautifully. And now the library has this bit of funny that they didn't again didn't have to shell out any money for. They just had to give permission for people to do it. And now they have this thing that showcases the library as a positive space to be for students. Can't do any better than that. Which brings me to my last point. You have to be able to laugh at yourself. Again, I'm not saying that you should be inappropriately funny when times call for seriousness. There are times to be serious. But there are times to lighten up and to look at yourself and see your own selves, your departmental selves, your organizational selves, your institutional selves. And look at that and see where you can take yourself a little less seriously and just bring a little bit of that spark back. Pun, stealth pun, didn't mean to do that. And one of those things is find out where people are having fun in your library and then capitalize on it. I walked into work one day. Yes, I passed this bust. I'm in the older building. The Boston Public Library's main location downtown is comprised of two different buildings next to each other. And I'm in the older one of the two, which is to say it was built in the late 1800s. And so we have a lot of old stuff, including this bust of Jared Sparks. Get it, Sparks? On the way in. And I came in one day morning after a weekend. And we do have events at the library. We have weddings and corporate events and all sorts of stuff. And clearly, there had been a wedding over the weekend. It was a Jewish wedding. And I know this, because sitting on top of Mr. Sparks's head is a yarmulke, which is typically given out at Jewish weddings for the men to wear to cover their heads. And with the name of the couple and the date of the wedding inscribed on the inside. And so I come in, and I'm greeted with Mr. Sparks wearing a souvenir from the weekend's wedding. And I just fell over by self laughing. Aren't we having a good party at the library now? And again, it's completely contextual. Out of context, this is funny, but it's not remotely as funny as it is to me. But it's still funny. And anybody who's familiar with the building and has passed by this bust, which is in a fairly prominent place next to a fairly high traffic door, will see this and think it's hysterical. So I, of course, sent it along to a snap picture. And if you've got a smartphone or a cell phone with a camera, this is the best tool ever for the funny. Because you can be out in the world and you can see all sorts of things, like that subway advertisement from sovereign on the subway. And you can get the best inspiration. It's just by snapping pictures with your cell phone camera. I took this photo with my cell phone, with my iPhone camera. Jennifer, I'm going to interrupt you for just a sec. You're starting to silent just a little with your audio, so I'm just going to take over, let you pause for a moment, and hopefully, they'll kind of clear itself up. No, it's actually getting worse. There, there, let me, let me. I had another. Try again. It's actually getting worse. Right now, when I'm speaking? Yes. Okay, I just switched over to my different mic, which means it's my connection. I will just show last few. They're pretty clear, not just from the visuals. Okay, that sounds like a good plan. Michael. Yes, go ahead. How am I sounding? You sound great. Fine, fine, okay. Actually, Jennifer, if you want to go back a couple of slides, I think we can, oh, there's Jennifer herself, by the way. Yeah, obviously, we can do some, you know, earlier, this is, they had anime Boston attendees at the public library did a photo shoot, bring in local groups, obviously. On the next slide I saw was calendars. Two groups that did library-themed calendars. The men of Texas libraries, and the tattooed ladies of TLA, Texas Library Association. The tattooed ladies, well, I actually had that year, the one that they had that calendar, which was the, what, 2010, 11? And there's been other groups that have done the same kind of thing of calendars of librarians or tattooed librarians or anything. Praise me, I actually have the one in my office right now that is the Massachusetts, the teen librarians, teen tattooed librarians, who use librarians of Massachusetts Library Association. I thought I got that one in my office right now. I am not in there. You're not in there? No, it should be. And now these, bibliophilies and librarians of the apocalypse. Burlesque show, yes. Oh, yes, I see, I was talking about this, yep. Trying to read what this slide is here. This was a book. Librarians get a discount for getting in, that's very cool. And this is Jennifer herself, in case anyone's wondering, this is our speaker is this morning. I love the cape, I've got to say. Me too. Any chance it's cleared up? Not much. But Michael said, you said you saw her talk about this before, I don't know if you could... Well, I... Speak to what this is about. I can try. Two words, watch language. Just read that and think about what it means. You're sounding good, keep going. Oh, okay. Yes, so vegetarian, it's what's for dinner. So this is of course a play on meat, it's what's for dinner, or beef, it's what's for dinner. But when you change the noun, it changes the meaning. And when you say vegetarian, it's what's for dinner. You are in fact referring to eating vegetarians, not to eating a vegetarian diet. So have people sanity check your comedy before you put it out in the world. Have people who are not you look at it because this was an actual advertisement, as you can tell, on a bus in Boston. And it's, I know what they wanted to do, I could see where they wanted to take it, but man, did they just not do it right. So when you talk about comedy not going quite right, it can really go not right, where you could offend someone and you could just cross that line or jump right past it, but then it could just slightly not go right and leave people scratching their heads and going, what? So, and by the way, the bibliopholies, that was actually a postcard advertisement that was up at Internet Librarian this past fall to try and entice people to get up to the California Library Association Conference, which was I think the following weekend or some such, and to go to this burlesque show that was librarian themed because it was being held at the same time as the State Library Conference. So you wanna talk about playing with stereotypes and turning them on, I mean, to be frank, and again, pushing that line a little bit, it plays with one librarian stereotype of being very laid back or a very staid and here on the bun and the glasses and the whole line yards, and then turns it into the quote unquote sexy librarian stereotype that they were clearly playing with at the burlesque. So it, comedy, as I've said several times, comedy is about taking what we think we know, taking stereotypes, taking what's out there, flipping it on its head, and then presenting it in a way that shows that you're aware of the stereotype and you're aware of what you're doing with it. And you can have a lot of fun, you can start small, you can go big, but whatever you do, be fully committed to whatever you're trying to do because, you know, if you're on thin ice, tap dance, just you gotta, you have to run with it. The worst joke is the one where you stop halfway through and go, ha, funny question mark. So whatever you do, no matter how big, no matter how small, take it and go all the way with it. And there we are. Thank you very much, everybody. Textual, oh, thank you, everybody. Exactly. Yeah, it's, I've now seen this a couple of times and you obviously updated too, but even the stuff that I know I've seen before, I was still laughing at kind of as we were going along. And so it can be done right. Let me ask this one question, we don't have a lot of time, but we can go along a little bit. Let's say you give it a shot and it just doesn't work and or you actually get complaints. What is your advice for dealing with that? Because obviously you can do something that's very funny, but somebody could also be very offended. First of all, own it. Absolutely, 100%, do not shrug it off, do not ignore it, do not in any way, shape, or form or pretend it didn't happen. Own it, own up to it and say that what you were doing was trying to be funny. If I have time, I could go grab a screenshot of a letter that we got from, that I use Dreamhost as a web hosting service for some other websites that I run and they did an April Fool's Day hack of saying that they had been bought out by one of their stiffest and most annoying competitors. And people went nuts. They went absolutely off the rails and they were all like, oh my God, we're leaving, cancel my accounts, blah, blah, blah. And to their credit, Dreamhost did exactly the right thing. They turned right around, sent out a blast to everybody who subscribed with them and said, whoa, whoa, check your calendars. April Fool's Day, it's April Fool's Day. We clearly touched a nerve, though, and we're very sorry. We are really sorry. No, we haven't been acquired. No, nothing is changing. Everything is fine. And of course, the level of owning it is completely dependent on how big of a gaffe it is. If it's something small, you just apologize to the person and say, hi, I'm sorry, this is an April Fool's Day joke or this is a, you know, we were trying to be a little bit funny. We're sorry you're offended if it's, if you really think we should remove it, we'll consider that as well. But if it's something big and you get a flood of complaints, go big and also just send out an email blessing, hi, many of you have written in to let us know that you found our website today very inappropriate and not funny. We apologize, we were trying to do this and we didn't do it well. We are sorry. It's been removed. We're going to not do that again. Because as we have all seen in the news over and over again, large organizations get into trouble when something goes wrong and they don't address it. So absolutely, if you've crossed too many lines all at once and you've bumped up on too many toes, find that out however you can and then address it immediately. Don't wait, don't hesitate. Don't wait for perfect crafting for legal. Just get something out there. And then when the legal department catches up and go blah, blah, blah, blah, you're fine. You guys craft a response. We're just going to address the problem and just get it out there and do it as fast as you can. And as sincerely as you can. Yeah, that's great advice. Thanks. And basically I will second that. Own it. As if you follow the news with lots of different things, when it goes really wrong is when somebody tries to say, no, I didn't say that or whatever and it's the internet. They can find it whether you take it down or not. So. And more importantly, that same ownership will do exactly the same thing as the comedy you were trying to do in the first place. It will show them that you are real people, that you really care, and that you were trying to do this one thing and as soon as you got enough feedback from people saying, wow, that was not okay, you responded to that and reacted well to that. And that's a positive message that will go all the way. It will do as much or possibly even more as your attempt at comedy in the first place. So don't be afraid of it. Ben Bizzle says the same thing. Don't be afraid to try. But when you try and fail, own the failure. Own it immediately and own it sincerely and fully. And then people will be, they might be a little skittish if you wanna try something else. But they won't say, no, never again, this is never a good idea. They'll say, yeah, let's dial it down a little bit next time, shall we? Sure. Because it got a response. Yeah, definitely. So one other comment from Dave in South Sioux City that they've done a wisdom from the back bumper column that has featured humor stickers. So. Nice, excellent. That's great. All right, Jennifer, thanks. Once again, I'm gonna go ahead and take back control for just a few minutes. I usually kind of do some news items in that for the month since this is Tech Talk. So I just wanna show you, I got four quick things I wanna show folks. One. Ooh, Willem Branch. Yep, two things that I was reminded of from the presentation itself is there is a library signage flicker pool which I started years and years ago and has almost 500 folks contributing. So some of them are funny, some of them are serious, some of them over the years have been signs that everybody ended up absolutely despising. But there's a lot of great just examples in this that you might wanna take a look at. We'll provide all these links in the show notes. There is also a 404 file not found flicker group. So I, you know, dead link from Zelda here, face palm from Captain Park. Lots of great examples. Just a little over 439 examples right now there. So just kind of some related examples if you're looking for some inspiration from that. The two kind of news items that I wanted to show, one quick thing, we've talked about passwords and password security in the past on this. And Jennifer's like, yeah, in fact, bringing the funny one ring to rule the wall. We've talked also about two factor authentication with Google in the past. Whereas if I log into my Google account from a new computer, I have to respond to a text message of being sent to my phone. So not only do I need the password, I also need my phone with me to work. Google is looking into replacing passwords with actual physical objects that might communicate with your computer over things like Bluetooth and whatnot. What they're suggesting is maybe, you know, you wear a ring that proves you are you. I don't want to get into a lot of details as to how this will work or whether or not it's practical, but it's a piece of news I thought that some folks listening to show might be interested in. The other website I stumbled over, which doesn't really deserve its own show, but I wanted to show people, if you've ever been in a conference in a room where you want to maybe project what people are saying on Twitter, up on the wall or something like that, I love this one, I just, turns out I knew about it from years ago, I had completely forgotten about it, rediscovered it, but if I wanted to say, see what people are searching about Encompass Live or saying about Encompass Live, I can do this search. And I don't know how well the animations are going across, but this is quite a nice way to be. It looks actually really good. It is coming across well good. Yeah, it looks good. It's doing the search, it's doing these animations. I think it's a great way to maybe display what's going on with Twitter to a larger group, maybe to a state conference, larger conference, things like that. So just something visible tweets.com that you might want to take a look at. And then the last thing I'm gonna mention, and before I hand it over to Krista to wrap this up, is again, big talk from Small Libraries 2013. The schedule has been announced, it's on February 28th, it's gonna run for nine solid hours. On that, I believe it's a Thursday. Krista correct me if I'm wrong, but it is definitely February 28th. We're getting speaker bios up. The schedule is up. We have well over 200 people already registered to attend. We'd like to beat our numbers of last year, which was about 450. So sign up. Again, we'll provide the link or you can just search Big Talk from Small Libraries in Google and that will come right up for you and you can get registered and find out all about the conference. I'm gonna put that out there. So with that, that's gonna go ahead and wrap up Tech Talk. And I know- Michael? Yep. Michael, I just wanted to back up to that thing about the Google password and wearing something or having something physical. That's actually something that's been done already in some places for, I don't know how many years ago, a few years ago, Blizzard company that does games, World of Warcraft, Diablo. They actually have, they call their authenticator, which I have one. That is a physical thing that you, when you log into your account after logging in with your name and password, then you have to use this thing to get a random number generated and enter that as well. Yep. And that's a level of authentication. Right, and that's kind of how when Google sends me a text message on my phone, that kind of works the same way. In this case though, what they're saying is instead of it showing you say a number or a code you have to type in, just its physical presence near your computer would indicate that you are you. They're kind of taking it the next step. So yeah, it's kind of an interesting possibilities there. So yeah, but yeah, it is based off of some existing technology and thanks for pointing that out. So okay, Krista, you probably wanna wrap this up here. So I'm gonna go ahead and give you control for a few minutes. No. No, no, that's not necessary. Okay. Just go ahead and show. I'll take it back. No, just keep it there. That's fine. Just go ahead and go to the end of the slide website. Gotcha, I can do that. Dimpler, easier, that's what it is. There we go. There we go. Okay, all right, yes. Thank you very much, Michael, for your tech talk information this week. And Jennifer, thank you so much for being on. That was very cool, very interesting. I got lots of ideas from it, definitely. And as was mentioned, all of the links that were in that PowerPoint will be added to the commission's delicious account, as we do every week. So they'll be available when the recording goes up. And the presentation, I believe Jennifer, hopefully you'll send it to us. We can put it into our slide share account or link to hers. I'll be all available out there for you to take a look at. Next week, I hope you'll join us. We have the first part of, as you can see here on our schedule, our three-part series about digital preservation. We have staff from the Historical Society, is who I believe they are. Let me check here, sir. Yes. Yes, who are going to be showing how to use Library of Congress training modules that are about doing digital preservation. And it's a three-part series, as you can see there, on different parts of it. So they'll be debuting the different parts of that that you can use. And the first part is next week. In the middle there, we have Seed Saving for Libraries, who Dave McStorff, who was online with us today, will be talking about having a Seed Library in your library. And we'll see what that's all about. So hopefully you'll join us next week for the start of that series. And also, Encompass Live is on Facebook. So if you do use Facebook, please go ahead and like us there. You'll get announcements there of one of our new shows coming up, when the recordings are ready, anything that we find that's of interest and related to the shows that we do, we'll put up there on our Encompass Live Facebook page. So other than that, I think we are done for the day. Any last minute things, guys? No, I'm good. No, I'm all set. Thank you for having me as usual. Yeah, thanks a lot. And thank you, everyone. Anyone who is dealing with the snow, be safe. And thank you for attending. And we'll see you next week. Bye-bye. Bye.