 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I'm your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover various things, variety of things that would be interest to libraries. The show is broadcast live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time, but it is recorded every week, so if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. You can always go to our website later and watch the recording. And I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can see all of those archives. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of our topics, send them to our website and they can register for any of our upcoming shows or watch our archives. We do a mixture of things here on Encompass Live's, book reviews, interviews, mini-training sessions, demos of services and products, basically anything library-related that is our only criteria. The Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for all libraries in the state, providing training, consulting, grants, all sorts of resources. So we serve all libraries, public, academic, school, K-12 schools, special, correctional libraries, anything and everything. And that is the not focus of, a broad focus of Encompass Live, anything for any types of libraries. So you will find lots of sessions that will cover, there should be something for anybody who works, or is related or interested in libraries. We do have Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes do do presentations for programs or services or things that we're offering here specifically in Nebraska, but we do bring in guest speakers as well. And as we have this morning on the line with us from just next door in Iowa, not too far away, from the Marion, Iowa Public Library is Madeleine Jarvis. Hi, Madeleine. Hi, thanks for having us, Krista. And Rachel Polari, and Chanel Slater over there, just off the edge almost. And they're going to be talking about providing teen services. This is a very popular topic, of course, teen youth services and libraries. So I'm just going to hand over to you guys to tell us what you've come up with for your library. Sure. First of all, thank you so much, Krista, for welcoming us and the entire team over at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is such a great resource for libraries across the country and we're just thrilled to join your programming lineup. Thank you. So our topic today kind of is looking at what we're doing after school, throughout all hours, to really welcome the teens in our community. We're looking at our teen services without teen spaces and some of the innovative programming that has been proven successful for us. So in this webinar, we're going to talk about how our programs and community relationships are blossoming thanks to new staffing models and our programming resources. So where are we and who are we? Marion is a part of what's called the Creative Corridor in eastern Iowa. We're adjacent to Cedar Rapids, pretty close to Iowa City, if that helps folks navigate us. And Marion is a rapidly growing community. We're at about 40,000 residents and this is a 46% increase since the year 2000. So there are a lot of people moving in. One of the city's brand promises is that Marion is the best place in Iowa to start a family and to start a business. So we see a lot of creative folks. We see a lot of young families moving in. So it's a really exciting time to be a part of this community. The library sits in the heart of it all in our historic Uptown Marion district. We're the sixth busiest library in the state of Iowa based on our circulation. And we see about 1000 people come through our doors every day. Marion serves patrons as part of the Metro Library Network. We are a shared library catalog with the libraries at our neighbors, Cedar Rapids and Hiawatha. But we are separate libraries reporting to separate boards. So Marion is kind of that right sized library. We're small enough that we can try changes and really see the difference, but we're big enough to have those resources to play around. So in our presentation, we're going to talk about how our ideas can be scaled up or scaled down depending on what your community looks like. Another thing that's interesting about Marion, especially in the teen realm, we serve users from four distinct schools. There are two public school districts within Marion, Marion Independent and then the Linn-Mar district which serves Marion as well as some of the rural students. There's a parochial school and we're a part of the largest homeschool assistant program in the state of Iowa. And students open and roll from up to two hours away because of this program's strength. And geographically, we are only two blocks away from one of the middle school schools. So at about 306, would you say? That's when the Vernon flood comes. And so we really see great after school numbers thanks to our proximity to the schools. So despite all this, there's not really a teen specific space in our library or in our community. And just so you know, I know we all talk about our users in different ways, our patrons in different ways. For the purpose of our presentation and in our library, we usually define teens as our middle school and high school students. So our school districts have middle schoolers from fifth through eighth grade and high school is nine through 12. So when you hear us use the word teen, if we're referring to a younger group, we still say teen as well. And these are some of our awesome programs that we have done in the past. And I'm going to let Rachel talk a little bit more about our department growth as well as walk you through some of the pictures. And by the way, that photo on the left is basically my dream breakfast. I want to know what that is. That looks like. So under these pictures quickly, we hosted the picture on the left is from our doughnut diorama day, which we did with our local chain of grocery stores, Heidi. I think there's some had these in Nebraska as well. Oh, yeah, Heidi's big here. They donated all the doughnuts for us. And we also partnered with the local Marion Police Department. And basically we brought in a bunch of police officers and invited our teens to come in and build structures out of doughnuts with these police officers. So it was a great way for them to work with police officers in a non-confrontational or non-official capacity. It was just bringing them together to talk with each other and just kind of have fun. That was one of the other awesome structures as well. The second picture from the left is actually the winners of our big summer reading prizes. Last year we had a limo ride donated and they won some like fidget spinners and sunglasses and got to go take a limo ride to the local Dairy Queen. So that's them posing with their prizes about to get in the limo. The next one is we partnered with a local organization called HACAP, a family alliance. They do a lot of nutritional and food related assistance in our community. And we had a couple of members from HACAP come in and actually teach a series of nutrition and gardening. And so that's our teens outside our library, planting seeds and plants in boxes and watching them grow. And then at the end, they were in charge of kind of keeping up that garden. And at the end, they helped prepare a meal for their families using kind of the skills and tools that they learned. And then our final picture, painting the pumpkins. We hosted last October a after hours lock in for our teens. We had some just various activities. We played a ghost in the graveyard in our library among the stacks and also had a paranormal team, a local paranormal team who do some ghost hunting stuff, come in and talk to them. And they also got to paint pumpkins and design pumpkins around the you know, the autumn season. So that was really great for us. So those are those are just a few of our photos explaining what we've a couple of the programs we've done. So our department has grown immensely. And even just in the last year or two years, we saw an increase in attendance and related to that, we increased our staff due to some retirements. We managed our library managed to create a position for a full time library assistant, specifically 14 services in January, February of last year. That is my position. And then last June, we did also hire another part time teen services specialist, Chanel. And also we among all that, we the teen services department shifted from being in the youth services area. And we switched it over to the adult services staffed, you know, led by Madeleine. And so the department's kind of changed and grown. And we're, you know, learning kind of still our footing and working on, you know, working together and working forward. And it's been really great for us. We have also recently as a library been crafting a new strategic plan and working on what our teen departments goals are within this library wide strategic plan. Our main thing is we want to prioritize risk taking and radical customer service within our strategic plan, but especially for teens and, you know, taking risks and seeing what works for them, what they want and and being radical in the way that we serve them and help them in our help them in our community. And then finally, we recently also started our teen volunteer program for many years. Our volunteer program, our policy was offering volunteer opportunities for those 18 years old and up. And so we recently were able to modify that volunteer policy. So officially, our policy says 16 and up, but it also does include the caveat that if you're under 16, you can still fill out an application and feel free to volunteer. We just launched it officially last month in March. Right now, we are focusing mostly on ages 13 to 15 and bringing kind of that age group and then anyone 16 and up can work with the general volunteer program. But we kind of crafted it in a sort of, you know, gamification sort of way where they they all start at the same level and then they get to level up and do, you know, more to help. Our first level is a lot of, you know, just making sure the library is safe and clean and, you know, general cleaning duties. They get to help out with some of the programs. And then once they level up, they get to start doing some of the shelving and, you know, keeping keeping sections in order. And then our kind of final big step is they get to help start kind of plan programs and kind of create, you know, the teen advisory board that we don't have currently in place. But we're working towards with this volunteer program. And we're really excited about it, really excited to see it grow. Currently, we have five teens volunteering. The last two just just added this this past these past couple weeks. But in March, we had three teens actively participating and they have already contributed 25 hours of volunteer, you know, volunteer work to the library. So that's really great to see. And we're really excited to see that. One more thing, which off the slides here, one other thing we are really proud of that we have recently created is our teen life page. We used to have a resource called Tough Topics for Teens. You might have seen it. It went a little viral a couple of years ago. It was just a poster of not from us. It was from from someone else and we got the idea from them. But it was just a poster of, you know, different topics that teens might have questions about and listed next to them or their druidesimal numbers. So we had made a similar resource for our teens and decided that we wanted to kind of revamp it for our community. And we were, you know, browsing, looking online. And we spotted the Denver Public Libraries page. And they just called it life under their teen Evolver page. And we really liked that phrasing. So we took that and kind of ran with it. Just like the Denver Public Library, we ended up creating a bunch of local community resources. As you can see, we've got print, as we say, print online and local area resources for a variety of subjects. So we created this page for our teens to to look at and and see. And we've got everything, you know, current events, you know, domestic violence, adoption and foster care, gender and sexuality, gender identity, anxiety, pregnancy, school and social media, just all sorts of topics for them that are relevant to them that they may have questions about that. You know, they don't know where to to go or, you know, who to who to ask. And so we're really excited to provide this kind of resource. This was also very recently launched, but we're very excited about it. And, you know, we know it has already seen some use. So we're really thrilled and and hope to to continue adding to and updating the resources as we find them. But we're really excited about that. So we'll go back to the slide here. All right. So within our department, we have a very heavy focus on programs because like Madeline was saying, we have a middle school right down the road. So we see a lot of after school traffic. As you can see with our program numbers, July 2015 through June of 2016, our fiscal year, 15 to 16. Our program numbers, we didn't have a specifically dedicated teen staff person. Our program numbers were sitting right about 343 teens for that entire fiscal year. July 2016 through June 2017, when we first started focusing a little more on teen programs, especially the latter half of that year, we saw, as you can see, a huge jump in our teen numbers and teen engagement, massive jump. Mostly mostly from middle schoolers, the middle schoolers down the road, coming to the library and after school and realizing that, oh, we do have things to do and, you know, they're fun things. And, you know, they want to come hang out at programs. And then this year after, you know, creating the full time services and the specialist position last year in 2017, just this year, July 2017 through April 10th, as of yesterday, we've seen 2,000, excuse me, 2,871 teens at our programs. A lot of them repeat teens, but that means they're just excited to come and, you know, be at the library and participate. And we're astounded and tired and, you know, really thrilled that they are here and they want to, you know, come hang out at the library and work with us and have a place to go in a community that doesn't have a lot of places for them. So, obviously, in our community, there is a demand for, you know, teen spaces and we're happy to provide it and hope that, you know, in the future, our community can grow even more and have even more space for them. And we're excited about that. So. And if we get to 4,000 teens that come to a program in a fiscal year, we've been promised a piece of parties. We're even more excited for next year. And like Rachel was saying, part of the reason for our increase in attendance is because we have more staffing. Mary Ann is growing in population. And of course, we're still close to that middle school. But another reason is that we've really taken time to form relationships with the teens who are coming after school, the ones that we're seeing without reach and ones who are visiting the information desk or the little teen space that we have for the young adult novels are. Another thing that we've been doing is pulling our teens. We have made it valid and brought them to outreach. We bring them to the teens who come to our after school programs. An example of this was our Teen Fandemonium Week. It was one of my favorite programs that we did. It was during spring break. So for about a month, we took votes from the teens about which fandom is their favorites, like Harry Potter, Dr. Who. Percy Jackson, who else was in our Marvel and DC? Yeah, anime and anime, exactly. So it was really fun to get everyone involved. We went to the local high schools. We went to some behavioral centers. And when you get to hear the voice of your teens, I think it really gives them agency. They know that their voice matters and has a direct impact on programming in the library and community events. So that's been really nice. Always trying to figure out, I guess, what their interests are. And obviously they're going to come if they're more interested in that. And that also ties into our regular weekly programming schedule. Rachel is the one who informally talked to the teens last year and asked them what kind of programs they're most interested in. And Rachel can tell you a little bit about. We had a lot of interest in kind of a global interest in learning about other cultures and a little bit of learning language. They we've had an anime club that's been pretty popular through even through, you know, it started before I got here, I think, you know, 2014, 2015. And it's been kind of our consistent program. And so they love learning about other cultures and engaging with other cultures. So that became our regular weekly travel Tuesdays program where every week we talk about a different culture. Usually we'll bring in some sort of small snack if they have one available. I think we did when we did the England kind of UK, we brought in Turkish delight from, you know, the Narnia universe. And then we usually have like a film or a short clip that they can sit and watch and kind of learn about different cultures. Sometimes it's more like documentary. Sometimes like for France, we just watched a cat in Paris. We have the licensing for it and watched a cat in Paris with with the French and then English subtitles. And they're they're really excited to learn about the different cultures and engage with it in that way. We also have had a huge interest in our game days. We've had a couple of our friends donated a couple of TVs and a few slightly outdated gaming systems a few years ago. But they love playing Mario Kart on the Wii. They love Minecraft on our Xbox. Super Smash Brothers has been really great, too. So we've started working on expanding our video game offerings as well as completely overhauling our board game collection to include more age appropriate or, you know, strategy games that were more, you know, at the team level versus, you know, some of the some of the younger games, which are still fun to play and they still love a game of Twister. But, you know, they they're really engaged in kind of the more modern strategy games. We also last summer had an entire game week. And there were a bunch of regulars that came and they were like, you know, we should really play Dungeons and Dragons. And I was like, well, hey, let's do it at the library. I knew absolutely nothing about Dungeons and Dragons. But one of the kids was like, no, I'll lead a group. So we started meeting regularly and that has completely grown. We now have three Dungeons and Dragons groups that meet once a month and then also a Pathfinder group that meets once a week. And so that's been really awesome to see, too. It's really great to see them take the initiative and and lead these groups. And it's it's a really great model for, you know, leadership and and also cooperation and teamwork. So that's been really exciting to see. And so game our game days are Wednesdays, our role play groups. Pathfinder meets regularly Wednesdays, even later. And then Dungeons and Dragons meets once a month Thursdays. Along with our kids department, we partnered with a local organization called Marion Cares. And they Marion Cares brings in a bunch of other community organizations like a local robotics club or the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts. And it's open to kids, ages, kindergarten through 12th grade. And they come in and have a program every Thursday. And then another thing we really the team saw the teens really talking about was, you know, technology and kind of the the maker, the steam aspects. So every Friday, we have a Steam Fridays program where we do all sorts of things from making slime, which they love. We'll do a lot of engineering things, building bridges at a newspaper and seeing which one can hold the most weight, you know, building straw towers, really getting, you know, their their hands on materials and experimenting and having a space to do that. So that's what we do every week. Like I said, we like we said, we've got that middle school right down the road. So that plays a huge part into our attendance numbers and because of the lack of other resources in our community and really a space here in the library, we kind of have to craft or, you know, like to to provide that space for them within our programs that we offer for them to come to us. So we found that having these regular after school programs is really necessary and needed in our community. So that is a that's a very impressive jump there in this in the attendance. That's awesome. Yeah, a little overwhelming. So, yes, one of the things we found, one of the the lessons that we've learned that we think is really great for any size library is just recycling the programs that are successful. We, like I mentioned, when we had the slides of the pictures of our teams, we we had a lock in and our team lock ins have been have been consistently successful. And we found even some of the simpler stuff about the lock ins, like playing Ghost in the Graveyard or just playing hide and seek. All you need is a closed library and some safety rules and bodies. And they will play hide and seek for three hours and have a blast. You know, Nerf gun wars are kind of the big thing in libraries right now. But, you know, if you don't have the budget or can't find a way to to get those Nerf guns seriously, hide and seek is awesome. They will have a blast, especially if whoever's hosting the librarians can get it on it, too. They love they love doing that. They'll astound you with the creative places they can find to hide. Just just thinking about it in terms of, you know, what games can we play with just us and, you know, a space after hours? And that's been a really great approach for us. And also, like I mentioned, they love gaming, any kind of gaming thing. They can get their hands on the love it. So we find an excuse to throw games in wherever we can. Like I said, hide and seek is a game. And so that's been also really successful for us. And that's a great, a great way to approach programming, especially if something's successful. Just, you know, keep offering it. And the more you offer it, the more chances you get to interact with your teams and the more you get to, you know, know them and hopefully drive new people and find out, you know, what else they want to explore and kind of branch off from that way. And part of the growth and staffing has also meant that we have a little bit more time to do some targeted outreach. So Rachel goes to one of the parochial schools here in town. I go to one of the high schools and I also go to four Oaks. I don't know if that's just an IMO organization, but for folks who are unfamiliar, they serve kids and teens who have either gotten into legal trouble. They might have psychiatric and emotional problems. They might be in a transition for housing. And they just might have challenges with traditional classrooms. So some of these teens can't come to the library and they don't even get to go out to go to school because they have a school on campus. So that was a demographic of teens we weren't reaching before. I found their program director on their website, just emailed them and said, hey, can we come in and either do some fine forgiveness? Or we brought in some of our discarded books that they can keep in their library there because one of their concerns was a lot of these teens don't stay there for longer than a couple months. So they were concerned about having a library card and building up fines. We've done a lot of fine forgiveness, building up their own library. And we are also doing some recycling of programs. So if I hear that Rachel's STEAM program that she did at one of the local middle schools was really popular, then I'm going to recycle that, grab those same materials and bring it to four Oaks. And it's been a great way to also give them a little bit of structure. Every Friday, they don't have school on campus. So for one of those Fridays each month, I will go out to their campus and at least provide you their learning opportunity or something fun for them to do. And another thing that's been really either free or low cost has been reaching out to other community organizations and bringing them in for after school programming. So you can see all the logos down below of folks that we've worked with. And I do a lot of travel to stay programming. So I've reached out to some of the museums that we have in Cedar Rapids and Marion. One of them is the National Check and Slow Focke Museum and Library, African American Museum of Ottawa. They have education teams who are used to doing outreach and are really excited about it. So our teams might not be able to make it into Cedar Rapids and make that drive or have the transportation. So it's been really nice to bring those organizations here on campus. So that way they still get to experience that. Catherine McCauley Center is another one. It's a women's shelter, but it's also a resource for immigrants and refugees. So we talked about that with Travel Tuesday. What's the differing makeup of Marion since we've exploded in growth? That means we're also getting new sorts of neighbors. So that kind of equip teens with some of the language they can use with some new kids that they see at school. We've done yoga with the YMCA for our high schoolers, different after school programs. That was free. The Cedar Rapids brand page, that's one of our soccer teams. We have a soccer and an indoor football team in hockey. And they'll come out at low cost or for free. It's another exciting opportunity. Corridor Therapy Dogs, that's been one of the most popular. We've been bringing them in after the first day of school or during finals. And it's a volunteer group and they have some amazing dogs and they just bring them out to the library. Teens get to read to them or just like lay on the floor and hang out with them. It's so much fun. And we do let them know beforehand or let the teens know that we're going to be having dogs. And so there are any allergy issues they know will be coming in. So really utilize those community partners because they're either free or low cost, which is really nice in businesses. I know Rachel Rudd and Rockwell Collins. Yeah, I mean, Rockwell Collins is really big in the Cedar Rapids area, one of the largest employers in Cedar Rapids. And they're, you know, engineering, aviation, all sorts of things. And they they have, again, educational resources. And they have an outreach show that they do to a lot of the local schools. But it's free and we invited them to come to the library. And so the teens, they came to the library. Teens got to see, you know, a balloon within a balloon being popped. But the outside balloon wasn't popped. It was just the inside balloon and it was done with lasers. They got to see that they brought in some liquid nitrogen and they got to eat marshmallows after they had been dipped in the liquid nitrogen. And so just really cool, awesome stuff. So, you know, I definitely encourage anyone to just explore what's out there in the community, even if you don't, like us, really have a lot of teen specific resources in your community. There's a lot of organizations out there that are really happy to, you know, scale what they have for teens or, you know, just bring what they have for teens and the teens will likely surprise you and be, you know, very engaged in what's going on because they're just excited to see something new. So, yeah, you have to insert one, but that was really fun from the University of Iowa's Museum of Arts. They brought one of their education collections and it was African art and they had these huge wooden masks that would have been used for teens right around 11 to 14. And so it was really nice. It was targeted to our teen audience that we see after school. So that was a really cool cultural connection for them. All right, future plans. So like they were saying before, we're really close to a middle school. That's kind of our bread and butter, but we want to reach out to more high schoolers in the area. We want to meet them where they are. So that means maybe high schoolers aren't comfortable or don't have enough time, don't have the transportation to actually make it into the physical library. So we've been doing outreach, going to their book clubs that are already established at the high schools. Another thing that we did was having an Instagram worthy latte art program, which was really fun. I informally asked some of the teens at the book clubs, where do you guys go to study if you don't come to the library specifically for that purpose? Where do you end up? She said, you know, we either stay at home or we go to some of the local coffee shops and there's a coffee shop that's closer to one of the high schools. So I reached out to Mr. Beans and said, would it be okay if I brought some teens over there and you can either show them how to do latte art, or we can just complain about Instagram's new algorithm or we can look at rainbow latte art on Instagram. So it was a really fun way to get some of the teens together and support a local business as well. What was really fun is that we had representation from two of the high schools. They're saying before we have both Lenmar and Marion, and sometimes they don't interact except for sports games when they might be facing each other. So it was good to have them there, engaging in conversation together. You want to talk a little bit about home school? Yeah. So like Madeline mentioned, our home school program in Marion is the largest in the state. And so we're really hoping and aiming to focus on some more homeschool specific or more actively engaging our homeschool population because there's a lot of students out there that are homeschooled. And we do see some of them in the library, but it's definitely an untapped resource or an untapped source of teens. And we want to make sure that we're providing for them too. And we're looking forward to engaging that demographic, that that part of our of our teen population. And we also we offer a ton of after school programs, as you see, but we've also got some kids don't like anime, so they don't want to come hang out at our anime club. And so they go into the library and they don't really have a space that's theirs to hang out in. We've got kind of a crammed corner where we keep all our young adult books, but it's right next to our adult computer area. And so a lot of times they'll end up on the computers and that's great. They can find ways to keep busy. But a lot of times, you know, they might get a little disruptive because they're bored, they don't want to participate in our program. We've got a bunch of kids over there participating in the program, but a couple of teens don't want to hang out. And so we're hoping to expand to reach them too for the for the teens who don't want to come to our programs or if we don't have a program that day to create what we're going to call teen activity kits, which are just going to be like backpacks. They can check out that have like a pack of cards and, you know, a couple of books about, you know, magic tricks with cards and different card games. So it's just another way that we can reach them and, you know, give them something to do so they can choose which kit they want to check out and, you know, take that with them to a space that, you know, is not theirs in the library because we don't necessarily have that space, but have something that is just for them to take into a space and play with and experiment with and make it a little more of a portable space for them versus, you know, an actual physical one. So we're excited to work on developing that. Yeah, another thing that is really crucial for us. We've got about between 30 and 40 staff members here at Marion. And three people on specifically working with teens. But we find that staff communication is extremely important, as well as education, both for ourselves and then also our other staff members. So Chanel is going to talk a little bit about that. Yeah, so part of this new strategic plan. Oh, Rachel, I want to interrupt this for a second because we do have a question actually about your previous slide. The teen activity kids, you said you're still working on those, correct? Yes, yes, we don't. They're they're mostly a concept right now. We've got some ideas for the different kinds of kits we can create. But we've got a contact. No, this will be something you said they could check it out. They'll be able to take it home with them then, too. Or is it just going to be for in the library? We're we probably scale that. So we probably start with just in library use and then see how that goes and kind of grow that. We're we're pretty limited on like physical space, too, for the kits. So we're working on where we can keep them that they are visible and advertised. But we would probably start with just in the library and see how that goes and maybe potentially in the future. Allow the teens to check them out to take them home. We're lucky we have our youth department has early literacy kits that they check out. And so we're pretty much kind of trying to work off the same model and families that check out the early literacy kits do take those home. So we're we're planning, I think, eventually to kind of work towards you know, imitating that same model. But instead of, you know, for for families and younger kids, it would be specifically for 14s or, you know, high teen interest. Great. Thank you. Awesome. So like I was saying, we're working on our new strategic plan and part of that is our vision that we are where our community chooses to gather and connect and that includes teens to their huge part of our community. And that's who we choose to serve. So they have a few options when they get out of school. They can go to a park that's right next to us. They can go to Walgreens, which is another one of their favorite ounce, or they can come here to the library. We want to be that choice for them in that space where they're most comfortable. The choices are limited, though. Again, even here in the library, one of the most exciting places to be is in the very echoey lobby, which I completely understand. That would be the best place to be. You're kind of away from staff. You can hang out. It feels like you're outside, but trying to make them feel comfortable in every space and then also let our patrons know our adult patrons know that this is the teen space, too, as long as they're using it properly. We have taken steps ourselves to learn more about teen development and especially brain development, because that's such a crucial part of being able to understand teens and then provide for them in a way that is useful and considerate and engaging. And so we'd encourage anyone working in teens to learn about teen brain development and behavior and approach them with that understanding. Sometimes you'll look at a behavior that's happening and you're going, why is this happening? And then having that education and understanding what their brain is doing and where it is in the developmental process can help you understand, OK, that's why they're doing this. How can I approach this that is respectful to where they are in their development, but also upholding library policy? And so that's really important. And we're hoping to spread that education throughout our whole institution as opposed to just kind of focusing it on the teen staff. Another another crucial thing is staff interactions with teens, you know, just encouraging all staff to be welcoming and engaged with the teens, especially because we see so many teens after school, as you can see by our program numbers. They're, you know, at the top of the list for, you know, our regular patrons. They come in, you know, almost every day, if not every day after school. And so it's really important to advocate to, you know, staff and and other patrons that, you know, this space is also for teens, even if it's not a specifically teen designated space. And that's that's really important and something that, you know, as a library, we have not always had in the past. So we're we're taking steps to, you know, advocate for for that. And then the library is for everyone. Yeah, exactly, which is sometimes it's a hard thing for sometimes when, you know, things aren't going smoothly. It's it's hard to remember that. But that's that the core of, you know, what our department is is about and what we want to do. So yeah, and that there's not an asterisk after everyone. Yes, libraries are for everyone. Yes. So in addition to not really like we mentioned, there's not really a teen focused hangout space in the lobby. The programs that we've mentioned, the vast majority are in our meeting room space. So we book the meeting rooms every day after school from three to five. The first hour is more so for that hangout time. And then the second hour is for the program in addition to some of the targeted after those after school hours programs in the evening. So that as we're talking about not having a teen space, it's the same spot where genealogy might meet. It's the same spot where there's story time, where there's Scrabble Club. If a homeowners association is trying to make a reservation, it's all in this room. And we're working as a community on how do we meet these teens where they are? How do we make Marion a welcoming place for teens and what resources are we missing? Who are we not seeing and how do we reach them? It's important for our for us for our patrons to see that we're part of the big team, we're part of the big picture. So we're working with the school districts, the Chamber of Commerce, the police and some area nonprofits on starting that working group, starting that conversation about what can we all do better? How can we all reach higher as a city to make sure that this is a welcoming place for everybody? You know, within that, we have some kind of scalable lessons. And for this part, especially if you have questions or comments, feel free to chime in. We're a chatty group and we love conversation. Yeah, I'll just remind everybody. Yeah, you can type into the questions section of your go to webinar interface. That question about the teen activity kits came from there. Just type in there and I can see that and grab any of your questions or comments for for you guys. Yep. Awesome. So for scalable lessons that, you know, can apply to any library, big or small school, public, the big thing that we encourage and that we found really helps us is just asking questions and reaching out. That includes asking questions of our teen patrons and, you know, other patrons, our peers and even other libraries. We've done a couple kind of state tours, regional tours. We've gone to libraries kind of in the Iowa City area around kind of the Iowa City area and just talked to the teen staff there. We've gone up to and spoken to the University of Northern Iowa Library as well as some other public libraries around the University of Northern Iowa and their local community college there and just taken tours from their staff and just asked them about what they do for their, you know, for their teens or for their college students that they serve and what do they see them needing, you know, within the community and where that's being offered or, you know, how those gaps can be filled. It's been really informative and really helpful for us to see how other, you know, members are working with their teens and just reaching out and asking questions. We're happy to answer questions. We've, you know, we've done tours and, you know, informational interviews for other libraries who have reached out to us and we're always happy to answer questions by email, but just really encourage you to ask questions of your community and your peers and other libraries. That's a really great, easy, you know, start for, you know, improving and working on engaging teens. Definitely. And I'm the newest to the library world. So seeking out training has been really important to me and my peers to better serve my community. And the list there are some of the free and low-cost options that are available. We, all three of us did the mental health first aid training, and that was specifically for youth. And that was free, sponsored by a nonprofit in our area, and it is a nationwide training. So that's something you can even Google in your browser right now. That's been really helpful. I've used some of the tools that I learned in there already with some of our middle schoolers and some of our high schoolers. It's a really top time, developmentally and socially. So having even the language to use or knowing about some of the behavioral concerns or mental health concerns has been really helpful. Another training we did is Askable Adults Matter. That was provided through the Iowa Library Association. It was through our ILA conference, but something that you could do is reach out to different sexual health clinics close to your city in your state, maybe your capital, I'm not sure, wherever you are. But most of these clinics also have an education outreach person who can help with that because when you put yourself in the shoes of a teen and you have sexual health questions and you don't know where to turn, you want to get your answer as quick as possible. And you want a staff who is as knowledgeable, knowledgeable as possible so you don't have to stand up at the information desk waiting for someone to search the answer. So it's been really nice to learn our area resources of where teens can get their sexual health questions answered and get free treatment. So just knowing that so we can pull it out of our pocket right away. We get a question like that. And that's something we included on our Teen Life page. So we're tying that in to other resources we offer. Yeah, we've also sought out webinars. One of the ones that we really enjoyed was by Kerry Rodgers Whitehead. We included it there. If you just even Google that, that's been really helpful with teen brain development, too. And something that's in the beta phase is the National Geographic Educator Certification. And I just recently went through that. It shows you a whole different learning framework. And it was interesting to get that perspective. But it also broadened my horizons when it comes to different lesson plan resources. So, of course, we all look interest and that's a good place to find program inspiration. But there are a lot of other places in your state that you can also find some lesson plans and adapt them to become more of an informal library program. So we do have a question actually that came in about the first aid, such the first one you mentioned there. You said that was some sort of a national program. Yeah, I believe the Mental Health First Aid is a national nonprofit. You can go for the course that we did was Youth Mental Health First Aid. And it was two four hour classes. A lot of peers in that workshop worked in in the home facilities, worked at colleges and universities. If you're working with your staff on a staff training day, you can also get a scalable two to four hour session in addition to eight hour certification for general mental health first aid. And that certification is good for three years. OK. And so this is something that was available locally. That's an in person thing. Those are in person. And something else, although we are librarians for teens, we are also the voice for teens to librarians, keeping it a two way street. Be that advocate to your staff. We have staff meetings, but of course they get so long and so busy that we really wanted a chance to invite the staff to learn more about what we're doing and to ask those questions ranging from what is the National Geographic Educator Certificate to if there is a mom checking out a YA book. Is that allowed? So we just phrased it as talk about it because my currency is food. So we made some delicious taco inspired dips and hold up in the break room and invited folks to come in and kind of phrase it as an ask me anything. So we actually had 16 percent of our staff attend that first one this winter. We're going to repeat this meeting in August right before back to school. We shared with them the welcome booklet that is on the webinar notes, which is kind of our contract to our teen patrons. Here's what we expect from you and here's what you expect from us. And it was just a great opportunity. We had some of our pages come who are high school students, submit level staff all the way up to our director. And it was a really engaging conversation. Even if you are the only teen specific person on your staff or if there are no teen specific people on your staff, just use that as a lens when you're thinking about your guiding documents. They're all living and breathing and they all reflect your communities. So advocating for teens within policy design within the Metro Library Network. We recently started circulating hotspots and within that conversation, the first draft looked at loaning these devices for ages 18 plus. And right now it's ages 13 plus. We kind of pointed out at this age, you're able to get a library card. What if you needed for homework and really what's the worst that could happen? If you lose a device, at least with our contract, I can't speak for all of them as a city department. You're paying for the line. You're not paying for the device. So it's been a year now and we haven't lost any devices. And then I'm going to pull up our website about our different tiers of library cards. The Metro Library Network recently launched and I'm kind of a snarky person, so I'm obsessed with our library cards as is. There's a few different tiers of library cards within our network as of this fall. So the Metro card is your traditional library card. Metro light is if you want to limit what you can check out if there are fines. And the quick card is what I think is crucial for our after school users. It doesn't require a photo ID or appearance signature, but you're limited to no more than three items. So although it might not appeal to me as a browser who wants a sack of 20 things. If I'm just here after school and I want to use a computer and I just want a graphic novel every now and then. This is a perfect opportunity. That's great to have this different level, those more levels than many other libraries than you traditionally think of just like adult or children's cards. It's pretty much usually what the breakdown is. Exactly. And I want to mention we are so lucky that we're a part of a very supportive leadership team here at Marion. Our board is fantastic, engaged and curious. And they're really excited as we're talking about service. We have a generous friends group who's curious to learn more about what we're doing and is really quick to champion our successes and help us learn from our mishaps. And that goes for all the Metro library networks and their boards. So it's nice to be able to kind of play around with this. Another thing that we've really learned is your peers are not always going to be librarians. Not everybody has your job and that's just fine. Connect to your schools. Chanel and Rachel have great working relationships with the teacher librarians. We meet with the school's social worker and that relationship brought us into the start school right event. So in addition to being a presence where you have more of a captive audience, thinking about a parent-teacher conference where you don't want to sit and listen to your parents talk to your science teacher. I don't care how old you are, that we can be there with our robotic stuff, that we can be there with mind storms or back to school night to have that presence and do mobile cards sign up. The start school right event is geared towards family who might be a little lower income and just connecting them with different community resources that help with life navigation. And if you don't know where to start, just kind of ask who is working with teens in your community and start those relationships from there. When we talk about things like stress or burnout, it's really helpful to hear somebody more established in their careers, even if it's not directly a library career and learn from them. Before we move on to questions, I want Rachel to explain this picture because I can't talk about it without crying. We, during our Teen Fandemonium Week for anime program, we had, we did Shrinky Dinks. We just went out and got the, got the, got the sheets and we're like, you know, oh, here's some anime and, you know, manga books. Here, let's create some anime characters with Shrinky Dinks. And some people did that. Some people did their own designs, but we had one teen who took a star design and made, and, you know, colored it and made a bunch of stars. And then she wrote each of our names on it and we were like, oh, that's really sweet. And we're like, oh, you know, are you going to give it to us? And, you know, it's, it's going to be for, you know, for us is what she said. And then, you know, she made them and we shrunk, she shrunk them. And then she was like, you know, I'm going to keep them. And so she, we've seen her come in a couple of times and she's got this chain and she's got each of our, the stars with our names on them and she wears them as a necklace. And we're like, OK, you know, that's we're seeing that directly. And it's really, it's really great and really touching to, to see that and seeing the, you know, the effect that we are having on teens with, with all the hard work we've been doing. So that's beautiful. Yeah, that you're having such an impact. Yeah. Yep. So yes, this is our contact information emails. Feel free to reach out to any or all of us if you have any questions or just want to talk more about something that we've discussed or, you know, just just want to chat about, about libraries or need the recipe for Madeleine's taco dip. It's really good. So maybe to add that to the archive page. Yeah. All right. Great. So if anybody does have any questions, we definitely will. If you have any questions, you know, officially, our show goes from 10 to 11 a.m. Central Time, but we will stick around as long as people need to ask questions, get things answered, have any comments, whatever. So do go ahead and type them into your question section if you do. And we do have one question that did just come in here just at the end now. Someone wants to know if you have a social worker available at your library. I know that's something that some libraries are doing. Is that something that you have available there? That's a great question. We do not have a social worker on staff. There are some area nonprofits with social workers who we have connected with on programs and then Vernon, the nearby middle school, does have a social worker on staff. So we're able to reach out to Michelle when we have more specific questions about area resources. But we have definitely talked about. What would we do differently if, but we do not have a social worker currently? But it's nice that you have one, the resource there. And that's part of a lot of what your resource available to you, someone you can go to for the same service. And that's, I think, a part, a lot of what you guys are doing is making those connections out in the community to anyone and any for everyone you can possibly think of just reaching out to them. And then you'll be able to have that as a resource when you never know when you might need. Exactly. And that's a lot of the work that we've been doing. We might not be the people who can make a Toyota Yaris full of donuts, but we know where to find that person. Thanks. We might have those social work skills, but Michelle's always a phone call away. Exactly. Awesome. All right. So nobody has typed anything yet. Now we've been talking. If you do have any last minute questions, get them in there. This has been great. Guys, I'd seen that you had done this session at Aerosel, correct? No, we did not. Oh, OK. I couldn't remember where each of any of my where it might have been from. OK. Oh, your camera just went off. Oh, no, that's OK. There it is. You're back. I was afraid things had gotten lost or something had happened. All right. So this is great. I'm glad that we really have you on to talk about this. And this is something that I know a lot of other libraries are struggling with is not having the room, not having the space. Is there any chance that one last thing I wanted to ask about that? You might be be planning for a teen space now that you've realized that you've got such a huge increase in the teens coming in and using the middle of the teen coming in. Is that a possibility at all? Or is it pretty much this is the way you're going to have to go with it? Actually, Krista, our library board is in the process we're in the beginning stages of a multi-year library building project. Our current facility is about 24,000 square feet. We are looking to increase to 45,000. And this would be of an entire uptown, multi-use facility project where the library would take up most of a city block along with retail storefronts along another side. A floor above that of commercial office space. And then I'm obsessed with the two floors of apartments and residential units above that. I do not feel like the dorkiest little Eloise if that is where you live. The community, our development partners did identify a site that is just kitty corner from where we currently are. Rachel mentioned our proximity to the square, the local park. And so this way we wouldn't lose that proximity to the park. We would still be able to catch that after school crowd from Vernon and we would be able to keep our footprint in historic uptown Marion. And we would be a player in this project. The library would not be landlords, which if you know anything about my plumbing skills, is a very good thing. So it's been more about this process. So stay tuned to hear more of the new library in Marion. Yep. And within that we're advocating very hard and are fairly certain we're going to get a team dedicated space. You should definitely be how much you're doing. So I know that's going to be for and not for another few years, I would assume if you say they're just talking about starting to talk about it. Yep. All right. Great. Well, good luck with that. I hope I'm sure it'll be great. All right. I think we will wrap it up for today's show then. Thank you very much, Madeline, Rachel and Janelle. This is great. I am going to pull back present and anyone who wants to ask some questions. There's their email. This slides will be available on our website later as well. So you will have access to that information later. You didn't get them scribbled down right now. That's fine. So that will wrap it up for today's show. It has been recorded, as I said. And this is our Encompass Live website. Luckily, so far in the world, if you Google, you use your search engine of choice and type in Encompass Live. We're the only thing called this so far. Yay. So you can come to our site. These are our upcoming shows. But right beneath them is a link to our archives. I just want to show you where this is. And this is where today's show will be. It'll be at the top of the list here. The most recent ones come up first. And this was last week. So we had a link to recording, a link to presentation. We'll have the same thing for this week's. Although we actually do also have what you mentioned but we didn't show there was the flyer, the welcome document that was emailed to everyone who pre-registered today. But it's here available on the website as well. This is something that you did mention during your talk that there's this, what you give out to all of the teens to tell them what it's all about. Yep. So this was something that we created after those library visits. We looked at some of the positive language we saw at libraries like the Iowa City Public Library. And this is a double-sided eight and a half by 11 document that it's just a welcome. Here's who we are, here's how and why we serve you. And when we originally passed it out during the first week of school, there was what we called a contract in certain the middle where you would sign your name and say, I agree to be respectful and make this the best year ever and have fun. And we did a drawing for Barnes and Noble gift card. Yep. At the end of the month for everybody who had turned it in. And that was helpful because I could say things like Chanel, I know you read the booklet, put your shoes back on and you kind of started from ground one. That way they were able to put names to faces, learn more about the programming and learn, yes, you can hang out and be as long as you're not shouting. Right. Yeah. Awesome. All right. So that's available there too. So this will be the same thing. We'll have the recording link and a link to the slides will be here as well for you when you get to the archives. So this is our archives for the show. And I mentioned earlier to share with anyone you want to encompass live, we are in our 10th year of this webinar series. So we have every single one of our shows is here on the page. I'm gonna, if you get a little seasick, just close your eyes right now. I'm gonna scroll all the way to the bottom and you see it goes only back to January, 2009. So there's a lot of topics here. And also it's a different things. And there is some things that are, I want to give a warning, are definitely out of date because the show's been around for 10 years. But everything has a date. So you can see when it actually was originally produced and originally broadcast. So just keep that in mind. Some things may be old, maybe out of date. Some of the links might not work anymore. We don't always go back and double check everything that is there. But we're librarians, we archive everything. So I scroll back to the top here. There is a search feature though. So if you're looking for a particular person or a topic or something that you wanna know if we did a show on, you can do a search for all through all of our sessions or just the most recent year. If you think there's something more, you wanna just do something more recently. So take a look at those. That's where the archives will be. Everyone who attended today and who pre-registered for today's show will get an email from me letting you know when the recording is ready. Most likely it'll be later this afternoon as long as go to webinar and YouTube cooperate with all of my uploading and processing of that. But I'll let you know as soon as it's available. So that will be for today's show. I hope you join us next week when our topic is reaching out through your collection. This is about unusual and unexpected collections. What kind of different things are libraries doing? As we know, leading librarians, we will lend anything you can think of. And so Natalie Bazan who is the director of North Riverside Public Library District in Illinois is gonna come on the show with us remotely and talk about some interesting, creative things that she knows of that libraries are doing out there. So if you wanna see what kind of how you could pull off this kind of thing, if you're wondering, this would be the show for you to show up for. And you can see all of our other upcoming shows are here. I'm working on filling in more of the May and June dates. So keep your eye on the page as I start confirming more and more sessions. Also, Encompass Live is on Facebook. I've got links here and on each our show page. Over here is our Facebook page. So if you are a big Facebook user, give us a like over there and you'll be notified and of when things shows are coming up. Here's your reminder for today's show. A lot reminding people to log in, letting people know when archives are available. This is the one from last week's, the recording available. So if you're big on Facebook, give us a like and keep up with us over there. Other than that, that wraps up today's show. Thank you everyone for attending. Thank you guys for being here and we'll see you next time on Encompass Live. Bye-bye. Thank you.