 Okay. Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event, or a webinar, or a webcast, or an online show. People call these things all sorts of different stuff now, I don't know. But whatever you want to call us, hopefully only nice things. We're live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. We do record the show, however. So if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. You can go to our website and we've got all of our archives going back to the very beginning of the show, back in 2009, or all listed there. So you can always watch the shows at your convenience. And I'll show you at the end of today's show where all that is, if you've never looked at that before. Both the live show and recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So do go ahead and share this information, any topics that you might see, think that any of your colleagues, friends, neighbors, whoever might be interested in. Go ahead and tell them about it and have them come and watch the shows. We do a mixture of things here on the show. Book reviews, many training sessions, interviews, demos of products. Basically our only criteria is that it's library related. Something libraries are doing, something libraries are interested in, something that might be useful that libraries to get involved with pretty broad in our topic areas. We do have Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes do presentations and we also have guest speakers that come in. And I don't know what you would be considering. I would be a guest. Your guest speaker, yeah. I'm technically not the Nebraska Library Commission staff. Right, yes. And today we have a guest speaker then as we've just decided. Scott Shielders is the director of our Southeast Library system here in Nebraska. One of our regional areas that does consulting and training and assistance to libraries in the state. He's just in Lincoln. Just down the road here a little bit. So he just popped over to our offices this morning to talk about Edge. The Edge service, which is a technology assessment tool. There's lots of different things you can use. It's online. And I'll just let you explain about it, where it came from, everything. But it's a good resource that we've been interested in, not using it exactly, but training with it and having it involved in things like library commission. We started doing some grants through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They're part of who started up. So we had some libraries testing it out then when it was still a pilot demo thing. But Scott's going to tell us all about how you can use this to identify and what kind of technology you're using or might need to use at your library. So I'll just pass it over to you to take it away. Okay, thank you, Chris. Everything we need to know. Okay. So yeah, building off of what Chris has already said, Edge is an assessment tool that will let you take a look at your library and kind of give a more focused picture of where you are with technology. And one thing that I do want to stress is that it's not just how many computers do you have and what type of, what speed of internet you have. It's all sorts of facets about libraries and technology. So what type of training programs are you providing both for your clientele and your staff? What type of policies do you have on replacement and budgeting? How are you interacting with the community with technology and for technology needs? So there's a whole lot of things around technology, not just what many people think. It's just bandwidth, computer numbers, how many pieces of software, how many databases. There's a whole lot more. It is geared for public libraries. That was the project. It was started, oh gee, what was that? 2010, 2012. Yeah, we had the first Gates Foundation grants that we used. This was in like 2011. Okay. 2011, 2012 is when they were starting. That was when it was still being piloted. It was just in beta being created, still a work in progress. Yeah, all of that stuff. So yeah, it took a while for it to be developed. And they did do some tests. It's now out in the wild now. And I do want to spend a little bit of time here at the beginning to point out who has been involved in this process. I just might need to just click onto it to get a point. Oh, yeah. Let's go back a slide. All of the information that I'm talking about today, you can dig around on their website, libraryedge.org, and find this information. I'll have screenshots of their information on these slides as well. But please do feel free to dig around libraryedge.org and export for yourself. Some of the groups, this is the Edge Coalition, these foundations and organizations and such. And you'll see there's people there that, you know, definitely library-oriented, the majority of them, ALA for one, you have the Urban Libraries Council, which I think is a major player. And that's the Gates Foundation, which we mentioned in passing earlier. But there is one organization I really want to point out. It's the ICMA. This is not a library organization. This is the International City County Management Association. I believe I got that correct. If not, someone could correct me. They are geared towards the management and running of cities and counties. For many of you, I think you could compare them to the League of Municipalities here in Nebraska. I think there's other leagues in some of the other states who are attending who may not know what ICMA is. It's an international group that goes towards these concerns. This is important because of some of the things I'm going to tell you later. It is not just a group of things developed by people stuck in library land. There are outside influences. In that case, you can use those when pointing out certain standards that you may be trying to get. You could say, hey, it's not just someone in library land. The International City County Management Association also believes in this. Otherwise, I doubt they would have their logo listed in the coalition. So something to keep in mind about who made it. Again, this took several years for it to come together. Pilot programs, it's now up and running. Some states have developed it a lot more than others. We'll talk about some reasons for that a little bit later on. So that's the who. Let's talk about what. Hopefully, you can see the diagram, but if not, I'll just give it to you briefly here. The heart of edge is the benchmarks. If you're not familiar with benchmarks, it's not a set of rules. You're not punished if you don't meet these. It's more like a ruler trying to put into focus some vague ideas about technology by putting some specific things and say, if you do this and this and this, you're good. That's kind of an oversimplification. And hopefully as we go through some actual benchmarks, you'll see what I mean. Again, these aren't rules in a very technical sense. They're not even standards, but people often refer to them as such. There's nobody who's like checking up on you. Right. If there's no organization saying, did you do this? If not, you're going to not be able to. Yeah. Right. There's no library police. At least on this site, I don't know if other states or systems have decided to implement rules based off of these, but the edge benchmarks themselves are not that strict and have punishments or anything. These are things for you to aspire to. And that's the heart of what we're talking about. Some of the other things available are resources and tools based around those benchmarks. So there's an assessment tool. If you're a person that likes to think in numbers, more than narratives, you can go through, be asked some questions on how your library is doing in certain areas, and it will give you numerical data. Out of 100, it gives you 44 points or 23 points based on how you answer those questions. So for those of you who like more quantitative types of analysis, you have that ability to get that through the assessment tool. Related to that is a peer comparison tool. So they get their data from people who put in, answer the assessment tool. So it's the best of my knowledge. They don't go out and grab like the bibliostat data or anything like that. Because a lot of the questions on there just aren't going to be in those data gathering forms. So what happens is, you fill out the assessment tool, then hey, you can get a peer comparison report as well. And if more people answer, and that changes your standing, I guess, in that peer comparison, you can get an update. Now I do want to mention this. And for those of you attending outside of Nebraska, I'm going to rattle off some Nebraska towns. So please bear with me. You can find the peer group levels in their support pages. If you go to libraryedge.org, go to support and look up peer groups. You can find the actual groups, but they have seven groups for the peers. And just that way, those of you who have different levels based on population. So for example, Omaha here in Nebraska, our largest city, is the only one in the largest peer group of the edge. Peer groups, I need a the source all of a sudden. They're in the largest. Lincoln would be in the second largest, group six. Then the next 10 largest cities blog in group three. So there's a good chunk in there that there's no Nebraska cities in. Part of its population, part of it is, they have a peer group that has the same population, but it's based on number of branches versus single branch. We have from outside of Lincoln Omaha. It's all single all single branch. So for those of you in Nebraska, that that other group, that's cities of the size of Bellevue and Grand Island down to about La Vista. And of course this changes as population goes. The next 20 largest cities in Nebraska. So from Scott's bluff type of size down to Holdridge size. Holdridge, Wayne, those would be in group two. And that leaves everyone else in the state of Nebraska into group one. So cities the size of Ogallala and Wahoo all the way down to that community that has a library that serves 83 people. Yeah, that's a huge range. That's a huge range. And even in group three, there could be a difference of maybe 10,000 population was. I'm not saying this to scare people away from peer comparison. I'm just saying you need to be aware that those are the groups as they are now. Who you're being compared to. Who you're being compared to. Yeah. It's very possible. And I do not have any inside knowledge from the Edge folks, but as more data comes in, they might be able to split those into different, more granular groups. But as of now, that probably all that they have data for. So just to let you know that that is the peer group. I know when our strategic planning in the state comes up, there's a big question about, well, who are my peers? Now you know. Okay. The other tools, there are things for help you with PR. If you're doing something regarding a benchmark that you're trying to get, or you've achieved ways to discuss that with decision makers outside of library land. Some training on Edge benchmark type of topics. So there's a lot of stuff in there that are tools geared around those benchmarks. Now here's a catch. The benchmarks are free. They're on the website, and they're the heart of Edge. The rest of it, you have to pay a subscription fee for. And so that, it's an annual fee. I've known some libraries, they'll go in, pay a fee for a year, get all the data that they want, and then not resubscribe the next year. That's cool. You know, they consider it a consultant. It's not something you have to do on a regular basis necessarily. I mean, things may change, but it's a good way to get started, maybe evaluating this kind of thing. Yeah. And that fee schedule is based off the budget that your library has. You can find that in support. The smallest, I think if it's 100,000 or less, is your library budget, it's $250 in here, and it scales up. There is a statewide license. I know the Library Commission applied to get extra funding for that. What's that? It's a few years ago, three or four years ago. Our legislature didn't say, nope, we're not going to do that. So we didn't. There are some states that do have statewide license. And if you look at the map of EDGE libraries, Illinois is filled completely. It looks like one of those little, gangbusters. They went gangbusters. And then there's others that have a good chunk of their state filled in too. So, questions so far, since I've talked about who and what, while we're looking at questions, I'm going to spend the rest of the time really digging into benchmarks. So if you have something outside of benchmarks, now would be a great time to ask. Anybody have any questions? Type it into your questions section of your GoToWebinar interface, or just say, me please, and you can use your microphone to explain and ask your question if you have anything. Now, as far as signing up for it, is there just an easy, pretty easy on the website to get yourself an account? I believe so. Since I'm not in a public library, I can't go through that. But from what I've heard, it was fairly easy. I've talked to a couple of EDGE libraries here in the state, and they seemed fairly unconcerned about getting into EDGE. Yeah. Yeah, it looks like there's just a sign-up thing and your basic information about your library. I'm just looking at it here. One account per library, and they suggest you're a director or someone authorized who can be in charge of it. Ten business days for them to approve an account. So it's not an instantaneous thing. You'd have to look at your actual info. It's an actual human interaction type thing, obviously, to get it going. Yeah. I was looking at it and it came in right away, so I think we'll go right into the benchmarks and see if people have questions about that. Yeah, if something does pop up, please feel free to ask questions. I'd much rather answer your questions than rattle off into a camera that just stares. So hopefully on the screen, you will see benchmarks. This is a screenshot from their benchmarks website. There are 11 benchmarks in the EDGE system. They have those broken down into three strategic areas. And the first area is community value. So are your patrons, is your clientele able to get what they need from the library? And we'll look into examples of these benchmarks a little bit without hopefully clearing that up. It's services and those type of things. That's what this strategic area is about. Then we have this blue area, engaging the community. And this is, are you asking the community what they need? Are you partnering with other groups in the community? Are you, and this is unique, I think, I've seen this before EDGE, are you sharing your knowledge with other libraries? So there is a part in there, there's a benchmark said, are you participating in conferences or writing bits and pieces or even just talking to the library director down the road or at the other institution? And then the third one, that green area, you'll see organizational management. And this is, how many computers do you have? How fast do you have? And also, how good is your staff training on technology? What are your policies on replacing computers? So a lot of the internal type of decisions that do affect the public community will be in this area. Now, you'll notice, I haven't said public library in any of these yet. So those of you in other institutions than a public library, a school, a college, university, a regional center, you might be able to easily find some areas here that you could adapt. Now again, it was put together by a group of people focusing on public libraries, but there's still a lot of good information here that you could take to your own and use it as at least suggestions. It's interesting that even though Edge is, like if you want to sign up for an account, you do have to be a public library. But when you look through the benchmarks and on the site, they don't use the word public library either. Because you just mentioned it just talks about library, library, library, libraries. And it's made broader descriptions that any library could potentially use these because a lot of these are things that are going to apply to any type of library, not just public. You just think of your community as your students and faculty rather than your public community, your town. Absolutely right. There's a lot of room for adaptation outside of the original writing of these. So let's jump into benchmark one. And hopefully you can see on the screen. If not, you can always go to libraryedge.org go to benchmarks and you'll be able to click on these. I do want to focus a little bit more on instead of what is said, I want to focus on like Christa pointed out how it's being said because I think I could sit here and read through all of these and you will be bored to tears and we will run over. So I'll let you read to match your own pace. But the way this is built up at the very top you'll see the literacy, you'll see the box that tells you what strategic area it's in and then you'll have the actual I'm going to peek over here at the laptop because my glasses aren't that good. Libraries provide assistance and training with the goal of increasing the level of digital literacy in the community. And then I'll learn more link. You click on that you get an expanded definition. So this is the big area that the benchmark is suited for. Then underneath that you'll see some parts like 1.1, 1.2 it gives you some more information like 1.1 the library has curriculum for and provides regularly scheduled digital literacy training. So it's kind of describing what the big benchmark is about. So those of you who have been involved with the strategic planning process here in Nebraska and you may have similar ones for those. It sounds a lot like those strategic planning things. It sounds like community need, goal, objective. So this is following kind of a similar strategy as far as laying out. I would call it the same thing, of course. But you have big idea how we're, you know, big idea smaller idea of what we want to do about it and then some particulars about what's being done. I like how this one also it gives it doesn't like leave you hanging it gives specific examples of what you will in this particular one what you actually do training in computer skills office productivity privacy library resources social media so yeah gives you a little nudge in the right direction to what you're supposed to be looking into at your library. And I want to build off of what Krista just said. You'll see if you take a closer look at how they're ordered in those smaller groups like 1.1 it starts with you're holding classes and some suggestive classes and the next part of that would be you're holding in-person training classes for people bringing in devices a little bit more advanced and then after that you're holding training in a language other than English and so I'm not saying this is a strict good better best there are some benchmarks built like that because it's the same thing with better numbers attached but in this case they are saying well this is a good early step for you to look at and then after you got that if you want to progress this might be an area now I will preface this or I guess I've already talked about I'll post place this some communities having language digital literacy classes in a language other than English would be a waste of money because there's no there isn't any population of that there's no population of non-speaking non-English speaking people in that area then there's others where this is a dire need because the non-English speaking population is growing very quickly so you may want to concentrate on that instead of people bringing in their own devices so don't read this as a strict one, two, three read this as possible suggestions so not everybody has to do is going to want to do all these things the local need is going to dictate what is important in your area but this might get you actually thinking about do we maybe you haven't ever had anything in a different language and you're not even sure if that's something that I'm supposed to be looking into and to start investigating that absolutely you're looking for ideas I do want to point out another thing with this in that curricula and in-person classes are available in at least one library location in the following topics I will tell you right now that many of these are written with the concept of a large multi-branch library with multiple staffing do not let that stop you if you're a smaller library from just reading at least one library to the library and there are going to be things in here that you will not be able to do because of resources available to a smaller library you just don't have those economies of scale going on and that's okay in fact on their website I have seen written that they don't expect any library of any size to hit every single thing this is a document for suggestions in places to grow the library that supports 83 people they have completely different needs in areas to grow that say a library the size of Omaha or some of the other larger cities that might be using this don't worry about that you're not going to be judged if you do this there any other thing you're looking for suggestions in areas to focus your thoughts on technology same thing with personnel some of them you'll look at they'll say 100% of the staff can do this and 10% of the staff can do this other thing well many of our libraries 10% equals 100% because there's only one person working because he's employed maybe you're not going for the advanced knowledge fine but can you answer the basic questions those are the type of things that we'll keep in mind as you go through these other benchmarks and also for other types of libraries too there are going to be things that if you're a certain type of institution you're not going to deal with internet usage from your clientele it's not allowed ignore those benchmarks but there might be other things with technology that you can use or you could adapt maybe it's not internet but maybe it's certain types of legal type of databases let's see let's move on to number 4 the engaging the community strategic area so you get a flavor of that area any questions popped up so far while we're loading that up nope either I explain this very well or I put you to sleep either way I'm glad I could help so looking at the engage the engagement communities I chose benchmark 4 this is strategy and evaluations so the big picture is that libraries are making strategic decisions based on community priorities for digital inclusion and innovation so those of you again ties into the strategic planning process many Nebraska libraries are going through are you asking questions of what people need in this one in 4.1 it's based on how are the library staff specifically director in the first part how are you connecting to other groups in the community are you going to city council what appropriate are you reaching out to other groups are you talking about in this case technology programs other benchmarks in this area talk about partnerships with schools after school library looking at this are you partnering with the public or maybe the university or the community college all sorts of things about connecting with people so again we're not talking about are you handing out a computer to everyone who walks in the door it's talking about well reading from the sublist that there's a library representative that sits on key community board such as community planning maybe economic development depending on the size of your community you give a presentation to a group about the technology resources available so all sorts of things about communication and making those connections being part of that community it's very important and being in a academic library university library something this would be reaching out to other departments in the university to other faculty heads of faculty at different departments the student involvement organizations anything that's not library not just staying within the library to do things yeah absolutely when I was working at UNL this was kind of an unwritten type of thing that people tried to be involved with the rest of the faculty so faculty committees and being part of the faculty council and embedding yourself into that department that you served if possible okay sometimes it was written into job evaluations like hey we should go talk to these people but there wasn't a policy at that point but it was a good practice to follow yeah that's something I think in this case when you apply this to a university or something it actually might be easier because in many universities there are subject specialists in different areas and they are required as far as their job description to be the liaison to that particular subject faculty people so that's already something they are doing very well so yeah all the ones in blue or kind of this teal depending on your screen I'm looking at two different screens now and I've seen two different shades of blue so the blue-ish group that's strategic area it's all about how are you connected with people not with tech okay the last one I'm going to go down to organizational management and this is going to be more than nuts and bolts so if you've got a tech person they're probably going to be more interested in these areas the ones in green the organizational management and any of the others but again some of this is policy and working with your funding agencies and decision makers I'm going to go to benchmark nine devices in bandwidth because this is probably the most practical one and through my years of helping libraries whether it's because of my tech background from the university or my current position and all stops in between I get two big questions how many computers do I need in my library and how fast the internet do I need now if you're right there's a minimum that people should be looking for now yeah there's not a there's not a you won't get anything if you have less but they're trying to encourage both the libraries and the providers to provide a certain minimum level and you can get more easier you can go through the process easier if you're already getting 100 megabits per second which is really really good and in Nebraska not very common yet I know it is in bigger cities or in other areas but the 100 megabits per second is what they are it kind of gets you through a simpler stream line through the process is what it helps with yeah so there are going to be some cases where an e-rate application may overturn some of the suggestions that these make and I'm going to tell you right now looking at these numbers they make no sense without any background so I'm going to give you a little bit of background on this one I also want to point out and we will link to a document that has a direct link to expanded definitions of what you see here so you'll be able to see 9.1 well what does device hours available per capita basis mean so they have a really good page that has all of these benchmarks all of these 9.1, 9.2 expands on them so that link will be available with the show notes I think that's what you call them here when the recording goes up I put any documents this powerpoint presentation will be available yeah so that will define what some of this means so you have a better idea of what's going on but I want to spend a little bit of time with 9.1 because not only can you get a good answer for this question but you can use this benchmark to help leverage a request for something else and this is going to be a practical application of a benchmark so let's start with the actual benchmark 9.1 the library has a sufficient number of device hours available on a per capita basis and then some various numbers but this is trying to measure is if you took your service population number and say everyone comes in for an even amount of computer hours that can use a computer for a certain amount of time and everyone gets the same amount of time what is that number per user that's what this is trying to figure out and so what this is trying to measure is do you have enough computers to fit the needs this is a calculation to help you answer that question how many computers do I need exactly so their minimum suggested is 3 hours per capita okay how do we get that number I'll show you on this next slide I went through found this in the support areas and I'm sorry there's math involved this early in the morning again this information is also in that extra handout that you can get from the show notes as you can see it's on the slide as well so hours per capita is what we're trying to find out we're going to use D to say the number of devices the library has access internet this is the ones you own as a library not the cell phones people bring in not their laptops this is what you have this also does not count staff computers we're talking about publicly accessible we're also talking about general usage computers so if you have an opac only station an email express station an aw or otherwise locked down children's computer those don't count this is general computing internet filtered or unfiltered word all that stuff if you have a hybrid computer like well that's a genealogy computer but no one's here for genealogy we let anyone else use it count it count it okay population your service area use the same thing you use for whatever reports you do just use that same number some people say well we'll serve anyone who comes in the door that's fine I'm really going to throw off your numbers if you say the whole state or the whole nation so just put the number that you put in your other reports then hours hours per week and so we'll go through the math so you take the number of devices times hours you're open times 52 52 is the number of weeks that gives us a number that's easier to to use in reports and stuff the 3 the 4 to 5 as opposed to 0.00 it's a lot more and when you're talking with people outside of library land having the number that people can recognize as a number is useful so you take that divided by your population that's your hours per capita okay we'll run through an example here real quick so let's say you're open 40 hours a week you have 10 computers and you serve a population of 5,000 so just plug them in you have 10 computers times 40 hours times 52 take that divided by 5,000 this hypothetical library has 4.16 device hours per capita they are well in that first run which is 3 to 5 so they're doing okay alright there's room for improvement of course but hey it's not bad now this is device hours per capita is that like then like a week this is how much or is it just like an overall it's kind of an overall thing again you can go through if you want to adjust that number to say you can always throw in some other quantifier like we're going to take hours per capita times some other thing and we have 1.3 device hours per capita of ADA accessible so maybe you only take a certain amount of your computers and say we've got 3 with Kurzweil or Dragon Dictate or something and do a subset you can do that now you have math to do it so we figured out how to come up with that number let's say we have that number as a goal and we want to know how many computers we want alright next slide how many computers do I need so I've done the algebra for you to move stuff around this will be in that additional handout it's also on this slide so what we're doing is we have a target HPC and then we divide that by the population take that times the hours times 52 and that gives us the number of devices and this is a suggestion but sometimes it can be useful if you go to say your funding agency or if you're writing a grant and you can say according to the edge benchmarks we should probably be looking at 3 HPC and to hit that we need X number of computers because of our hours and population so let's work through an example and if you have questions go ahead and start asking them but let's say we want a 3 device hour per capita which is the bottom part of that that benchmark say we're open 20 hours a week in a population of 500 so we're a small library and this is where we get those questions from often so 3 divided by 500 times 20 times 52 to give us a nice number equals 6 and a quarter so in this case they're looking at 6 computers probably 7 to really hit 3 now I understand some of the small libraries they can't fit 6 computers well count laptops that you check out to people that are stashed away behind the desk maybe you have 2 desktops and 4 laptops or maybe it's one of those things where if you're looking for justification to get rid of a certain type of space that everyone insists you have but there's no need to maybe you say hey we're looking at these benchmarks that are put together by ALA and ICMA and all these other groups that suggest we need 6 or 7 and we need space for it in a place that we can look to get rid of so this is good but I like these benchmarks they're not just to look at yourself you can then use them outside the library to get what you need done to convince stakeholders that we need to buy more computers so we need to figure out a way to get money to do that and this is why not just the librarian thinks they need this many computers no we've actually done some math and we've got other organizations telling us this is a way to evaluate and see what your library needs absolutely in this case let's say you're a school or an academic institution you have an outside computer lab so maybe you're not looking at this particularly however it might be something that you can use to say okay the computer lab has X number for our students but they're closed for classes and we still need general usage computers during study halls or something or in academics maybe you're partnering with a lab to do a joint you know this is a the computer services lab but it's housed in the library and you'll be joint staffing well you want your end to hold up so you might be able to pull some of these numbers and other benchmarks to say hey this is where we should be shooting for and Chris has earlier remarked about using these for your request that's why I'm pointing out the ICMA at the very beginning this isn't just library land in their own echo chamber they're outside informants on this project which could be very impressive to other non-liberal people in your town or county or your administration who you need to be talking to and convincing of things you need and I'll be honest I've talked to city councils who are unimpressed with everything and it won't matter but there might be other people who can help you and again like we said other institutions adapt use these suggestions smaller libraries like we said you may not have room for six or seven but at least you would have maybe you're trying to get a third one in and say hey even at three we're still going to be low but it's still closer to what we should be having and maybe if someone used to have said to someone we need six or seven computers to meet this say look at the size of your building but we could do that with laptops or tablets instead and then some people might go oh that counts yes it does count and then you can convince because I know some libraries have moved into the checking out of laptops and some are still not sure about it but this is a way to convince here's something we need this many for the people whether the size of our building is irrelevant they need we need this many pieces of equipment how can we pull that off this is how use it a laptop or tablet or something instead and that's what you offer to them I'm going to throw this out here as a stretch let's say you want to change your hours to get people better access to the computers and you're not going to increase your... how often you're open is part of this you do some more algebra to solve for hours instead of devices I didn't do that for you you'll have to do that yourself but then you can say hey according to this if we kept the same number of computers our population stays the same and we want to hit this benchmark we need to be open another two hours a week or something like that so any of these variables treat it like a math story problem and if you don't want to do it find someone in your community who likes math and do it for you that's okay there'll be somebody and use these and I picked on this one because it has numbers and it shows the flexibility to get that even numerical information that some people some decision makers need others it's going to be pretty narrative but you can point out hey you know the Edge Coalition suggests that we have there's one that explicitly suggests that library staff have paid time to do technology training to learn stuff to help development yes it's very important so it's there so I encourage you to explore all of that there's another one another benchmark 9.2 that suggests how fast of a connection you should get I'm not going to spend the time on that today but that formula is in that extra handout I will mention those three benchmarks that you see on the screen let me go back up 9.2 the first one and this is one of those where the numbers increase so it is the better best the 512 this is government forms not a lot of streaming not a lot of gaming that's the level of computer use that you're seeing with that speed and I would focus on that download speed you're not going to get a very fast upload speed unless you have a really good ISP and they're going to do what's called sync for this where upload and download is the same so ignore the upload for now unless you're doing unless you're doing a lot of gaming you're producing your own website in-house that involves a lot of video in this case it's the download that really matters so anyway that top one that's your people come in look at some web pages do some forms the middle one that's going to be low level YouTube, low level Netflix some gaming but not every computer is on Minecraft and that bottom one then you're talking the high quality Netflix streaming for everyone if they all hit it at once of course more is better but these give you at least three things to three target areas so let's say you've already got the first one and you want to know well what do we need to do what should we talk to our ISP about increasing our speed to then you can do some math and figure out oh well we need to get this amount into the building the numbers in the benchmark are per user and that includes your Wi-Fi users that includes people who bring in their own devices for that right you have to think about the Wi-Fi not just the ones actually physically on your hard-wired work stations yeah there are some libraries I support that they're made internet uses from devices being brought in that's a lot of that's happening and there's one library where a particular user would come in and everything would call to a halt including the staff computers it was that bad so they took appropriate measures so let's see here so hours per capita let me wrap up quickly then we'll spend some time with questions because it looks like we are going to close it in on our end of time so edge assessment benchmarks were created by many groups including the ICMA so again it's not just some library echo bubble that many things have been accused of being there's some outside influence on this which is great it's more than just how many computers do you have hopefully through our time together you've seen that it's about policy it's about budgeting it's about staff it's about all sorts of things it can be used as leverage and request showing a clear suggestion by a coalition of interests what that means is you've got some backup when you make that request if it matches one of these benchmarks and that's to your board that's to your decision makers that's in grant applications that's in all sorts of things if you can say by doing this we will hit edge benchmark 9.2 at a reasonable amount that's a whole lot better than saying this would be good it gives you a benchmark it gives you a measuring stick gives you a little background a little something stronger more powerful to say and I like that I think it can be a little overwhelming potentially there's 11 different benchmarks and they each have all these different levels and what do we do you don't have to go through every single benchmark one through 11 what a time scan through them see what it is that you are interested in improving at your library or what you're interested in learning more about at your library and just look at that one to start with and if you just use that one little bit of it that's fine you may then decide okay you know what now in six months let's go back and look at a different part of it do it a bit at a time it's not like I have to do this whole huge thing all at once that's too overwhelming absolutely and like you were saying you get one of them done that might put you in a better place resource or political capital wise or whatever to work on the next one and yeah we're trying to work on all 11 and all subgroups of those 11 is just setting yourself up to not get anything done yeah I agree with what Krista just said just do find some that and go ahead and grab that low-hanging fruit for your first one that's fine I'm not going to say anything about it so do that and also hopefully we show that a lot of these and you'll see more as you go through the full book benchmarks on your own that there are parts adaptable to any size of library and any type of library especially if you treat them as you know suggestions and a place to start the discussion I think that's probably the best way to handle that in especially different types of libraries but I know for the smallest of libraries you know and you see something written like this it's just geared for large urban go ahead and look at these suggestions and places to grow and if you start hitting the benchmarks as written great otherwise you're still trying to improve you're trying to focus where you're at in psychology in all facets in your library and you may be surprised I know when we were first working with this with the Gates grant that we were doing there are some that you may already be meeting and don't even realize like a lot I think a lot of times public libraries are really good at engaging with their users the actual patrons and that's kind of something that's a no-brainer they do it anyways and you can find them in here probably be engaging the community or community value that are boom boom boom we're doing this awesome we look great and then that's a good way to like sell if you've got some people in your community on your council city council or board or whatever that are a little skeptical skeptical of the library's value you can say well according to these benchmarks from this coalition we are actually doing this this and this already and you know we rock so we're not just saying we rock somebody else is saying we do too so we can report to the city council say we rock whether literally or in more tactful language is a good thing so at this point any last questions before we run out of time yes I didn't have any questions anything you want to know about any of the benchmarks any other ones that you want to know more about that Scott didn't mention you only highlighted a couple of them because as you said there's eleven different ones with each of their own sub sections there but is there any of them you'd like to hear more about libraryedge.org is a website you can pop over to to look through them and see what's out there so type in your questions to us oh good I didn't chase everyone away I thought the math would absolutely do it right there but thank you for sticking her out I am what I am like myself I am a librarian who went into libraries not only because but I was also an English major because I don't do math very well it's just it's not my thing you know and then you get into library school and the whole class is all about statistics because you need to do that and I was like ah darn I still have to know math fine well thank you good job thank you for those who are sending good jobs glad to hear that you're all still awake I appreciate that yes we can tell who he is well if you don't have any questions right now that's okay there's a lot of resources on the page and of course Scott is available he's investigated this very I don't know if I say deeply but probably more than any of you or any of us have you know just help people use it I've been following it as close as I can without actually being able to participate in it for oh G 3 4 yeah since like 2014 or so even before that so on the slide you see my email if you have further questions feel free to email me and like you said we'll include that we're going to have a link to the website these powerpoint slides will be up for you as well and that extra document that has the actual math to look like a cheat sheet I guess yeah the math for 9.2 that I talked about plus the 9.1 that we worked through together that link for the more expanded definitions of these benchmark parts is on there plus I forgot to mention there is a link to there for their they have a 20 page edge assessment pdf and I think let's actually bring up that page right now you really click on the fire fox there we go so the edge website if you go to toolkit it to do and you'll see all sorts of resources here the assessment workbook actually has all of the benchmarks and some benchmarks so you can print it out there if you need a paper copy plus a lot of other things because it is an assessment workbook but instead of always referring to the web page if you want to print copy there you go plus samples of the peer reports all sorts of good stuff and it's available without being a member or whatever they term a dues paying person. Yeah there's a lot of resources here which I was very impressed with that because I remember when Edge first came out and the pilots and it was they were not sure if first of course it wasn't going to be something to pay for was it something to always be free we're still developing it everyone hoped it would all be free and I'm really impressed with what they've still left out there for people to use who don't have the resources to pay for even just the one year of it that you can get a lot out of this without having to actually sign up yeah like I said those benchmarks are the heart and soul of this whole thing that's everything works off of yeah and if you've got those you've got a good set of tools already and if you find it worth your budgetary dollars to pay for these other tools they have them for you. Yeah and I like that what you said that one library is doing just doing it for one year to get access to it for just a brief at least get a start that's something you could put in like an extra thing for one year of your budget and say you want to you know we need to you know we're building a new library we're trying to really do a good push on changing things here's something that can help us do that we'll just like you pay for consultant is a one-shot deal in a similar situation. I don't know if the edge coalition would agree with that. No they probably wouldn't like us telling you to do that. They want ongoing. Yeah if the edge coalition doesn't like our statement let us know we will issue a disclaimer on that but no I do think even with that one year even as a test to see are we getting money our money is worth out of these other tools or if you're doing a big project it's like we're going to do a big technology push this year we need all the tools we can get both the assessment and the PR and the training stuff it might be a really good thing to write it to a grant for a project budget. Exactly grants would be something that could support this for you. Yeah absolutely. Alright any last minute urgent questions you want to ask that while we've got hang trapped here type them in anything else you want to No thank you for listening and thank you for your interest in benchmarks which is sometimes a very dry topic so. It can be and I think they've done a good job at this and as I said it was a pilot project I've seen it more for the years too. Yeah. It was pretty it's really gotten turned into a very nice streamlined easy to understand and use service. Yeah. From something that was kind of choppy and you know little coming off top of our heads what we do and they use that they actually had library saw the groups that the groups that are involved in it but they also had actual libraries that helped inform them of what the questions should really ask what benchmarks really should be for like your real life. It's actually happening in libraries so they were you know they listened and adjusted as needed. Alright so I think then we will wrap it up for today we're just hit exactly 11 a.m. which is almost perfect for us and we just start a little minutes a few minutes after 10 so that's perfectly fine. So thank you very much Scott for coming to today and tell us all about Edge. As I said we did have a session about this we were mentioning before when I'm live a couple years ago but as we said they do change things. Yeah that was June 18th 2014. Yeah and look it up in Google and you'll find it on YouTube. And things are very different now so always good to have an update to it. So that will wrap it up for today's show. It will be recorded and put on our website if you just type in live there for me. We will show you where that's at. There we go. This is the main Encompass Live website and here I'll get this out of the way for us. There we go. Where we have our upcoming shows but right beneath where our upcoming is a link to the archive sessions and this is where we post all of ours and I said they do go back all the way to the beginning of 2009. January 2009 was when we started the show so if you really want to go back and see some historical stuff you'll find it in here. But this is what we had last week on the show and it's going to be the same kind of thing. A link to the recording which will be on our Library Commission YouTube channel. A link to the slides which will be in our slide share account and that document is it a word? It's a word document. That'll be up in the slide share as well. Links is really just a library edge website so that won't be a separate thing necessarily. That'll all be there for you. I'll let you guys all know probably later this afternoon that it's available and ready for you to look at or as I said earlier share with your friends and colleagues. So that will wrap it up for today. I hope you join us next week when we talk about books. Friday Reads, the NLC blogs books. We started a there's a couple of different things that go into this session. We started an intermittent as we think of it series on Encompass Live of what Nebraska Library Commission staff talking about books or reading. We've had some themed ones, romance books, men read books, whatever. We've also started, two years ago I went back and threw this out, a Friday Reads blog post. This is something that started out I believe on Twitter. Someone said a Friday Reads hashtag and basically it was just on a Friday share what you're reading. Just to share what you might be doing and people would see what other people were reading. And now it's also morphed into blog posts. Every Friday some people will say here's a book I like, here's a book I am reading, here's a book I read years ago whatever and we didn't hear the commission. So it's a bunch of staff. Every Friday you'll find a new post by one of us talking just sharing a book that we like and want to share. We decided to bring some of those together and we're going to have a group of people. I think there's about four or five of us now who have committed to this. It's still convincing some people. And we're going to actually chat with you about some of the books that we have blogged about on here, so you'll get some good ideas. As you can see from here I actually went back and looked at all our two years' worth of posts and scanned through them. We do all of these genres that I list here are what people have posted about books about. Nonfiction, memoirs, mystery, sci-fi, fantasy, history, horror, graphic novels, long adult, it's on and on. We are all over the board. We got 45-50's staff here and we read all types of things. So you will definitely find something of interest to you in next week's show or something you might want to share with some of your users at your library. So definitely sign up for that one. Any of our other upcoming shows, we've got July and August all booked here so you can see all the different topics we've got coming. Sign up for any of those you'd like to. Also Encompass Live is on Facebook, so if you are a big Facebook user do go ahead and click on our Encompass Live link here that will pop you over to our Facebook page and if you're logged in, which we are not here, you can like our page and get this to go away. It's something new. We posted a reminder to login to today's show. I post reminders of upcoming shows and when our recordings are ready there we go, not now. Go away. I post when the recordings are ready. So if you are on Facebook definitely give us a like over there to keep up with what we are doing on the show. Other than that that wraps it up for today. Thank you Scott. Thank you. Thank you everyone for attending and we'll see you so let me double check my questions. No, okay. Good job. Thanks for the show. Alright, we'll see you next time on Encompass Live. Bye bye.