 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host Krista Porter here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. We're a webinar, webcast, online show, whatever you want to call us. We are here live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. We do record the shows however, so if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. You can always go to our website and watch the recording later at your convenience. I'll show you where that is at the end of today's show, where our website is and where you can see all of our recordings. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, so you don't have to sign into anything special, join up in anything. You don't have to register for a live session in order to have access to the recording later either. They're all just posted out there for anyone to see. We do a mixture of things here on the show, interviews, book reviews, training sessions, demos of software or product sometimes. Basically our only criteria is that it has something to do with libraries, something library-related. Some new things libraries are doing, technology that can help out libraries, new services and products you might be interested in. Sometimes some of our topics might seem a little out of the box, like you're wondering what does this have to do with me, but trust us that everything eventually comes around to having to do with libraries and all types of libraries, public school, academic, museum, anything out there. We have Nebraska Library Commission staff, some of our own staff that sometimes do presentations when we have things that are services and things that we are promoting from here, but we also bring in guest speakers from around the country, from both locally and Nebraska around the country and that's what we have this morning. On the line with us is Jen Eilers and she is just next door to us here from Nebraska, from the Iowa City Public Library. Good morning, Jen. Good morning. And last, not last month, two months in October, I went to the Iowa Library, it's already in December, yes. I attended the Iowa Library Association annual conference in October and I saw Jen's presentation on this there on the technology classes they were doing at the Iowa City Public Library and it was very, I thought it was very interesting and how she managed to pull all this off and I invited her to come on the show to share what they did at Iowa City with a broader audience, hopefully. So I would just hand over to you, Jen, to tell us about what you've been doing at your library with all these awesome classes that you've got running. All right, thank you, Krista. So I'm Jen and I've been working at the Iowa City Public Library for about three years. I went to library school and graduated from the University of Iowa in 2013. Before becoming a librarian, I actually worked for five years in a marketing and outreach department where I helped people with disabilities and traumatic brain injury. So as we go through today, you'll see that background from marketing and outreach kind of come through in how I've helped grow our classes here at the Public Library. Basically what I'm hoping that you'll get out of this little talk here today is what I'm hoping is that we'll discuss some strategies for creating successful marketing tools within libraries and identifying marketing outlets outside of your library. I also want to get you guys thinking about developing or finding assessment tools and measures that help you understand your patrons and the barriers to your service. I also want us to consider different ways and resources to keep your curriculum interesting and relevant and we'll talk about methods to assess the resources your library has and how to use them in your classroom. So those are kind of the things that we're going to get started with today. Well, the first thing I'm going to start with is assessment and how to do that in your classroom. So when I started here at the Public Library, I inherited the technology classes and my boss has honestly said to me that she wasn't sure if I was going to be able to make technology classes here popular. They hadn't been very popular before I was here and I basically received a blank slate. I had no curriculum. I didn't have any participation in classes and I wasn't entirely sure how we got the word out about technology classes at the library. I taught a few classes. I made my own curriculum and I taught a few classes and no one attended which I know a lot of libraries experience. So you put on you plan and you get nothing for all of that planning when no one shows up. So that's basically where I started with classes with zero to sometimes one person coming but now after three years I have seven to eight patrons coming per class and we have over 28 different classes that we offer at the library on various subjects and for those classes we have instructor notes and we also have curriculum and handouts that are given to our participants. So while I didn't have patron attendance and I didn't have curriculum to work with I did have a host of other resources that were critical for teaching technology to large groups of people here at the library. When you start out to do your technology classes at your library I suggest you kind of make a list of the resources you do have. So I made a little goal when I first started here because I had zero participation on occasion. I really just wanted to get one patron in each scheduled class that we had. So my problem that I saw was that I didn't have patron attendance I want to get one person here and so I tried to brainstorm some potential solutions to getting folks in the door and some things that I thought might help would be to offer night classes and weekend classes. Also we have a great website we have a marketing department so I was like we need to get our calendar of events up to date and our website entries for classes up to date and refreshed appropriately. Also I talked to our marketing department to create a marketing plan so we figured out what audiences to target where we were going to put information about classes in the community and what pieces we marketing pieces we might need to develop and then I was also very very lucky to inherit with this with my classes I inherited a work group and basically that meant that I had staff that were assigned to work on classes. I had seven staff members which is huge we are a bigger library for Iowa and I know that some some libraries don't have those resources but I understood that that was something that was going to help me make my classes successful. So I had seven staff members who were captive to my vision and I wanted to encourage those staff people when they were at their service points to encourage patrons when they saw the need to promote our classes so if they felt like a book didn't really fit or an online subscription to a database didn't fit that I wanted them to know about what classes we were teaching and I get them to talk about that at that you know reference interview or that interaction wherever they may be. So when I was look as you can see with this little slide thing you see the solutions there and I've kind of a little astra next to all those solutions and then I've tied them to the resources so what I had as far as resources went about getting those solutions into action was that I have extra hours and flexibility so I'm not a full-time librarian here I only am contracted to work 25 hours but I can get more hours and so that allows me to have a little bit of flexibility in my schedule to say you know what I can add a few hours on a weekend or a night so that we can get those night classes and weekend classes scheduled. We also have an online calendar and a library website and web page for and web page specifically for our classes that online calendar we just updated to make it a little bit easier to use so I understood that that was a resource that I needed to get my classes there. I'm also super lucky in that I have a computer lab with 20 seats within within the library with 20 computers and that it's a dedicated space and having that meant that I could have a large I could have a class up to 20 people and someday I hope to have that. I'm also very lucky in that the Iowa City Public Library has a marketing department. We have a graphic designer on staff whose part time we have a graphic intern and then we have a part-time PR person and those people have expertise that I could rely on even though I do have a marketing background and I have done design work I couldn't talk to them and see how to improve what we currently do and create materials that they feel will be a good fit. Also I had seven staff members which I talked about before that I could pull from and another really important one was that I had five hours away from a service point so some of you who have to be on a desk all day interfacing with the public it can be hard to sit down and write some curriculum but I was very lucky in that I have five hours of my 25 hours that I have to design curriculum. So when you are thinking about your solutions to the problems that you've faced once you've matched them with some of the resources that you've brainstormed you should really give your solutions time to realistically work and then assess their effectiveness. Some questions you probably want to consider are how will I measure the outcomes of my solutions? Am I using the right resources to solve the problem? Does my goal need to be adjusted? Are there other solutions that might work better to solve this problem? So before you decide whether or not your solutions are good to solving your problem really sit down and consider and assess those and these questions hopefully will give you a good place to start with that. The next thing we're going to talk about is assessment tools and this is probably the best way to get good feedback so that you can accurately decide whether the solutions you've come up for solving your problem actually are working. The Iowa City Public Library has an 11 question survey and a comment section to gather feedback from the class participants. I'm going to quickly show that to you just a minute here. So this is our assessment and it has the first seven questions really gather qualitative data about the class and the class instructor. I want my students to evaluate whether or not they felt the instructor was a good fit for the topic and I also want to make sure that the problem that they had with the enjoyment of their class isn't dependent on the subject or the teacher but maybe how it was organized. I just want to get some good feedback about how they felt the class went as far as the material covered and whether or not the teacher was a good fit. So that's where the first seven questions kind of lie. The next questions 8 through 10 I want to get some information about my patrons. What are their skillset? You know who is coming to my classes and then I want to know how they've heard about our classes. That's really important to report back to my marketing department so they know exactly what marketing tools that they're using are effective, what things we can improve and then finally the last section is that comment section and I it's unstructured so with the rest of the questions we designed in a way to make it very easy for patrons to kind of just check a box or circle something so that they're not having to think very hard and it's it it makes the assessment quicker to fill out and doesn't take as much time but I also wanted to give them a free space to give feedback any kind of feedback they wish and so in the comment section I receive things like thanks this was a great this was a great class I really enjoyed how you presented the information or it could be something as simple as I couldn't hear you very well so you need to use a microphone or turn up the sound a little bit so that comment section I feel like is a very important part of the paper survey that we give now we did decide to use a paper survey and that was a very purposeful choice and I'm not saying that a paper survey is the way to go it just was a good fit for for our library and Jen we do I do have a question about your survey okay first I think it's a really great I was just myself thinking when you're talking about the different questions that there are so many different variables that go into what was makes what made a particular class successful or not like I said it wasn't the format wasn't the instructor wasn't the content or and especially that I like the part about the the comfort level of the patrons or was it just something you know they weren't at the right level for that particular class so I think it's a really good document and actually other people think that too well can we get a copy of that that someone wants to know if you would include that in like the show notes afterwards if you send me something like that so that people can borrow from it for their own assessments or surveys yes okay great yeah send it to me and when I put up the recording afterwards for everyone I will include this along with that so that you can get a copy of it and use it for years and we do have a question about using the computer lab but I mean I suppose I could ask it now or if I don't figure me into this about you said you do have a computer lab specifically that you use for all of these classes okay for these classes yeah do you close it to public access when when like you close down the lab for just when these classes are happening and or is it and what's the reaction to further of the patrons who want to access the lab during the time you have in classes do you have other workstations elsewhere for them so that it's not really an issue yeah so we have basically we have the computer lab which is 20 reserves computers in and like it's in a classroom space with the door so when we are teaching a class people cannot go into that area it's actually a closed space just in general we have another area for computer use we have 40 computers on our second floor that patrons can access at all time so the computer lab is a dedicated space for we we also rent that's a silly word but we rented out to other groups so during the year if we have like we have the bond we have a volunteer tax group that comes in to help people with taxes they use that space so it's used by other community part community people who need computer access who don't have it in the community for free as well so it's not just for classes but it isn't open it really isn't accessible to the public right oh okay not just us not just open for even at other times so there they wouldn't they wouldn't be thinking it's I've actually taught in class in classrooms computer labs in libraries where apparently it is also like open for anyone to use when there's not a class going on and people peeking in the window or looking and wondering hey why can't I get into yeah so it's nice that you have this whole separate area yeah it's a huge resource it's a huge resource I know not all libraries are lucky enough to have such a thing so yeah I can understand how that could be a barrier okay cool um can keep trucking yep go right ahead yep oh someone just say that they have someone else has us as a survey that they use as similar questions did your skills improve as a result of this class so you know getting their opinion of it yeah and that's good for when you're trying to talk to administrators or money people that look the people are actually saying these were what if they help them yeah yeah yes proving I mean I collect my data for my classes but I also collect my data for my board and for my director who I'm like no no this is a service we should provide to our community let's let's keep writing this yeah that is another way that the that the assessment is a is an important tool so yes definitely it double teams it's not just a way of doing your classes better but a way of proving to your your board and your community that this is a valuable resource or for your for the community that you're serving right and it's not just as the as the librarian is coming from the actual the citizens use it yeah proof in the pudding yeah exactly just type of question about your hours that you said that the 20 hours a week that you work for them is the five hours away from the service point in addition to that 20 or is part of that 20 so I'm 25 hours I'm okay sorry so I'm 25 hours so I have 20 hours on a service point essentially and then five hours that are dedicated to desk work like where I can sit down in and work on curriculum do all the behind-the-scenes things that need to be done in order to get these classes right yeah all right exactly up ready yeah great all right go ahead then we're caught up on our questions okay yeah those are great questions thank you um so we have our we have our paper survey and as Krista kind of mentioned you know we I use that for four classes but also for board members and we in addition to this qualitative data which is essentially what you're getting from your paper survey I also capture quantitative data and quantitative data for us is I collect information about attendance numbers per class total registrations for class I do date time location of the class so while we have that wonderful computer lab I also take classes out to the community for members that maybe struggle getting here so I've taught classes at retirement homes and actually I will teach class next week at the shelter for people that are looking for jobs in the in the coming year so I will teach them a resume skills class at the shelter where they're at so I also look record that location information and the two together really provide a very full picture of what our classes are doing and they also give me a full picture of how I might be able to find better locations find better times for my classes and find little tweaks and improvements to who I assigned to a class how I teach a class tweaking up curriculum so by capturing all of this data it it can really make the classes that you teach fit with the feedback that you're essentially getting in various ways from your community so we did end up going with a paper survey there are lots of great tools out there and I'll talk about those in a little bit that can help you if you don't have the time and energy like I made this paper survey I record all of my stats both the qualitative data from the survey as well as the quantitative data into an Excel spreadsheet that just seemed to work best for me I like having that kind of total control and I also like entering that information because it gives me immediate feedback of how my classes are going those were just choices that I made based on my my personal skills and and what I felt was necessary to get kind of a fuller picture but there are great tools if you do not have the time or the skills to do this kind of assessment so for us it was it was that I did have the Excel skills I mapped all of this kind of stuff in Excel for my previous job so I know all the little tricks in and what not and using that program also it seemed easier for our patrons who had lower computer skills or beginning computer skills to fill out a paper survey then have to do something on a computer so we I did kind of try an online form and it it didn't get the return as it didn't get a return as good of a return as a paper survey did so that was kind of why I tried both and this was the better choice for us and it doesn't mean that that will be the case for you so definitely try those out and I you know again I have five hours away at my desk it takes me like 20 minutes to input this stuff or less and I have the time to do that kind of analysis and data entry that may not be something that you can you can do so when you're considering finding an assessment tool and here are some questions I've had these up for quite a while and would a paper or online survey work better for getting patron feedback and I would encourage you if you have the time to test to test both both them both options and when do you want your patrons to assess your technology class or your class in general immediately following your class through an online survey sent in an email at their convenience either of those could be a great can be a great asset we give ours immediately after the class I wanted fresh fresh feedback I wanted the captive audience but I've heard of online surveys sent behind being a very effective tool as well again you want to ask yourself how much time do I have to record my data how much time to do data entry how much time do you need to analyze the data there are some great tools that will do the analysis for you how frequently do you want to do this analysis I know that technically I only have to report information to my board every July so once a year but I actually find it very helpful in managing my classes to look at data pretty much as often as I possibly can so that that's how I've kind of answered that question for myself and then what other data would be useful to determine the success of your class so I have you know class attendance location time those those may not be important over a time of recording that information you might decide that that really isn't helpful data and you're just wasting your time so again it's just critical thinking and assessment constantly I'm constantly tweaking and I think that that makes our classes better because that of that constant kind of evaluation and tweaking that happens so here are some examples of some great assessment tools that are out there I'm gonna just kind of quickly run through some of their benefits so there's Google Forms if you have a Google if you have a Gmail account they're free and easy to use you can customize the form and the data is compiled for you so you create the form and it creates basically a spreadsheet of all of that information so instead of having to go through and and figure out a method for capturing how many people said that your class was great it compiles those answers for you so that can save you a lot of time and then it does not do the analysis of that of those spreadsheets for you you would you could use the tool within Google Forms the spreadsheet tool or you can actually export it and then use a different tool like Excel to create graphs and do the manipulation yourself as you choose another great tool is SurveyMonkey again it's an offline software that allows you to create surveys and analyze your data the tools are that are offered are free they're basic and you can only create surveys that have ten questions that's kind of a pitfall of it and you can only capture a hundred responses so after a hundred people have taken the survey you either have to upgrade and and purchase an account with SurveyMonkey or a way of getting around that would be to sign up for a new account and create a new subscription but then your data is going to then be housed in like several different places which isn't necessarily ideal and if you can't afford a subscription it might not be a great tool for you but it's definitely something to look at another tool is Project Outcome this project was launched by the Public Library Association it's a three-year project and it began in 2015 so we're kind of midway through essentially when your library signs up to be a part of Project Outcome you get access to surveys and measurement tools designed to help you measure the effectiveness effectiveness of your program and build persuasive arguments for your board and for your community to garner more funding if you are looking specifically at doing classes they have digital inclusion and education and lifelong learning as two core areas where they have pre-designed tools and surveys so the thing with Project Outcome is that it's all built for you which is great if you don't have the time but it isn't something that you can manipulate or design yourself so if you're looking to save some time and and you know just want someone else to have done it and have tested this out again Project Outcome is a very good resource the thing that can either be a boon or kind of a negative for you is that the data is that you enter is going to be shared with libraries across the United States so how effective your classes are that data is recorded in and will be shared to get more data for for the nation essentially PLA is looking for more data to figure out how effective libraries are in the United States so that data will be shared so that's something for you to consider as well and finally the last resource that I'm going to talk about there are other resources out there but these are the top ones that I that I wanted to present to you is library research service and this is a site that offers tips and strategies for collecting data creating surveys and analyzing the data from those surveys this organization it conducts research about libraries and works closely with the Colorado library community on their resources page they offers in general how-tos and considerations for putting together an effective survey and understanding how to analyze it they offer three general survey templates to get you started so I've included some questions that I use to consider the library research service also has questions and they also have some pre-designed surveys that you can use to get started so it's kind of a bare bones but again if you want a little bit more control it's a good place to start okay we're going to move on to the next selection or a section here and talk a little bit about creating successful marketing tools and the first place that I recommend starting is creating a marketing plan that kind of maps out what you want to be doing what your budget is and how long you plan to test out various marketing strategies try a bunch of things to get to get the word out and saturate your community with information about your your service so when I first came I knew that part of the problem with people not attending was that they just didn't hear about our classes and so I wanted to make sure that I I figured that out but that wasn't as big of a problem as it had been in the past so what we do to saturate our community here at the public library here at Iowa City is we do a monthly press release to our local paper the press citizen and it's I don't know 250 words and it's just a quick and dirty kind of this is when we're doing a class these are the skills we want people to learn and we put that out in the local paper and occasionally I will write a longer column spotlight in the local papers the press citizen in the gazette that's about 500 words about the effectiveness of our classes kind of my vision for classes if I wanted to talk specifically about a suite of classes that we're teaching like a lot of times in the spring we teach design classes for graphic design movie making those kinds of things I I'll do a bigger piece for the paper to kind of get people excited and enthused about the skills that they might have the opportunity of learning if they signed up I've also gone on local radio shows to talk about our classes we have a Facebook page and Twitter and Instagram accounts that our marketing department posts to we I also do blog posts our library has a blog I am routinely assigned to write a blog post every three or four months and I generally use that opportunity to talk about my classes we also have a library website and I try to get my classes in there as on as many different pages as possible and tie them together so that patrons are seeing that information on our site as frequently as they possibly can and lastly we have the window and it's a newsletter that we send out twice a month or I shouldn't say twice a month twice a year and basically it is sent to everyone in Iowa City and it just gives information about the projects that we're doing at the library so I always try to see if there's a little bit of space for classes on that tool because everyone in the community will see it and I want to make sure everyone in the community sees my classes all right I'm some of them are getting I do have a question about some of your marketing outreach okay basically do you have any way and maybe you're getting into this I don't know of tracking how many people read your posts like are they actually being looked at yes so I'm beyond the assessment tool the the server that we have our marketing department can track the likes of a of a particular view they also they get all sorts of statistics for our blog and website as well so that when I want reports I can get those and a lot of times I don't worry about the website or social media posts until the end of the year but I can ask our IT department for that that kind of information cool good that's good to know because sometimes you put those things out there and you have no idea if it's having any effect but it's good that you have people that can will look at that I know like on our Facebook we do have you can see you know how many how many people it reached and for tweets how many times they've been retweeted or shared or anything yeah definitely so definitely another good place to look at yeah yeah yeah maybe not as frequently as some of the other data that you're collecting but definitely a valuable thing to assess so when we were looking at our marketing another another thing that we did was we developed specific marketing tools for the library so we have these great little half sheets and I'm gonna go out again and show you what they kind of look like here oops this is not it this is our data so we have this great calendar and this has all of the events that the library does in programming for the library is on here what I decided to do was also do a so I planned my classes out for about four to six months and we created this little half sheet that we have available at all of our service points so at our circulation desk at our information station in our classroom this is plastered everywhere I could think of putting it and it just basically gives the classes their times in a little description and it tells you how to register for our classes so that we you know people are getting that information and that's just this is a tool that we only use in-house so it's not something that goes out to the community or anything it's something that's solely made for the library and the patrons that come through the door and the same is true for this calendar those takeaways are really important when I'm teaching after I'm done teaching a class I often pedal my little marketing tools I'm like hey if you want it if you liked this class please take a flyer and decide if you want to take another class with us another way that I market our classes is through our class handouts so at the very bottom of our class handouts I also give another shout out to how they can find out information about classes in the future where they need to go on the website and whatnot we have some posters as well around the around the library that tell about our classes so those are just some while I you know do a lot for the community you also have to think about marketing within the library building because that's that's where a lot of your your patrons I mean if they're coming to the library the chances of them coming back to the library for a class are much higher than a community member who may not come to the library at all so it's important not to overlook your library space as an important marketing grounds and finally and another strategy here I know that we're kind of getting close to time but you one of the biggest assets to marketing is actually your staff so the more educated you can make your staff about the class opportunities that you have the better it also energizes your staff to know the kind of effective things that you're doing within the building so I share class listings at staff departmental and board meetings if I can get on the agenda I try I send emails or post information internally we have an internal blog here at the library so this isn't something that the public sees so like today after I'm done speaking here I will let my my co-workers know that I gave this talk and I do the same thing for my classes I tell them when we had a great success or what we what might be coming up through that blog so it's not necessarily being as pushy as emailing them constantly but it's that that information is available for them I also will post my statistics to that blog yearly when I give that over to the board as well I also invite my my staff members to come to a class as silly as that sounds I want them I mean they may already have the skills but I would I I do want them to be in that classroom and then I can get feedback from them as to whether or not what can I improve you know what did they see how did they enjoy the class getting that feedback from staff can be really helpful and it also you know gets them into this process if you don't have seven staff members to you know pull from you're going to want to energize the staff that you do have working with you and partner with them a little bit to get them energized about about your classes so they'll share that with patrons Jen we do have a question about that actually but yeah just going back to the having the staff come is this done during their regular work hours did you have to work out something with other departments that it was allowed for them to come to your classes as part of their workday or was that so I did talk so our I'm very lucky in that our director is always looking for training opportunities for our staff and our staff just like our community has a wide variety of computer and technology needs so she is perfectly fine with our staff if they have if they aren't assigned to a public service desk they have some downtime and want to come to our wanted to come to a class that I'm that I'm doing they are welcome to we teach databases and sometimes our infos info staff need a little refresher and it's a good way to kill two birds with one so those are they have enough that this is a great way rather than having to have a separate we're going to teach the staff how to use this new service or already said refresh them on it just haven't come to class already being taught and they can learn right along yeah yeah because we generally have enough see I mean we'd have to kick them out if if we had a full classroom but a lot of times we don't and so those seats seats are available for staff so yeah cool um one question about the marketing and social media just a quick thing do they do you know if your marketing department uses any sort of social media tools someone wants to know like Hootsuite or one of those services that can like aggregate things together or they just go I know they use I think they schedule posts I'm pretty sure that they schedule posts they work they work months in advance sometimes and then I think they use a tool like Hootsuite I'm not entirely sure if that's true and I don't really know the nuts and bolts unfortunately but I do know Hootsuite does allow you to schedule posts right they do so that it goes out and appropriate time frame and I know that they do work ahead a lot of time so that we can get marketing out into the community a month or two in advance just so that they're getting an opportunity to hear at multiple times in multiple ways right okay cool thank you mm-hmm um also when you're thinking about marketing tools utilize your existing partnerships so the Iowa City community has a senior center so it's a center where seniors can go and learn new skills or just be with other seniors basically and they're right down the street from us a lot of the patrons that I see taking my classes are in that demographic so I basically developed a partnership with that with that organization where I teach some classes over there and in return they send out information about our classes in their mailer to everyone that basically the senior center you have to pay some dues to be part of it so everyone that pays dues into the senior center gets a mailer every every quarter and our information goes into that in return I teach classes for them so it's a very nice partnership we get our information out to a demographic that wants to come to our classes and we help the senior center provide classes that are interesting to their to their constituents also I talked to I have connections at our recreation centers our our City Hall I don't do as much posting to churches but certainly if there is a church in your in your area that is an important community center you would want to consider them as well but getting your posters and handouts to those areas can be a really great way of getting your community aware of what you're doing also be on the lookout for potential partnerships so we had the Iowa City tech chicks which is a group of women that just focus on improving their tech skills and it's a very loose open group and they actually came to me and asked if I would be willing to teach their group specifically some some skills so we did I used a YouTube curriculum we teach we teach using YouTube to edit video and they were interested in me presenting that to their group a couple times also a group called sense and sensibility it's an investment group wanted to know about our investment databases and we saw that they were using our our other rooms in the library and approach them and we're like hey would you like a training on value line which is a investment database or Morningstar and they were really excited and and that captive audience also does help boost your like boost those numbers and shows that there's there's community value there so that you know look for look for ways in which groups that already exist already meet within your community how you might be able to help them you know do you know accomplish their goals for their group with your technology classes and again always assess assess assess assess your efforts we assess our efforts based on our how hard data through our web stats and when you've when you've done your assessment over some time with your marketing tools scale back don't be afraid to scale back if you don't you know maybe social media isn't where people are hearing about your classes stop scheduling posts it you know just because it's an effective tool for one library doesn't mean it's an effective tool for your library and so so make those assessments for yourself and and just do that kind of frequently so final thing that we're going to cover today is building better curriculum because you can get the word out you can get you know an infrastructure in place for teaching your classes but essentially if the meat of what you're presenting isn't interesting nobody's gonna want to come and so you can consider different ways of keeping your curriculum interesting and some of those ways is bring in people from your community to teach and design new classes based on their interests or expertise now I I do a lot of our own design of classes and curriculum but we also are very lucky in having the library school in town so I often go and ask their students if they want to try their hand at making curriculum for a computer class at a public library to give them real experience real-world experience in something they might be doing in the public library they land in we also have pages here who when and I asked them on a volunteer basis if they wouldn't mind designing curriculum so we had a garage band class that one of our pages volunteered to create curriculum for and teach because he used to be a sound mixer in Seattle and loves using garage band it's a little pet hobby of his so he was very excited to come and teach for us and then he ended up teaching staff how to teach that class so now he's handed the curriculum and has taught me how to teach the class effectively so that was a great that's a great way of considering building your curriculum especially if you don't have dedicated time to creating your own curriculum and also figure out ways to make your classes more interactive we essentially teach three different types of classes here at the public library we teach a hands-on skill building class so we have a gimp class the gimp is a free open source graphic design program we teach you to we have garage band classes and basically what we're doing is helping patrons learn to use the software to complete a particular project so in our gimp classes we'll have patrons edit and touch up touch scan photographs to correct issues like water spots or whatever so that they are learning how to do how to use a graphic design tool and kind of become more comfortable in general with technology and we talk about hotkeys which is or keyboard shortcuts which is a useful skill to have just generally but then they're you then they're also learning specific school specific skills using a graphic design software and they are walking away with a product too which I think is really important they are correcting a photograph that is meaningful to them in their real life and so those classes those hands-on classes are really are really great we also do lecture-based classes with discussion and that's typically a librarian a librarian is demoing a software or application like Facebook or our genealogy databases and students are welcome to ask questions periodically to make sure they understand the programs as they work through going through that interface and then we have just kind of lecture-based classes with hands-on activities so one of the great classes that we teach here is our computer hardware class and basically we give a little bit of a lecture that kind of discusses the computer components and then we have old decommissioned computers that patrons can then look in and say oh well this is the motherboard and this is where the motherboard is in this broken up computer and they can kind of literally get their hands into the computer hardware to see how it kind of connects with the information that was presented to them earlier so those those are three ways in which we kind of keep our curriculum interesting as well as having a wide variety of different topics that we that we cover I did a couple questions that came in about the classes right that how long do each of these classes usually last does it vary depending on the type of class yes so if we're doing a hands-on skill building class a lot of times I try to allocate two hours for those classes just because you're trying to teach a software and you're trying to get a finished product so we usually do teach those in two-hour chunks all the rest of the classes that we teach are an hour long okay and these classes are all free some of the desks earlier all of them are free cool all right yep they're all free and if you sometimes you just don't know what to teach there are lots of times when I'm like okay our curriculum seems stale but I don't really know where to go I look back at my assessment data and I'm like we've taught all of this let's try something new I don't know what to try new so I often survey other libraries like my own to see what class is there teaching so I basically look at size and type of community and I know that Iowa City's demographics align well with public libraries in Boulder Colorado again that's a small smallish town a small community with a very large University Ann Arbor, Michigan again a smaller community with a very large University I kind of found census data to kind of help me make that equivalency so I kind whenever I'm kind of stuck I kind of like okay Boulder what do you got for me or hey Ann Arbor what do you got for me and there are other libraries too that I pull from that are similar in that way and so that kind of helps me figure out okay well they're trying this with their with their community maybe we can try that too here so that's a way of getting some ideas for new libraries new library curriculum read about technology online or from magazines magazine subscriptions are I'm lucky in that the library subscribes to a lot of tech magazines and they get we have a staff subscription and they get pushed to my mailbox pretty frequently and I can just kind of skim through those and see if I see anything interesting go more in-depth read those articles if I'm sitting out on the information desk and it's kind of slow I you know go to my favorite my favorite tech blogs the Washington or even you know New York Times Washington Post just kind of see what's out there what's up and coming what's in the the zeitgeist essentially of technology to kind of decide should I be teaching should I be offering classes on this new free software that's out there for people or or what is the latest app you know I'm kind of always got my finger on that stuff and I would also encourage you not to forget about open-source software free and free online tools those are no overhead to your library to teach a lot of times because they're offered for free and and those tools can be great resources to allowing your patrons to develop some skills that you would never thought possible audacity is a free sound editing software and it's amazing and we've we've taught that class we've taught classes like that in which people record a digital kind of a digital history sound bite where they they tell a story kind of like story core they tell a story and then they can then they can use that audacity software to make sure that the sound clip goes well they can cut out please places where they aren't pleased with what they said necessarily or it didn't sound quite right and build a little sound bite that they can be proud of and happy with and share and also look look for other places that have curriculum for free GCF learn free org that's on the screen right now has free online tutorials technology courses for basic computer skills from Windows 10 to Internet safety if you aren't quite sure how to start out your curriculum a lot of times I visit here just to kind of say okay what are the baseline skills that that GCF wants people to know and and where do I go from there and they've been doing this for a really long time so they they provide tutorial they've been providing tutorials for 10 years they keep their tutorials fresh so this is a great website to go to if you just need some curriculum kind of out of the box you don't want to think about it it's their curriculum is there and it's great and also learning express the state of Iowa provides this to our libraries for free sometimes I'll look at those two tutorials to see if that's a good place to start or I'm a lot of times we don't teach a lot of proprietary software at the library because it's constantly changing and then we have to have subscriptions to that or we have to download that software and so I'm very familiar of what's available in our library databases and when a patron has a question about Excel or something I can point them in that direction if that isn't something that we're going to teach here digital learn org this is another great software it offers or another great program or website it offers free videos PDFs of curriculum and PDFs of handouts online it's a project by the Public Library Association so it's again if you don't have time to develop your curriculum it's right there for you especially some of the very basic topics it's all in out of the box you can just read that through and then use that to prepare your class and then teach it and then finally the Denver Public Library provides instructor notes and handouts for all of the classes they they teach in their computer technology classroom and there is a link here for that curriculum this is something that I hope the public the Iowa City Public Library will do in the future Denver Public has already done it so again if you see some classes there that you think would be a good fit for your community you certainly can just take that curriculum it's it's there offered up for you and the community so those are some great places to look at building your curriculum and as always is like I feel kind of like a broken record revise update and correct and tweak your curriculum as needed when you get those lovely assessments back you might get something that's some feedback that is really critical and making your class better so integrate those suggestions into your curriculum and see if it see if that changes things up and it makes a little bit better yeah these are not it's great that these are not static classes you can always change things and yes yeah nothing is in stone exactly exactly okay we do have a few more questions that came in about what you're talking about about your curriculum and your classes so yeah it is about 5 after 11 now we do have some more questions coming in but we will answer all of them since we started about 5 after this is this is on the dot for being our hour session but we will just continue until we get all the questions asked if you do need to leave any of you attendees because we did hit the hour that go right ahead if you need to we are recording you can always come back and listen to the rest of the session on the recording later but I don't think it'll take more than a couple of minutes so if you do have any last-minute questions type them in get them in there let me know and we can ask them before we go one good question to have here is it's kind of a what is your best tech magazine or maybe what are some titles that you would specifically request is being really good ones you said look into them for ideas for curriculum I frequently look at computers and I think it's computers and libraries is it bad that I just know what they look like computers and libraries I'm pretty sure that's the title that's that's that is one that I I do okay and they they do have a lot of their stuff is online as well which is good I know I've looked at some of their articles that are on on the website for that one yep wired is also very good for technology to I mean like the biggies yeah yeah great couple people did ask about promoting the classes themselves any interesting how do you make them appear interesting you come up with creative and memorable names for the classes themselves to catch people's attention rather than just the you know gimp for create for editing or whatever you know daddy because people are they the public will say to they have trouble just getting people interested or wanting to come to the classes and they just say we're gonna teach word or whatever right um so I do have a little bit of a met marketing background so I know how to write things for marketing and I do have those great those great marketing department ladies but I guess make them short and sweet and what I found has been really effective for us is that I group classes per month so I have so in January this year we're actually teaching a lot of smart like a handheld device classes so I'll group all of our iPad classes all of our Android classes together so when I do put out a pet press release I can focus on how this is the month for your handheld devices and I try to make the titles of the classes I mean they may seem kind of boring but I shy away from gimmicky kind of sounding marketing I want them to know exactly what they're getting right it's kind of a fine line between being interesting and being confusing and what is this class because it's such a cutesy title that I don't even understand what I'm gonna be attending yeah exactly so a lot of times it's very basic like I for January iPad tips and tricks and then I give two lines learn useful tips and tricks for making the most out of your iPad safe getting the most out of your memory and much more so I think what's really be succinct about what kind of goals you have for the class and that that will tell your patron all they need to know you're not trying to trick them by sugarcoating it essentially you know you want the words to be interesting and active but you don't necessarily want them to be misleading or confusing so again I get an idea what you're doing by looking at the Iowa City Public Library website you said you got your calendar of classes up there as well I do yes that is that is the test ground for for how effective you know if I have low registration I do kind of think mmm should I be should I be tweaking how I'm how I'm talking about this class so exactly let's see oh for do you do I know you in your survey you do ask yeah do they think these classes you help them do you do skill assessments for classes at the beginning and end of the class to see did they where do they start at and what are they and where do they end at I don't do that I know that you certainly can and and that can be very helpful but a lot of times I think the question that we ask and I'm gonna actually pull that up here because I can't remember exactly how we word that question but essentially what I ask from that is did you learn a new skill or some information and I it's it's I let them decide I'm not necessarily as concerned if they can't like if they can reproduce copying and pasting and in Gimp I if they felt like they learned enough that's good enough for me something new something that they didn't know before right yeah let's see what else we have here there's a few more one questions we don't want to go too long here so oh here's the suggestions for marketing to a younger audience I know you do adult classes so I don't know so with I don't do a lot like I guess I mean our our our library classes are kind of skewed to an older demographic and a lot of that has to do with the with free time you know and that a lot of people that are older have have a little bit more free time on their hands they don't have a full-time job or kids so I think that the maybe a different department would handle the like you've talked about teens or something that the different stuff that I yeah and I don't have the experience with marketing to our teens and tweens now I know we have very successful programming for both of those groups but it's not really within my expertise to speak on that no no problem at all do you limit the class size for most specific persons asking for seniors I may be because they might need more individual attention but I'm so for our our hands-on classes we do limit to 10 people and I usually have some sort of aid that we have some volunteers who can come in and kind of help me teach a class so basically I will give instruction at the at the front of the room and then I have an aid that comes in and kind of helps shepherd everyone if they kind of get stuck they can put their hand up and then the able come in help them and I also will go out in the middle of instruction again why we block off two hours so that we keep everybody together get there as best as we can but yeah we do cap those classes at 10 because five seniors who might have a wide variety of computer technology skills can be a bit demanding to get through a project you need to do a lot of more at one-on-one during the class right right all right we have two last questions that we're gonna I'll go through I think and then that'll be it just wrapping up you can always contact Jen of course at her library if you have any other questions you didn't get to something specific to doing the surveys how often do you recommend comparing mapped survey responses in this case they are asking about having a smaller class size because they only have like two to four attendees how often did you comparisons of what's going on what's changing that kind of thing and so I before I cut a class like if I we have a ton of classes so before I decide that we're going to retire a class for a while I map it for a full year and I try to offer it at least twice to make sure that that it is something that I should be cutting that goes along with what we're saying for so many variables that could affect it and time of year definitely you know would be something certain things are more popular in the summer than in the winter or something right well and even just attendance in general like we dip really really badly in November through January because it's tough for people to get want to get out of their homes you know we live in climates that are snowy so yep we're like that here too yep and many of us with Midwest people I know we have one right buddy from the middle of the country no it's this yeah exactly understands the the trials of getting people to programming in those months and last question we have here but do you find the service desk to be one of the biggest points for marketing this person wonders if some of their staff there are promoting the classes as much as they would like and is there any way to help you know where do you think is the biggest place most your marketing out so I know just by our assessment data that it's our half sheets so I make the assumption that my co-workers and I've actually like because we're double staffed on the information desk I've seen my co-workers hand them out so I know and I and I get questions from my co-workers about classes so I know that they're talking about them to patrons again it's a little bit harder to assess that you know accurately I'm without I'm not a supervisor so without without that kind of overhead I can't do a ton about it but I guess there's to me I just think it's a it's a positive attitude and when you do see someone pass out information to your about your classes or whatever I often I'm like oh thank you that seems like a great fit for that page and I'm excited to see them there and that may seem like a little silliness maybe but I do honestly feel that and I would suggest just saying that to the co-workers that you do that you do see handout or do get you know get suggestions for classes from or have patrons going to classes and again just making sure that they know that they're happening and what they are what's being offered I think is the biggest I mean we're all librarians we want to share resources we want to you know get people the information that they need and the training that they need so you're not hopefully you're not trying to overcome that kind of barrier that if you supply the librarian with the information they're going to disseminate it right so and definitely making it a positive thing and I think reaching out to them more if you're just not sure if they're promoting it chat with them and say and let me you said I like to come you said about how they ask you more about the classes because they've obviously either read what you've given them to hand out or a patron has asked about it if they're not asking about it maybe go to them and say so we're trying to figure out what's going on with the classes what have you heard what do you think and just you know make it a thing that they don't open up the dialogue yeah open up the doubt they can't not know about it at least exactly exactly you may sound really annoying but you can hide a lot of annoying by perkiness that's an awesome comment yes be pretty and positive whether they like it or whether they are or not all right it looks like there's no other questions floating around out there right now and that's fine I think we'll wrap it up for this morning anyways thank you everyone for attending thank you so much Jen for coming on and redoing this class for us this presentation for us here I think there's a lot of great information you can tell from a lot of questions a lot of people interested in and having the same kind of issues and problems with trying to run get these classes out there and people attending them as you are and I'm glad you got to tell us how you've been able to be be successful with it in your library thank you for having me all right all right I am going to pull back control to my screen here now should come up a second there we go all right so throughout the session as I was mentioning particular websites and things I do save them into our delicious account here at the library commission when I post up the recording later today you will have a link one link to all of these all the different sites that I gathered here for for the class and Jen will also be sending me her slides and that assessment that survey this afternoon and then that will be included as well for you to all to have access to our archive sessions go here on our website if you go to our encompass live website right beneath our upcoming shows we have a list of our archives and we post the recording we'll have the handouts and I'll also have a link to the as I said the our delicious collection of websites will be right over here when it's ready enough probably later today maybe tomorrow you'll all get an email letting you know that it's available and it's out there so if there is as I said we are free and open to anyone to watch so do share the links for our archives and our upcoming shows with anyone friends neighbors colleagues family whoever you think might be interested in any of the topics we're covering here so for next week show I'll invite you to sign up for that one at best new children's books of 2016 Sally Snyder who is here at the Nebraska library commission she's our coordinator of children's and young adult library services she does book talks every year about the best books that came out in the past year so she's got her best new children's book session next Wednesday and you can see on our schedule just two weeks from that on December 28th she has the best new teen books of 2016 where she'll be joined by Jill and Anas who is from our a librarian here at one of our middle schools in Nebraska to share the teen books so if you're interested in those topics please do go ahead and sign up for them also and comes live is on Facebook so if you are a big Facebook user please do give us a like over there and you'll see notices of when our new sessions are coming up here I do a reminder that people can log in on the fly to our sessions when our recordings are available all that is posted on here as well so if you are big on Facebook to do go over there and give us a like then that that wraps it up for this morning thank you very much for attending and we'll see you next time on Encompass Live. Bye bye.