 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. In the background there you may hear, I see a tail, our presenter this morning has some guest speakers with her, her cats, I heard a little meow there. They're both right here. They're both here. Of course they want to be involved and see what's going on because they can hear everything happening. So we'll have an interesting show this morning. Encompass Live is the Library Commission's weekly online event. It's our webinar, webcasts, online show where we are here live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show every week and post it to our YouTube channel. So if you're not here on Wednesdays, you can go back to our website and view our recordings. All of our recordings, going back to when we first started the show, which was in 2009, January 2009, are all on our website so you can go there and watch them. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So do please share with your colleagues, friends, neighbors, family, anybody who you think may be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. Everybody's welcome to join us here and then watch all the recordings are up there. When we do put up the recordings, we do include presentations like the slides our presenter has up this morning, any websites that are mentioned that collect them in our delicious account where we gather up websites to share. So you'll have all of that information afterwards to refer to. We do a mixture of things here on the show, book reviews, interviews, demos of websites. Basically the only criteria we have is that it is something library related. Something libraries are actually doing, something that may be of interest to libraries that may want to become involved in. Sometimes some out of the box things thinking that you might not really be sure why it's on this show for libraries but trust me, I always make sure everything comes around to libraries in the end. That's our goal here. We do here being at the Nebraska Library Commission sometimes have commission staff that come on and do presentations about services or programs or things that we offer here in Nebraska but we also do bring in guest speakers often times and that's what we have today on the line with us. You can see there is Natalie Bizon. She is, well where are you now, you're not where it says on, she's formerly library director at Hopkins District Indoor Township Libraries in Michigan, but has recently resigned from there and has moved. I am now in Gilbert, Illinois, so northwest of Chicago. I know you did say you were still helping out the staff at your previous libraries to make sure they're still up to speed on what's going on in their libraries. Natalie has been a previous speaker, presenter on our big talk from small libraries online conference that we do here via the library commission for those of you who don't know. It's a one day online conference that is for small and rural libraries. All of our presenters are from libraries who serve FTE of 10,000 or less. It's public library, academic, school, anything, it's for the smaller libraries we have out there. Natalie has presented on that before and has attended, I'm not sure if she's headed all of them. I think I attended all but the first year, the first year I didn't know it existed and then the second year I applied to talk and I've attended every year after that. Great, yeah. That's also something that we record and it's out there, so if you're interested in seeing what's been going on with that, the recordings for big talk from small libraries are on, you can just Google that. It's always the last Friday in February, so look for that again next year, we'll be doing it again. This is actually a presentation that Natalie did submit for this year's big talk from small libraries but I received more presentations that I could fit into a single day and being the person that runs this conference, I didn't really have the energy to make it more than a day long of an online session. So luckily we have this, our Encompass live show here, so the ones that couldn't fit in that one day, we got so many good submissions on all sorts of topics, so I invite them to come on here for us. So Natalie's been doing some really creative kits of all sorts of different kind of things that you can lend out at your library and I'm just going to hand it over to you to explain what you've put together there at your libraries. Okay, sounds good. Yes, Kilmowski and Koishinka may be wandering in and out on the picture occasionally and just in case you guys thought this was a sit back and listen, think again, I like to do interactive things, so please keep your keyboards ready and there'll be a few questions or ideas or please type in anything that you can think of, I have a few writing prompt things for you, brain teasers, different things for you. So yes, I was at Hopkins library for about five and a half years. The library itself, the building is about 2,000 square feet, but the library is about 1,200 of that. So space was kind of at a premium, pretty much the entire time I was there. We managed to add a little bit more shelving and reconfigure things to make things work a little bit better and I'll have some pictures for you in a minute. And then I started up at the Doortownship library about three and a half years there. That one is a much larger building, it's 7,500 square feet so you would think we would have lots more space, but big and open is really nice and you can't really move things around to get rid of that feeling too much, so we had to stay with a lot of the predetermined spots where things were, it was kind of a pain, but we managed to fit in a bunch more things there too, so I have a couple pictures from them. Okay, as much as we would all love to have space that looks like this, that we can move shelves, it is not realistic in a public library. I love this idea, I've always loved it ever since I saw it at my doctor's office, but I have been amazed that some libraries have put this in, I just see this as being kind of disastrous in my public library, knowing the kids that used to come in there. The only place I've seen that usually where I went to college in academic libraries, like in the basement for more like the storage, things you wouldn't use on a regular basis. Yes, I had to play around with it in one of my academic libraries. The older bound volumes and whatnot, so you'd go down there, be able to cram more into space with those movable shelves, yeah. I would love to put something like this. They do have safety features that don't let you close them in on people, I know that. I know you're thinking, yeah, somebody will figure out a way to get around that potential. Kids are amazing and extremely inventive and disastrous. Okay, so theoretically, if money was absolutely no object, and this is where you guys get to type in because I'm curious what you have to think of, or what you can think of, how would you maximize your space? What types of things would you add? Would you go with storage like this? Would you reconfigure things? What have you seen at other libraries that you liked? Just type it into the comments section. Yeah. Yeah, or if there's anything that you, what have you done at your library? How have you managed to, in a small space, be able to fit everything that you need to offer to your users? Go ahead and type into the questions section of your interface here and let us know. The very first ALA I attended, I went to a session, I had a grant to go and it was in Chicago some years ago, and I had a grant to attend one of the pre-conferences, and it was on doing technology spaces, so media labs in libraries, and I thought, with the tiny library, I was just at Hopkins at that time, it had a $100,000 budget and that included everything, paying staff, taking care of the building, programs, everything. These people are presenting on spaces that sounded like this. They sounded a futuristic, amazing, and the price tags were right. They were talking $7, $8 million for these things, but there are solutions where you can take some of the things that you see here, that you see elsewhere, and make them work. So, we're going to talk about some of those. Here are some suggestions. Furniture that can be moved and reconfigured to adapt to the space. So things that are either furniture, maybe on wheels, or lighter, so that can be easily... I'll be showing you some pictures of some of those that we've done too. More things on CDs, more international music they have there, so I'll suggest that small meeting or conference areas are needed. More work space for staff that is good for collaboration, but also allows for privacy when needed would be great. How do you do both of those things in the same? In a small space? Mobile walls. Definitely. That was going to say mobile furniture is for things like maker spaces, something on a cart that you can transport, put it in the back room, pack it all up into a smaller space, put it away, and then when you are having an event or a program, bring it out to the open space, so not everything is out all at the same time. Yeah, even those old media carts that every classroom, well, every school used to have a couple of them to wheel the TV into your classroom and out, those make amazing maker space kits. Okay, so here's an idea. This is a program that we did at Hopkins, the Hopkins Library. You can see the tables that those ladies are working on. There are four of those in the library, and we can take them apart, put them together. The wheels lock in place, so we don't have a problem with people just taking them and running around the library. Not that there's a huge amount of space there anyway. But you can see that we have the two tables there. There's two more that are actually over by our big table. The magazine things, we moved over here to get them out of the way and push them up against a wall. If I could have mounted those on the wall, I would have been a happy camper. Yeah. I like the tables, they're an interesting shape, that curve, rather than just a square or rectangle. Herman Miller has an outlet store in Zealand, Michigan, and they had all four of those tables, and we snapped them up as quick as we could. I see they can make interesting, they can make interesting different spaces, different arrangements with them. Yeah. And we can throw one of them up by the study area, so the kids can work up there or they can sit on the couch either way. We usually have one of them, well two of them over in that area, the seating area over here, and then we'll have one or two, depending on how we're moving things around, over by the teen area. And that way everybody has something to work on. They work as mobile desks, they work for, this program is extremely popular doing those puffy wreaths, but they take space. Yes, but they take an amazing amount of space, it's kind of a pain. So where do you put them in a tiny little library when you have 17 people who signed up for this program? We ended up stringing people out throughout the whole library and it only worked because we had furniture like this that we could move around. Trust me, there's no way to do these wreaths sitting down, it's just not happening. No. Okay, so let's get into what you can offer in small spaces and how you can make it work. So in 2016, I saw an ALA think tank, Ryan had posted this idea of binge boxes that his library did. Does anybody else do these? If you do, write in and let us know some of the topics that you do. The idea is you take four to six DVDs because six is pretty much all that fits in these cases and you put them together with one theme. I have a link, the link that you see down here at the bottom will bring you to those cases. And I have that on several pages so if you're interested in those particular ones, you can find them right there. You can always go to the ALA think tank on Facebook and just type in binge boxes and all of his information won't come up. And he has some really great stuff including the templates that they used to make their binge box stuff, their binge box labels. We just printed ours off on paper and taped them to it but they actually used stickers and all sorts of fun stuff. So we always had people that were frustrated that they wanted to watch, oh maybe they wanted all six Star Wars movies and you can't get them. They're kids six, they just want to watch them, they don't have anything else to do or it's spring break or Christmas break and they can only get one, three and six because the rest are checked out. Well now we have them put together in a box like this. Takes up less space because we have them all together in one area. We don't have to be searching all over for them, takes a lot less time for us. We still have ones that people have donated that are out on the shelf so if you're looking for just one at a time, you can still check those out. But now you can check out all six together. You can see in the bottom, can you see my cursor? Maybe? Yes, well we should be able to. It's bringing up the, yeah, where you have your slide as an interview, yeah. OK, so down in the corner of the shelf here, in Ryan's picture, you can see how they're shelved really nicely. They don't take up a huge amount of space. You can fit a lot of these kids in a very small area and they're extremely popular. I'm not going to lie, they're not cheap. The kids, the boxes themselves are not terribly cheap to get, but they do last really well. We have had people throw them in the drop box and we all know what bad things happen in the drop box sometimes. We don't, yeah, bad things. We don't have a separate AV drop box so everything goes in there. So when the newest James Patterson book comes in, right on top of one of these, they don't break. And that's what mattered to us. We checked them out for a week. We started off doing this type of display where everything is face out and people can see, well, we all know face out just gets more attention. People will actually look at it. And then we started moving towards, we'll have a bottom layer that's like this and then the top layers will be more like this where they're all face out. We picked various themes. I really liked some of his themes here, but when he talked about it, they went with either a series or maybe an actor or just a theme like the PG-65 box, which was really cute. We did things like Disney princesses, Marvel movies, DC comic movies, just the Avengers themselves. We did Star Wars. We did Hallmark movies, then Hallmark Christmas movies, and then Hallmark Mystery movies. And then I don't know how many Hallmark boxes we're up to now. There's a lot. They are extremely popular and they don't take up a huge amount of space. And there's something that you would normally see at a really large library with a really large budget, but you can do it, which is nice. I always get frustrated when you see these things at bigger libraries. And you're like, how do I do that? How can I pull that off? What's nice about this, if you don't go with a series, if you want to go with a theme instead or an actor, is you can ask for donated movies from people. That worked really well for us in Door Library. Hopkins Library, 50-50. We only rent out PG-13 and Below in Hopkins. No-rated R movies. So that became an issue. Does anybody have any good ideas for themes? Let's see. Did anybody think of anything that would be interesting in your library? Yeah. I suppose it would depend on what your Patreon base is like. I like the one you said, the PG-65. That's something I would not have thought of. Anything popular that people binge watching on Netflix and things all the time. This is a good way to do it via the library and possibly finding movies you wouldn't have thought of, potentially, yeah. The only thing, we set one limit when we were doing this. We didn't care what the theme was. The themes were all dictated either by our patrons. They started giving us ideas after we came out with these or by staff. But we had one caveat. We weren't going to put any TV shows in here because they're already so many hours long that if I put three seasons of Supernatural in a box, you're never going to be able to get through it in a seven-day period. If you do, I'm really scared. We need to have a talk. Yes. So then we figured people would just be checking these things out continuously, and that wasn't what we were after. And how long would one of these circulate for? Seven days. Seven days, OK. We do do a dollar a day. If you're over for movies, you can renew them. And we stuck with the dollar a day for the binge boxes. Any comments? Nope. All right. So, movie bags. One of the ladies I work with had this idea. She was a homeschool mom, and they is a reward for her kids. They would often read the book and then watch the movie that inspired, or one of the many movies it inspired. And she had the idea of, why don't we check them out together? Because that would kind of make sense. We have the movies. We have the books. Why not? It was a huge hit with homeschoolers with school kids who didn't understand the book or didn't understand the movie. And parents who had read the movie, and the kids had never read the movie, and all of a sudden the book was coming, or the, sorry, had read the book, and all of a sudden the movie was coming out. It was surprisingly well received. We got a grant for this. And each bag is imprinted with this information right here, the movie bags, and telling you that it's a book and a movie. They check out for three weeks. We'll give you plenty of time to read the book, and hopefully a little time to watch the movie, too. We stuck with the dollar a day late fee because I had a DVD in there. And we made sure that they understood that it was between these two libraries. There are other libraries in our co-op. We did, we did, we made the decision not to loan it out to other libraries because it was grant funded. And our inner library loaned through our co-op. We weren't sure if they were going to be able to move the bags safely. We weren't sure if we wanted to put it, we didn't loan AB to begin with. So we weren't sure if we would put these in the boxes, how we would get it to other libraries. There was just a lot of logistical issues. And Doran Hopkins are only about 15 minutes apart. So we had a lot of patrons who, from Hopkins, they would drive north to go through door to get to their job. It wasn't a problem. The problem, the main problem we had was, okay, I have Alice in Wonderland. Somebody donated a copy. We're gonna throw it in this movie bag. Which movie do I put with it? We have this problem several times. Surprisingly, a lot of the classics were an issue. Dr. Doolittle, there is a old movie and now, of course, there is the newer movie. And then you get into the, did we wanna put some of the cartoons that have been created of some of these themes in there too? Yeah, that was the problems that we were getting into. That's interesting. Yeah, with movies that have been remade, do you, cause that would be an interesting thing to read the book and then watch the two different movies and see how are they different from each other and from the book? We did that with a couple of the classics that had been out for quite a while. But some of them we tried to stay with whatever movie was closest to the actual book. But then you had the problem of which book do we want? Do we want the original one? Do we want one of the stories? Yeah. It was, it's one of those things where you just have to make a decision that I'm going with this book and this version of the movie and that's it. Yeah. And if somebody questions, you can always say, well, you're right, we do have the other one. Here you go, you can check that out separately as well. And we did. We had that several times. Like I said, homeschoolers loved these, but we did have a few people who said, well, that's not the version that we were told to read. It's like, well, dread. We didn't know that there was a specific version that was in your agenda versus somebody else's and different curriculums say different copyright dates. Okay. It was fun. And they're not terribly expensive. We got a grant to fund this, worked really well for reluctant readers. It was very exciting. What kinds of themes would you guys put together in something like this? We stayed with mostly kids and teen books. We were talking about moving out into adult books, but we hadn't yet. But we did things like James and the Giant Peach or Alice in Wonderland, Dr. Doolittle. We stayed with a lot of classical things and then we started branching out with the teen ones into like Twilight and the whole series. Harry Potter movies mended up in there. Things that we thought we'd see. Yeah, things that were very popular. Yeah, I can see this could be good for adult movies. I hope that'll be something they would move into because I know there's lots of more higher rated movies, rated R or whatever that would be of interest and to read the books, some of the more serious ones. Somebody here is talking about In the Wild, Hatchet series tie-in. A movie called The Cry in the Wild was based on The Hatchet, yeah. Does anybody else done the same kind of thing in their libraries? Did you have certain titles that you used before? I hadn't heard about it until you submitted your presentation Natalie, but then someone, and I can't remember who it was mentioned to me, I'm like, oh yeah, I've heard of so-and-so library doing that and now, of course, I can't remember who it was who was talking to me. Yeah, I brought it. I couldn't think of what to name this and I'll tell you I came up with some fabulous ideas. I brought it to ALA Think Tank and the local co-op and different things like that and said, hey, so what would you call these things? Booby bag one, we put it up to a vote and the staff voted for this. Kind of got me in trouble. Oh, when you're presenting it to your library board, you have to make sure to pronounce that really carefully. Doesn't matter if it's already in the agenda. They might not have noticed that it was in the agenda and they might have just been listening to you and... And hear something else, yes. But it was really fun. Kids love it, obviously, they think it's hilarious. We, the bags that we went with are not actually these, unfortunately, they no longer produce or I couldn't find them anymore that company no longer makes them. We had one that was clear on one side and had fabric on the backside with handles and a zipper. And it was a document bag, actually, but they work really well because they're thin, they're lightweight, we could do all the printing on the backside like this and we could put our stickers on the plastic side right here and you could see the books that were in there. Thanks, Zach. Good for things like some of the obvious ones that people know, like Harry Potter is based on the books and the Hunger Games based on the books but the ones that you don't know that the movie is actually had a book that it was based on and a book that may be completely different title or something that you had no idea they were even related. Yeah, I was really surprised at how well the ink heart ones went out. Oh, yeah. We did ink heart and that was very, very popular. I was curious how people were gonna react to this. It's not a huge space issue and most of these things, again, are donations so we didn't really have to worry about purchasing a lot of it. If you did, I think the ones that we purchased cost us about 20 bucks each. We did end up getting a spinning merchandise display, just the ones with the little hooks on them that we could hook these bags on and set on top of one of the low bookcases, the kids bookcases, so people could actually see them. Otherwise, it was really hard to prop them up and have them displayed nicely. But I did see the Holland Public Heritage Library, the Holland Library in Michigan. They have very cute backpacks full of little books for little kids, they're all board books. We do that as well but they did, they had a wall going up into their kids area and they put hooks, like coat hooks, all over the wall and they hook the backpacks to those. That's great, yeah, you just think creatively, that's cool, yeah. It worked really well for them. Kids will be very attracted to the backpacks probably too. Yeah, it's a really cute display. So our binge book boxes, oh, sorry. Did anybody have any other themes that they wanted to share? No, nobody typed anything in, but if you do guys think of anything, go ahead and type in when it comes to your mind and I can grab them and share it with Natalie. So the binge book boxes, this was again, we're in a very rural area, we have a lot of homeschoolers and we started doing the Thousand Books before kindergarten programs so it was a win-win for us. This is 50 books in a box. That's it, very simple. They were all donated kids books. Each box is a different age group. We'll have maybe two, between the two libraries, we started off with 10 boxes. So we had 500 books, you'd be halfway there if you just read through each bin. And they had, I wanna say, most of our age group, we had a zero to five, just board books and stories that were quick to read to kids and then we had a lot of maybe five to seven or so. We had three or four of them that were five to seven. But usually we stayed with the little kid books. We get a ton of donations. We get things from the Imagination Library that people are done with, any of the kid's books that we pulled off the shelf that still look like they were good and had been checked out quite a bit, even if they hadn't been recently, not the ones that have never checked out in their life. We didn't put those in there. That'd just be mean. But we did put the things that were popular at one point in time, like our Dr. Seuss books weren't checking out anymore. So some of those made their way into here or donated books from the Royal Williams books. Those usually actually checked out, but we get a lot of donations in from them. And we throw those in here. It gave kids, parents no longer had to go searching for books. They could just grab a crate and say, hey, I didn't grab the purple crate last time. I didn't have the blue crate. They have different designs on them. You can see some of them have different designs. And the one thing I can tell you, make sure you get ones that have good handles because you do not wanna be picking up and moving these books around all the time. They are heavy, no surprise. And kids have a tendency to drag the crates around. That can get interesting. Yeah, with that many books, even if it's a small books that weight adds up, you don't realize sometimes. It does. Again, it's not a huge space-taker for us. These are all stackable. So if we wanted to, and we did at times, you can put them in a corner and just stack them up. You can stack a couple of them and put a seat on top of them if you want to. You can do all sorts of things with these. They don't have to take up a lot of space in your library, but they can get those kids to that Thousand Books goal pretty fast. We weren't real picky. If they wanted to read the same book 10 times, they could. That's still counted for them. So if they got a crate that they absolutely loved, there was a crate that was all animal books. That one went out a lot. I think when the kids get into certain topics, they get really hooked on, and all they want is the animal books, or all they want is the truck books. I just want to read about trucks and big trucks, or airplanes, or whatever they've just learned about. We had one that was all board books, and a lot of them were those touch and feel type books, things like that, very popular. And again, there are things that you can pick up at a scholastic book sale or something, very cheap, a couple of bucks, and they don't have to be extremely expensive. The other, since all of ours were donated books, and the only thing we had into this was the crate, and you can see our tags here, which just tell you that there's 50 books in here. We want 50 books back. So if you're, on my case, my cat, or your dog, or one of the kids, eats it, throws it in the lake, I don't know, does something terrible to the book. We have a sticker on the back of the book. It's this little round green thing that either says AD or AH for Hopkins or Dora. And that's it. That's all we have into the book. So each one, each title in these particular boxes are not individually cataloged in pieces. Nope. The box itself is cataloged, and it just says 50 books. And that's it. Granted, if it's one of the theme boxes, we may have to go through and look at it and say, okay, we need to get replacement ones for this theme, but for the most part, parents will have a couple of books laying around. They can throw those in to replace the ones that were damaged, and then we were fine with it. Which is really nice for the daycares in the area. They would grab them so the kids could play with them and read them, and it would augment their books. And since they had the little green stickers on the back, it was easy to find our books back. These are great for, yeah, small towns like that, or even any neighborhoods, if you know who's borrowing these from you and you can get your books back or find out, you know. Daycares. We'll search for the right ones with the stickers on them or just say, yeah, send us, toss in another one, let us know that you had to replace five books or whatever because the kid dropped it in the bath or whatever. Yeah, yeah. You cringe, but it happens, and this was a good way to not penalize them for that and still give them that option or that ability to get to the thousand books without having to worry, or to augment their library at their daycare, or maybe you just have the kids for the weekend, the grandkids for the weekend, and you need something to keep them occupied. This worked. And how long did these circulate for then? They'll circulate for two weeks. Okay, that's good. And we would have a lot of people, since we did it between the two libraries, again, we couldn't interlibrary on these, there was just no way to ship it between libraries. But you could return it or check it out at either Hopkins or DOR, and each one of them would have different things. So every couple of months I might take two boxes from one library and swap them with two boxes from the other. We did the same thing with the binge boxes and the same thing with the booby bags. So all of those things would have contact info for both libraries on them. And it didn't matter where you checked them out, we would just check them in at whichever library you brought them back to. Okay, Maker Spaces, which has been the hot topic for a long time, and I know I've talked about this before, but you see that tiny little leftover bookshelf? That's our Maker Space kits. It has expanded from there. Hopefully you guys do some of this. I'm guessing that pretty much everybody's got something going on at this point. What kind of things would you put into kits? For us, it was... I like that when there's a crochet kit, learn how to crochet. Yes, you see the yarn in there? And you'll notice that yarn is not listed on our kit, what the kit includes. Most of our kits will have... A lot of them have books with them or different things, and a lot of them will have yarn or whatever material you would need to actually do something with these kits. That's all donated stuff. And we'll talk about that in a minute, but if we put together a kit like this, it's usually the result of a grant that we got. I have a link down here to the bag so you can pick up those bags. And those, again, are imprinted with our information, and you can see the little green stickers that we use. A lot of this is just grant-funded... Sorry, there we go. Cats again. A lot of this is grant-funded, and we would apply for grants for programs and write it in that we were gonna buy some of the materials that you would use to do this so that people could continue doing this. And we targeted it towards things that we had in our nonfiction collection. Who doesn't have a million knitting and crochet books? Everybody does. Soldering, that can go with jewelry, that can go with electronics, that can go with all kinds of different things, especially any of the STEM or STEAM books that you might be getting in. We had a lot of drawing books out there. There are stamping things in there. A lot of these, for us, are craft-based because that's what our people wanted. That's what they like to do. But we expanded to... We had a canning kit, a DIY canning kit. We have a spiralizer because they're expensive and people wanna try it out. In Hopkins, we did fly tying a couple times at the library. So we have a fly tying kit. The actual tools for fly tying will cost you about 50 bucks. Not everybody in a small rural area has got 50 bucks to spare on something that they might not use very often. All right, they might just wanna try it out for themselves or they only use it for one time a year when they... In this case, for the fly tying books or kit, we have all the tools and then you have, I think there's two books in there. We don't include the hooks because if you stab yourself and you throw the hook back in there, the whole blood contamination thing did not seem like it was worth it. But we did have like feathers. You'd use feathers on some of these things. We have some yarn in there because that's used. I may have been peer pressured into taking the fly tying class. So I might know about some of these things a little bit. So Maker Space has really expanded and I'm glad beyond just techy robots and things. And it's more, it is what I think it makes sense. It's about making things, making anything. And so creation, innovation, just creating something new. It's not just about learning technology. And that's actually, I like the term Maker Space that it's making things pretty simple. I was really surprised at how well our food type things go out. We had a whole bunch of cake pans donated. We also had cookie cutters donated. So that started our food stuff. But the spiralizer and the canning kit and stuff like that really go well, well. Yeah, that's again, those special attachments that, like you said, they're expensive. If you like to, or attachment, if it's like attachment to a KitchenAid mixer or even just the separate tool appliance, they're not cheap. And if you're not sure, is this something we like? Is this something we're gonna do on a regular basis or not? Do you need to invest the money in something that you put up, you buy once, you use it and then you put it up in your cabinet? And a lot of that stuff, you know, if you did buy it once and you threw it in the cabinet, you might be willing to donate it to the library when you hear that they're doing cool stuff like this. We do have some suggestions that come in. Anybody else who's done any sort of Maker Space kits or things like this that are either check-outable? I know some do things in like a box, a plastic box. I like these clear, I looked at these, these clear backpacks are really cool. You can see everything that's in there too. So, downside with the backpacks, the top, there's a top handle on these. Our top handle kept ripping off. It was very frustrating. Because that's where they're grabbing them and carrying all of it from, yeah. Improved re-projects and instructions, someone suggests, and jewelry making, jewelry making tools, all the findings and things you do for jewelry. We did that, we also did pumpkin carving. Oh yeah, did you do some fancy things on the pumpkins? Yeah, like a stencil or something sometimes. Yep, that was always fun. We do have people sign release forms when they check these out. Oh yeah, yeah, knives and needles and things, yeah. We have a regular carving kit. We have rock tumbler or the microwave glass fusing. So there are some dangerous things in here and we do make sure people sign a release when they do this. But again, it is not a huge space thing. This is the door library that you're seeing pictures of. Hopkins has no space, but we put these on one empty, along a bottom shelf that we emptied out. And it works really well for us. Door puts them on the end caps like this. We had a couple of bookcases that were donated. They're just those cheap little folding ones. They work really well. Okay, so craft supplies. Craft supplies, who doesn't need them, honestly. Has anybody run one of the craft supply exchange events that you see coming up all over? We haven't heard of those. You said anybody else done them? Yeah. I know I've heard of libraries asking for donations of supplies for certain events they're doing. I see that on Facebook pages or on the library websites. We decided to just make it a permanent thing. So door took, at the end of our big open room, there was two closets that had been used for storage and we took and made one of the permanent book sale room. So anytime we were reading or donations came in, just went straight there, if they didn't go to better world books, if they weren't moldy. And the other side we turned into our craft supply exchange area. And Hopkins doesn't have that much space. So we had an empty filing cabinet. I took the empty filing cabinet, put some labels on it and told people to throw stuff in there. And they do. It's a tiny little space that you're using. It can be as small as a filing cabinet, as big as a room if you've got it. It doesn't have to be that much. It's not gonna cost you anything besides some time to sort stuff. And we made labels. Doors has a couple filing cabinets that we had cleaned out and an old bookcase that we had cleaned out there too. And they have labels on them as well so that you can tell where to put stuff if you're donating it. Both Hopkins and Door, we usually encourage people to give us the stuff first and we'll take a few things out that we're gonna use and then the rest goes in there. And that's where the yarn comes from. The wood burning kit has wooden picture frames, the ones that you would usually paint. Well, you can use the wood burner on that to give you an idea of what it's gonna look like first. And it doesn't cost us anything. Patrons like it because they get to get rid of stuff and it's going to their library so it's benefiting the community and we can give them a donation form. And everybody's happy. It's a win-win. Except those people who bring in weird stuff that you're never gonna use. Like the lady who does, she makes pine needle baskets so she gave us all of her extra pine needle supplies. Okay. That's very specific. I never found a use for those but I'm sure there is. I'm sure there's lots of uses for them. I'm not that creative. That should have been useful. That's nice. Would you like to do a program on this? That might be a good way to use up these supplies. Teach other people how to make these. Could you show us how that works? I've seen those before but I wouldn't even begin to know where to start with that, yeah. They're beautiful but no. Okay. So are we there yet, kids? Again, it's just a small, simple bag. It doesn't take up much space so you can put it on top of a bookcase. You can only take it out in the summer if you want to. We have a lot of campgrounds in the area. So a lot of people coming from out of area. A lot of people from in area. Grandparents will take their grandkids for the weekend or something, bring them camping. They need something to do. A lot of times they will run out of things to do at the campground. A lot of our campgrounds don't do different events. They just, they don't have the time. They don't have the staff. So we started doing the are we there yet, kids? Two or three books. We have them geared towards different age groups. So we have adult ones. We have guy ones. We have girl ones. Everybody checks out all of them. We thought that we'd make things that were specific for one type of person. Of course that never works. We should know better. We throw in some type of game besides just the books. So it might just be a deck of cards. Might be one of those super frustrating, annoying, triangular games with the little tic-tac-tac, the golf tees that you're trying to get rid of. I hate that thing. Anyway. I'm not good at that one, no. No, no. Twice. If it's anybody from teens on down, we'll throw a toy in there. Could be a little ball that they can play with. Could be, we have eggs that, when you take them apart, one end will have a star and then it'll have the other star and you're supposed to connect them back together. They have all different shapes. All sorts of things like that. We have projects in some of them. Again, we had a lot of knitting and crochet hooks. Knitting needles and crochet hooks donated. We throw those in there, along with some yarn. It's amazing how much yarn gets donated to the library. People have leftover bits from projects they've done. We're not complaining. I mean, you can always use yarn. And then we make sure to throw a puzzle in there. And sometimes that's just something you printed off the internet, like can you find all of the words in this picture? Or a Sudoku book that might have been donated that we didn't wanna put on the shelf because somebody's gonna write in it. And we just throw those in there. Almost all of this stuff will be donated. So we don't have any particular attachment to it. We just want them to bring back the bag. It's been pretty popular for us. It's a small space type of thing. It doesn't take much. And again, it can be a seasonal thing. Sometimes we just put them out for the summer. We can put them out for the summer and then winter break, different things like that. I know I'm running short on time, so I'm continuing on rather fast, I know. We're good. We do have a comment here about the, are we there yet bags? Suggesting about, let's see. Oh, what about adult coloring books and markers and gel pens for adults and teens? We had done that for teens, but we hadn't moved into doing that for adults yet, which I don't know why. But it would be a really good idea. That definitely keeps me occupied. I love the colored pencil ones. Yeah. Games, everybody's into circulating, well, not everybody, but a lot of people are into circulating games now. And when we first started doing this, we called them Games to Go. And we started getting lots of donations. Did not take long. We started out with the basic things like monopoly and risk and doing skip bow and just cards. And then we moved into some other interesting things like Splendor and doing Settlers of Catan and all sorts of fun stuff. The downside with games, again, they don't take a whole lot of space. They're boxes, you can stack them anywhere, you can put them in amazing game libraries like this. This is not mine. Or just an old bookcase, they're all on there. We put ours on top of a bookcase, great by our movies, because we figured if you're gonna check out a movie, you may be looking to make it a nice family night, and advertising is everything. If we can get you to see both of those at the same time, great. Label everything. Do you have 40 tokens? Then tell me what the tokens are supposed to look like. If you have 40 cards, tell me what the cards are supposed to look like. Everything. The downside with games is the time. You have the time in trying to make sure that you have a list of everything. You have the time involved in checking it back in. That's pretty much it. Are we decided to go with putting ours in plastic boxes? Because we had a nice uniform size and we could stack things. That's a good idea. So I know some libraries, they just, as you can see here, they just used the box game came in, which are sometimes the same, but then there's always the ones that have to be different and don't fit. I love the cardboard boxes, but my monopoly box, I'll tell you how fast those corners break. It's amazing. Oh yeah, that's true too. There's, if you're gonna use the regular boxes, invest in tape. Good string packing tape, yeah. Yes, chalkboards and whiteboards, they have been, I should have zoomed in more, sorry. They have been very helpful for us. They don't take up any space whatsoever. We use the self-adhesive ones, the ones that you can remove. And we put them on the ends of both cases. We have them on foam boards so we can move them around. This was part of our Comic-Con, we had a tea party. And we set up, we can set them up all over the library to let you know what's going on, at what time for different events. We can put them on the ends of bookcases to let you know what's there. And it's great because when we move books around, all we do is erase the letters, it's easy. And we can use them for advertisement of upcoming programs. If we wanna put them in the lobby, we don't have any other kind of sign right there, but it catches people's attention right away. And then the bookcases with wheels. These are not mine. I talked to several libraries that do have these. Make sure that the wheels lock. If the wheels don't lock, you're gonna have issues. But they told me that I talked to a library in Michigan and I think it's about 1,000 square feet. But they can take all of their kids' section and compact it into a tiny little area by just pushing all of their shelves over because they're all on wheels. This is a company that does it, and I included their link, but all you'd have to do is pick up locking wheels and make sure that you space it accurately to hold the weight. That is very good. I mean, you were showing those huge ones in the beginning I had never thought about. I mean, you roll your book trucks, this is the same thing, it's just the bookcase, yeah. Yep, the only thing I can't stress enough is that locking mechanism there. But it makes it really nice. If I want graphic novels over here now instead of over there, all I have to do is wheel them over instead of I need to move all of those books and keep them in the right order. Yeah, that is never fun. So I was gonna show you guys, I was gonna emphasize that again, I ran across this idea, assuming you actually had space, I love these little nooks that you can get. Wow, that's cool. Yeah, the furniture and a shelf like in a lot, and they're all on wheels, I see, it looks like there. Yeah, and you can just push them all over to one side when you're done with them or not using them and wheel them out any time that you are. They are great. Invest in a bunch of those wheels and just stick them on anything. Just make sure it's not tall. I see the top. Oh yeah. Scholastic book sales, they have movable, well the ones that I would always go to would have the cases that open up and they're always on wheels, so you can use those. Yes, Kim Lasky, fine. You can use those, but they're about four shelves high. They don't seem to go a lot higher than that. Yeah, you wanna be very of a tipping potential, yeah. Especially around kids. We know they like to climb on everything. That's it, if anybody's got any questions, let me know. All right, yes, anybody, if you have any questions? We did just hit 11 o'clock now, which is perfect timing, but if you do have any questions you wanna ask of Natalie, go ahead and type them in. We will stick around for as long as it takes if you do wanna know more about any of the kits or bags or boxes that you put together or any of the resources. I have been grabbing all the links that she had at the bottom there for the different products that they used, so they will be included in the delicious links when the recording is put up later. We do have a question that just came up. Do you have a list of the makerspace kits? I may have maybe a list of all the different potential ones that you did. Yes, I can email it to you if you can put it up. If you can put it up. Sure, absolutely, yeah, if you have any documents, yeah, I can put that up as well along with the presentation slides. Yeah, if you send me the slides or where you have them posted, I can link to them as well. Yeah, I can definitely do that. Okay, yeah, so we'll get a list of that for you, so it'll be included in the recording when it gets put up. They said, great, thanks. Are we getting a lot of good things? Awesome info, great ideas, yes, people are saying. When we put together our makerspace kits, we decided to go with things that didn't have a lot of moving parts. Because I don't have too many people to service those, so. Yeah, that's something a lot of times, I just was at a training session last week, last Friday, where we were getting hands-on practice with some of these things. And some of the ones of building robots are building circuits and stuff. I can see there being, the presenter did say, a lot of these do need to be replaced regularly. Yeah, you're gonna have a piece that's gonna break, you have to buy that new one. But these companies that sell this stuff, they do that. They say, oh, did you lose that piece? Fine, you can buy it on a case by case basis. But that is something that you have to deal with. You have them either breaking or just getting lost, yeah. Even the things like checking out. Yeah, if you're checking out sewing machines, there are a lot of moving parts there and you better have somebody who can service them. That's one of the things that we were looking at when we were thinking about expanding to that. Yeah, repair afterwards, yeah. Someone wants to know, and I'm not sure if you guys did, could make these type of boxes work for YA books. I'm a teen services library assistant. Are you talking about which boxes, the ones where it was like the 50 boxes ones or the- The booby bags. The booby bags. Which type of boxes were you wondering about doing for YA? The booby bags, we did. We did things like Twilight and we had, what else do we have? We had a couple of different ones that I can't think of right now, but those were pretty easy because a lot of the YA books are being made into spectacular movies these days. So it's pretty easy to pair those two up now. The book boxes, the binge book boxes, that would be hard because YA books tend to be larger. Right, you can feel it in the end, yeah. Yeah, that's just talking about was the booby bags and the small number binge boxes, yeah. Yep, we did that in both of those, very popular. They go out a lot. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so you could focus them on, you had booby bags that were on certain topics where I saw certain actors and things, but yeah, you could do a collection that was on more teens. One of the teens that worked with me put together horror movies. So we had horror movie boxes or like I said, Hallmark was amazingly popular. That's interesting, yeah, I mean, I guess they come out with movies all the time, the Hallmark has this whole channel, so. Yep, obviously it is very popular. And that led us to doing like the Murder She Bakes. So we were thinking about taking some of those Hallmark movies and pairing them up with the books and throwing those in a bag. In case anybody's curious. Here's Kelmowski. Hi, you're gonna be on the internet, along with all the other internet cats. She is a library cat wannabe. Do you ever take, bring them to the library or no, if they pretty much take them? We have Sasha. Sasha is a Japanese bobtail, black and white, spotted and she would travel with me from Hopkins to Dore. She lived at my house during, well, at night and weekends and stuff, but otherwise she would travel to work with me and stay there all day and hang out. That's cool, lots of libraries are having animals in them now. People love them. All right, so anybody have any last minute urgent questions they want to ask of Natalie or the kitty before we leave? Looks like being petted happy doesn't care. Oh yeah, she's a big fan. All right, doesn't look like anything urgent is coming right now, that's fine. We will post the recording, we'll go up, we can get access to this and if you have any questions, you can always reach out to Natalie later. I don't know if you have your contact info on here anywhere or where, I think, oh I think it was in the beginning, on the first slide I had it, that's right, there we go, Gmail. So if you do have anything else you want to ask of her about any of these kits and boxes and bags that she's put together here, shoot her an email and she can give you her advice. I'd be happy to help out. Absolutely, all right, all right, thank you. All right, I am going to pull back presenter control to my screen. Thank you very much, Natalie, this is really cool, I'm glad I got to bring you on the show here, as I said, we didn't have no non-loss space in that one day big talk workshop, which I wish we had more. I don't know if I'll ever make it two days, but I hope wherever you end up in your new area you'll still keep up with us and maybe submit something again. That's the plan. Absolutely, all right, so we have been recording today's show, thank you everyone for attending live here. It will be on our website. You can go to the library commission's website and find our Encompass Live page, or if you just Google us or type Encompass Live into your favorite search engine. So far we're the only thing called this on the internet, yay, so you'll find our site. Our recordings, these are upcoming shows, right underneath them is the link to Archive Encompass Live Sessions, and this is where we have our recordings. This is last week, so we have a recording and a presentation from that one, but I think previously, yeah, recording presentation and links, this is, you'll have the same information from today's show, recording up on YouTube where you can watch it, the presentation, and when Natalie sent me the list of their kits they had for their Maker Space kits, that'll be all here, and the various links that she mentioned for products that I have been saving into our delicious account. Ideally, this should be ready for us, just before the end of the day as today is out, as long as YouTube cooperates with my uploading of the recording, and I will email everyone who attended today and everybody who registered for today's session, and if you aren't able to join us live, I'll let you know when the recording is available. Other than that, I hope you'll join us for next week's show, which is about ad filters, the case for and against installation on public computers. These are ad blockers, things that you may have on your own personal computers, I have them here and at home, so I don't see pop-up ads or ads that come up on the site of websites or in Facebook and things, but what about using these in your library? So we will talk about that next week, Scott Childers is a director of our Southeast Library System here in Nebraska, but this is a topic for anybody, of course, not Nebraska specific, and he's gonna discuss using these kind of ad filtering technology in your library. So please do sign up for that. I will have more sessions being added here, I'm working on getting some confirmation from some people on dates, so you'll see more topics coming up. Also, if you are on Facebook, we have a page on Facebook and Compass Live, and I've got that over here. So give us a like, you'll get notifications of our upcoming shows, here's a link to remind people to log in for today's show, when our recordings are available, scroll down here, I post that on here as well. So if you are big on Facebook, please do give us a like to keep up with things there. Other than that, thank you very much for attending, and we will see you next time on Compass Live. Bye bye.