 There it goes. Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am Krista Burns at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly online event where we cover commission activities or anything of interest to Nebraska librarians across the state. We have NLC staff that produce that do these sessions and we bring in guests. We have a mixture of that today. It is every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. They're free, last for about an hour. And they are recorded in case you are not able to attend a live when you'll be able to watch a recording of this one. This morning we are having our monthly, randomly monthly, tech talk with Michael Sowers, the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. And he has some interviews he's going to be doing and then talking about some other technology things. News and new stuff. New, yes. So I will pass it over to Michael to go ahead and get started. Alright, thank you Krista. Krista wanted me to put together a slide introducing tech talk. Brand yourself. I'm branding myself Elmo. Wait, I sure want to do that. Actually, with the way I should have picked Kermit the Frog. A bit of a frog in my throat today. Slept a lot yesterday. I'm feeling a lot better. Krista doesn't want me to breathe on her all too much however. So we're going to go ahead and kill this slide here and bring that up. And for those of you that have attended these previously, you know that I like to do some interviews. I like to talk to librarians both around Nebraska and around the country that are doing some interesting things. And today on the phone I have Marcia and Richard from the University of Lincoln College of Law. And just want to check that both of you are on the line. Can you hear me okay? Yeah. Hi there. Hello. Can you hear us? Okay. The video is working. So I've got some questions for you. I haven't really told anybody what we're going to talk about today, although they can probably guess from what's up on the screen. But maybe if I could just give you each minute to kind of introduce yourselves, tell us who you are and what you do at the College of Law. Well, let's see. I'm Richard Leiter. I'm the director of the Law Library and a professor here. I've been here for 10 years. This is my 10th year at the University of Nebraska. I'm Marcia Doherty Baker. I'm the Access Services Librarian here at UNL College of Law Schmidlow Library. And that includes a little bit of everything. And so the rumor I heard is that you guys have been doing a podcast for a little while. Can you tell us about just what that is? What it is you cover, who your audience is? Just kind of the basics? Well, sure. The podcast started in, when was it? May, our first show was May 23rd, 2008. I had been listening to one of my favorite podcasts, which I'll plug here this week in tech with Leo Laporte. And one of the guests on there was talking about something called BlogTalk Radio. And it sounded intriguing. And I logged on, got an account, and gave it a whirl on BlogTalk Radio. And it's open to anybody to try out. It's a neat, all-in-one web-based system that allows you to publicize the show, plan a show up to two hours in length. And then it's broadcast, archived, and allows you to take live call-in questions and comments and things. So it just sounded like fun. I like to experiment with new things. We got a prominent law librarian author, Ken Sven Gallus, who's an expert in acquisitions and knows the commentator on the legal publishing industry to come on the show. And that first show, we had almost 300 live listeners. And to date, it's been downloaded almost a thousand times. The rest was history. One funny anecdote about that was on the first show, it was all very new to us. And nobody knew really what we were doing. We just used the phone, the speaker phone is our microphone and speakers. And somehow or other, in the closing out of the show, we ended up in an echo chamber. And it just got terrible. And so the last 10 minutes of the show was this horrific echo and not confusion. So we actually had to redo it. So I deleted the first show. The second one, fortunately, just as many people called back in and tuned in. But over the last two years, we've had almost 14,000 listeners. We've done about 24 episodes. We started out doing it once a month. And Marcia started in the fall as my co-host in August this past year. And we increased it. We're now doing it twice a month in the first and third Friday of the month. We get guests from all over the country. A couple of weeks ago, we had the law librarian of Congress on and a lot of notable people like that. One of the things I really liked about using BlogTalk Radio as our platform for the show was the chat room. It was really nice because Rich could be hosting the show and talking to our panel or our guests. And as there were comments being made or websites dropped, I could quickly find them and add them into the chat room. I could do some quick polling. I'd ask questions of people that were involved in it. It was a really nice way to have kind of a print version of the radio show. And that is one thing I missed when we moved from BlogTalk Radio was how easy the chat room was to use. It was by far awesome. In the fall, we got picked up by the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction, Cali, in Chicago. And they used to go to webinar just the way you're using to record the podcast. And there's some trade-offs here and there, but we've been pretty happy with the way things have been going. Yeah, right now what's up on the screen is the web page for BlogTalk Radio. Now you've just switched it to our new web page with Cali. We had to change the radio show name for the podcasting in iTunes. And there are some little quirks about getting the show there. It is downloaded. You can listen to it on the website or you can download the podcast from iTunes. But there's been some behind-the-scenes stuff that has been rather squirrely. Yeah, and we also published the transcript of the chat room to go along with it. It's often a very rich source of information for people who want to listen. So we just publicize it using our professional email listservs. When I post to Twitter and Facebook. Yeah, there's gotten quite an audience. Okay, that sounds great. So with the move to the new system and looking at the picture here, you have one of these wonderful blue snowball mics in front of you. And for those of you who can see the video, we have one of those just kind of sitting off to the edge of the screen here. The original system you are using, you said you just basically use the phone to take care of it. With that picture of the microphone, I'm assuming you have maybe a little more equipment involved now with the new version of the podcast. What's kind of the process now for recording and putting the podcast out there? Yeah, now I was always concerned with quality. Like I said, when I started the podcast, I just did it on a whim. I didn't think that anybody would really pay attention or that it would continue. So the phone was good enough. But then when I started getting people calling in wanting to be on or giving me suggestions, and the numbers were astonishing to me. I decided I needed to get a little more serious about it. So I started researching mics. Really the only thing that a piece of equipment that we use that's extra other than our computer is the snowball mic. The way it's recorded, Cali records it using go to webinars capture process. We have learned, however, that it is important to do a backup. So I've always one of my co-hosts who's also the webmaster. He's at Georgetown University and he listens in and he records it to his backup. And that's it. We just put the recording up on the website. And then the webmaster has come up with the process that automatically puts it up on iTunes. So what is your impression of your audience? What sort of demographics? Are you getting lawyers, just law librarians? Do you have any sort of ideas to what sort of your audience is? Oh, it's definitely law librarians. The subjects that we cover, the topics that we cover would be of no interest to anybody outside the profession. My mother, I think, tried to listen once but she had no idea what we were talking about. It's pretty specialized. And based on what we've seen, the feedback that we've gotten and looking at who comes into the chat room, they're all law librarians from all over the country. It also depends upon the show because some of them are pretty specific. Like we did a show where we talked to firm librarians. And that one had a little bit of a different audience participation because it was very specific. And that one's been downloaded a lot because students are going to go work in a firm. They like to listen to that one. When we had our discussion about Google Scholar, that was a really big show. And that had a lot of law librarians who have tech interests they were on because they wanted to listen to Honorog talk about how they put together Google Scholar. And that's one of the things when we promote the show, we add a show blurb so people know what they're getting into before they actually commit to listening or go and download it. There's regular people that do that, but we like to give them a little bit of a teaser so they know what's going to be going on. And then when they get into the chat room, they have an idea of what the conversation is going to be about. But it's definitely law and a legal audience. Yeah, our biggest show by far was when we interviewed Anirag Acharya, the engineer for Google Scholar. And that one's been downloaded 1100 times or so. I was just looking for the... We set up one show where we had a group of firm librarians in San Francisco talking with us. And that one is probably our second largest audience. But it's a hit and a miss too. Some of the shows that you have a big name in the field on don't always have the live audience or the downloads you would expect. So I don't know if there's a generation gap there or if maybe people have heard them at conferences and stuff before so they don't feel like listening in. I mean, there's no rhyme or reason. It seems like the ones we think are going to be high participation in the audience, there's not. And sometimes it's the Friday. I mean, you know, good Friday. But who wants to listen to a radio show that day? So our downloads are higher. So for that show... Oh, wait a minute. That's right. That's on the other one. And we're still working on getting statistics from the Law Librarian conversations because BlockDoc Radio was great at giving us numbers. And as a librarian, you get used to looking at your search stats or reference stats, whatever. So we're always looking at show stats. But with the new platform, finding that out has been a little bit more of a challenge. It's still fun. Well, you may have just answered my next question, which is, what is the biggest challenge in doing all of this? You know, speed bumps? I mean, is it time? Is it finding the guests? What's the hardest part of it? Well, okay. For years, I think I was born with sort of a cynical gene. And so I tend to look at lots of things critically. And when you watch TV or watch the movies and you see all these producer names fly by, you always think, why does this person have their name on there? What did they do? They gave money to the show. Producers, who cares? It's a cheap way of getting... Or an expensive way of getting your name attached to a production. But you know what? I have completely changed my opinion. Producing the show is the biggest challenge. We don't have that heart of the time finding guests that want to be on. I'm surprised at that, actually. People are... Nobody's ever said no flat out. But getting the timing right. Getting everybody together at the same time. Coming up with the topics. Or we've had situations where we've had too many people wanting to be on. And so then having to put them off and say, no, we can't do this show, you know, that topic this week. But we've got an opening two weeks from now. Getting that kind of thing working, which is the production part, has been my biggest challenge. And then when the show is scheduled to go live at 2 p.m. And I still haven't heard from my guests at 1.55. And that's when I start sweating bullets. Marcy's seen me practically disrobe in the library because I'm starting to get so hot waiting for the guests to call in. So that's the biggest challenge for me. Yeah, I think on my end the biggest challenge is when the chat room is not functioning. We had one show where everybody kept trying to add their comments and to interact on it. And it just, it was not working. Like you try and post something three or four times and it wouldn't show up in the chat room. And so people just finally quit. And so instead of using the law library and conversation chat room, then we went to the go-to webinar chat. And so I was trying to maintain these two different chat rooms and some people were in both and others. And then the very first show we did with the law library and conversations in the chat room, every time somebody would hit like the at sign, it would turn into a smiley face. So any type of punctuation people were doing in their comments, it was your icon. I mean, it was your smiley's. And so this whole chat room was just like colorful with people's comments and then this odd punctuation that turned into smiley's or wings or, I mean, it was the oddest chat room transcript I had ever seen after that one. Well, and then, go ahead. I was just going to say, so sometimes the chat room is the most fun but also the most challenging because, I mean, sometimes there's things you can't control. You're in a live show and you just got to go with it. Well, and that's why I was going to say last summer we had a little construction going on right in the middle of the show, the fire alarms went off. There was no fire, but one of the, I don't know, painter or something like that was standing too close to a smoke detector and set it off. And the fire alarm is right outside my office and we do this right in my office. Yeah, that was bad. We've had barking dogs. We've had one person calling in from Starbucks and so every time she would ask her question she would comment on stuff. You could hear people placing the orders in the background and you could hear coffee being made and stuff. So that one was really just like, could you maybe go to the bathroom and talk to us? I mean, it was just this background noise that was. And she justified it. She said that it is the Starbucks in the federal courthouse in Montreal. Yeah. So it had a lock. So yeah, we've had, I mean, anything, I don't want to jinx this, but a lot of odd things that happen through the show and you just go with it. I mean, there's not a lot you could do. This is very low budget, but fun. One of my regular, one of our regular panelists is the Executive Director of NELCO, Northeast Law Library Consortium. And she was calling from home, which is where her office was, where her 10-year-old son was home sick that day with the flu. And she told us afterwards that she would sort of disappear every once in a while. Her son had his head on her lap while she was doing the interview and throwing up from time to time. You know, it's life, things like this you just never know. So either we have people who are very committed to being on the show and it's just, you know, it's comedy. Yeah. I've been told that during a presentation I will be giving on Friday the campus will be testing their tornado warning system. Oh, sorry. So not only will that be going off, but where I will be presenting is one of the places people are supposed to go. So we might actually get some additional audience members. There you go. During my talk. You just got the email from Lightning. Yeah, I do believe you touched on this earlier, and we do have a question that came in from Steve, is how do you advertise and promote the show? Well, on my end, I use social networking to do the promo for it. I manage the library's Twitter account and Facebook fan page. And so I am posting to that on a regular basis. I also post, we have the Law Library and I'm blog type radio fan page on Facebook that I post to. And then the new show has a Twitter feed and I'm posting to that. So, you know, you kind of hope with all of that, you're hitting different followers or fans, I think. Rich does the more formal promo. Well, now we're using go to webinar. There's the formal invitation that goes out. And before that, I just did an email that summarized what we were talking about. But I send them out on professional listservs. There's three or four that I regularly send to. And our system is we do it on a Friday. So the Friday before I send out an announcement that the show is coming up, I try to send out an email on Monday before and then the Thursday before. But it's interesting. I find that most of our listeners are people who would listen to podcasts anyway. And so they tend to be the kind of people that will follow Twitter or Facebook or things like that. I think that Twitter is probably one of the most effective ways of getting word out. Of course, any way that you can publicize it, I'm sure, would be effective. Yeah, and I've talked about the radio show and different presentations I've done as, you know, one more way to market your library or to promote it. And so we've had some interest that way. It's really nice with Kali having the go to webinar software. They can go ahead and push out those invites. And so anybody that's participated in our show before signed up for it, they're automatically getting those invites each week as kind of a reminder of the way the show is coming up. And that's been really nice just because it's one more entity that's promoting the show. It's just not us over and over. You know, there's somebody else out there and that helps. You know, this also, one important thing I think that should be pointed out and advice to anybody who's thinking of doing something like this is two things. Number one, be consistent. So if you start to do a podcast, many podcast listeners like to go to iTunes and subscribe. So they like to see a podcast that's coming out regularly. And so my advice is to pick that schedule and then stick to it. The second thing is don't be overly ambitious. I remember when I first did it and the first show was so successful, I suddenly was thinking, I want to do this every week. And that's just too much work. And I talked myself into being a little bit more realistic and we started out doing it once a month. And I tried to be as faithful as possible about doing it once a month. So as you're building your audience, they can expect that the show is going to be available once a month or whatever the schedule is. And now we're doing it first and third Fridays and I'm sticking to it. We had one show that we switched to Thursday and it's actually in our statistics, our lowest listened to show of all time because we varied from our regular schedule. People are creatures of habit. Yes, that's the one thing I can agree with both as a podcast producer and a podcast listener. I almost don't listen to regular radio anymore. It's almost all podcasts and we do ours here but then we also put it out as a podcast and I'm responsible for converting it to the MP3 and putting it in the RSV and all that fun stuff. And I'm several weeks behind actually in getting those up. A little busy. A little busy, right? Conferences, major projects, things like that. So yeah, I agree with you, it is a commitment. I don't want to scare anybody away from podcasting but it is a little more than just sitting down for an hour and recording a show. There is a process involved so that's great. And people do enjoy listening to conversations about things that they're interested in. Radio as a media I think is just extraordinarily popular and continues to be. And I see podcasting as sort of a variation on broadcast radio. It's something that people listen to and that's almost frightening at how quickly you can build an audience and a loyal audience. And once you start to get people interested in what you're doing and listening to it on a regular basis it's very important to keep doing it. Keep the discipline. I was going to say keep them happy but that's not exact. Keep them interested and keep giving them what they want. So I've got one more question but I just want to remind folks that if you are listening live you can submit a question in the questions and answers area of go to webinar. Or if you have a microphone raise your hand and let us know. We'll unmute you and you can ask your question on your microphone. Yes, yes we encourage that. More voices. Yes, more voices. So I guess my question is where are you going with this? Do you see is there something you're planning on doing eventually to kick in or you just at this point is getting the show out twice a month enough? You know at this point I'm having a lot of fun doing it. It is work a little bit but I'm enjoying it because of the response that we're getting. And the quality of people that have been willing to be on the show. When Google Scholar announced their legal opinions product back in November it was a shocking thing. Nobody had seen it coming but everybody was interested and I thought we've got to have a show about this. And so I started twittering does anybody know someone from Google who would be willing to talk to us about it. And we ended up with the chief engineer for Google Scholar on the show. He was not just willing but he was anxious and happy to do it. And then the law librarian of Congress. I got a call actually from somebody on her office saying that she wanted to be on. And you know when could we arrange a show and I found that everybody that I've asked like I said before has said yes. We had John Palfrey from the Berkman Center at Harvard, Carl Malamood from law.gov and public resources. Just anybody. And so I'm just having so much fun and the responses is positive. Guests keep wanting to come on and talk. I have no plans but I suppose if CNN or somebody wanted to pick this up I might give it a consideration. But I'd be a little bit too specialized. I am officially jealous of your guests by the way. I haven't had anybody say no but I don't exactly have people calling me either so yeah. I'll put that plug in for this show. Please I will be happy to talk to you. Give me a call. That's been one of the fun things about having people on our show is you read all the different blogs. You have your usual suspects and then you get your official emails and all of your professional listservs. So having the radio shows been a really nice way to have conversations about hot topics in the field. And you have people who are writing blogs who want to come on the show and talk about something. Or you have a very current event like the Google Scholar and you're getting the people that are involved in making something on the show to talk about it. So I think that's been the best part about it. It's kind of that 3D version of brainstorming and interacting that you usually only get to do at conferences. Well we get to do it twice a month on the radio. And so for us that's been the fun part. The other thing we're planning on doing is in July when we go to Denver for double A double L. We're going to try and get everybody who's been on the show together for a group picture. Because we don't have that. I mean some of us haven't even met before and we've been spending time together Friday afternoon. So that is like a goal is we've got to get a group picture. We have one more question from the audience if I can get that in. We're kind of running low on time. But the question is have you noticed any side benefits from doing this? For example have you made connections that you've been able to take advantage of at work? And Marcy you were just kind of talking about networking there a little bit. Yeah I think it's been a networking thing. I mean I'm new. I've come from public libraries. So I am very new, excuse me, to the law library world. So for me it's been definitely kind of a jump in networking and getting my name out there so people know who I am. I think the only thing I'd like to see is sponsorship from like Starbucks. I would love that. Somebody who will bring his coffee during the show. I would totally plug it. But I think for me it's been a professional networking. That's probably the benefit that I have seen at work. Yeah networking, getting the name of the university out there to a larger audience. We're the University of Nebraska. Nobody on the coast knows where Nebraska even is. But now they all know University of Nebraska. And that's a good thing. Plus I think that there's also sort of a deeper benefit just in continuing the conversation about these issues. Librarianship is largely about or a significant portion of what we do is about networking. Calling on colleagues and knowing who to call for advice or input about projects that you're working on. And this gives us an opportunity to keep talking to each other and finding out what are the good blogs? Who are the experts in this field or that field? Yeah and it's been a fun way to find out what other people are doing. Like what technology they're using. There's a lot of people that they might use Google Wave where instead we use your traditional listserv or something and being able to talk about the different webinar software. That's been fun. So just having kind of that continuing education that you don't get elsewhere, that you can have a conversation and you can learn from everybody else and what they're doing. And we did get one more question in. And Mercy I think this was because you mentioned you just came over from the public library world. But how would you see podcasting this process as possibly being used in public libraries? A lot of our audience are public librarians. What advice would you give them? Why should maybe they be considering doing this? I would say go for it. And you know I do know of one example, Lincoln City Libraries podcast. They used to be on the radio show, traditional radio. And now they've moved to a lot of podcasting. But it's great. Especially if you have a team advisory board and you've got some students who are responsible. Give them a flip camera and a mic and let them go to town and enjoy what they're doing. You can have podcasts of your different programming or even your book talks. I mean there's so many options out there I would say why not. And the nice thing about podcasting is there are some people that get a little weirded out about having an actual video feed. And so this is nice especially if you have a decent radio voice. You can just go ahead and talk about stuff. And you can be your own local celebrity for your library. It's really cool that way. You can also do a lot of group work. I mean if you have like a public library like your system or with all of the branches you can get together. And people can just call in and you can have that conversation and podcast it on an event. I'm thinking there's a lot of in-service things that go on. Maybe everybody can't get to it. We could podcast it and have them listen to it later. I mean I think it's a great opportunity for any library. But I can see where public libraries with all of the diverse clientele that they serve could really use this. And it's free for the most part. And it takes either a phone or the mic on your laptop. One of the reasons I think that law librarian conversations has been as successful as it is is because it's highly specialized for a very specialized audience. Law librarians. There are 6,000 of us in the country. And so what we talk about is only of interest to people that are interested in what law librarianship or legal bibliography is all about. And so that's highly attractive to people that are in the field. And that's why we get so many people listening. For public libraries or for anybody else considering podcasts, I recommend trying to make targeted podcasts. So if you have one for young adult literature, have it focused that narrowly or the science fiction hour or something like that once a month where you get people to talk about specific types of literature. That could attract people that are interested in that one area and not have to listen to somebody talk about new acquisitions about gothic romances if they're not interested. Yeah, I think if you pick your niche audience and you go with it and you're consistent and you promote it, you're going to have a great following. And it's very easy today to do with a little bit of elbow grease. The learning curve is pretty steep but anybody with a Mac, the garage band comes loaded right on the computer and it's a highly sophisticated program that will allow you to produce stunning podcasts with a little work. So it takes no investment hardly at all and it's easy to get up on iTunes and boom, all of a sudden you've got a podcast. I think it's a terrific medium. And I'll plug Audacity for those of us without Macs to do that. Yes, that's true. Yeah, and it's free open source. In fact, I think it does work on Macs, too, if you're not a garage band. I want to think we're pretty much out of time. I've got some news things I also want to cover in our hour here. So, Marcia Richard, I want to thank you very much for participating and this time you guys got to be the guests. It's kind of fun. Thank you very much for having us on. And feel free to stick around for the rest of the hour here. You might pick up something you don't know. I hope so. As long as somebody picks up something, I think I'm doing my job. So I want to thank you very much. I'm going to go ahead and put you guys back on mute. Oops, that's muting me. Not them. That's Ron gotten there. So let me find the right thing here. There we go. I want to thank them one last time for attending. Excuse me. It takes some time. There we go. Keep my finger over the mute button as I cough a little bit here. The joys of also video going out there. You get to see me cough while we do that. So what I'm going to do is now I've got about 15 minutes left here. I've got some bookmarks. I spent the majority of last week at the computers and libraries 2010 conference just outside of DC in Arlington, Virginia. And Kristen was there too. Yes, sorry. And most of the kind of bookmarks that I've got here are things that I found from the conference. And I always like coming back from conference and going through my notes and trying to figure all of this stuff that I want to look at and take a look at. So I'm just going to share some of those things with you. We'll jump around in my list here just a little bit. The first one I'll pull up here is a clicker photo that was posted, a sign that was made that I have printed out and that I will be hanging on my office door. And maybe a library or two might be interested in hanging this on the door to your library. But I just this wonderful quote, cutting libraries in a recession is like cutting hospitals in a plague that you can bring up full size from Flickr free and possibly use that. Excuse me. I am noticing that the person who posted this did put a full blown copyright statement on that. So I don't know if we can actually legally just print that out and post it. I'm going to go ahead and contact Daniel there and see if I can maybe get him to switch that over to Creative Commons license free to use. But one way to hope that he would allow libraries to print that out pretty darn freely. Very relevant to lots of things, lots of libraries having these issues with budgets and being closed down, et cetera, et cetera. And staff for a load and it's happening everywhere. I spent a few hours with a colleague from another state. I'll leave the name out at the moment. But major library system and the board meeting that she was watching live online while I was talking with her in the airport said I think the good or best case scenario is they would only be laying off 63% of the library staff. And that was at the good end of things. So yes, we need to be letting people know that we need that money. It's out there and it's very important. One of the blogs that I discovered while I was there is called AOTUS, brand new blog. One of the keynote speakers from computers and libraries this year was the archivist of the United States, David Fierro, I think I am saying his name correctly. He has a blog. He is the first archivist of the United States that is also an MLS degree librarian. Many of the previous ones have been historians and college professors and nothing against that. But it's nice that we have an archivist that is now a librarian. He has a blog up. I'm going to start reading that myself. And the other link I have listed here just below that I won't actually bring this one up here. David Fierro, archivist of the United States CIL 2010. That keynote was recorded, was broadcast live on Ustream. And you can watch that. Very interesting interview. Go ahead, Kristen. Oh yeah, it was a very good interview. So it's not just him up there talking head type thing. He was interviewed by Paul Hopengraver, the director of programming at New York Public Library. So very good, very interesting, very entertaining back and forth between the two of them. Something that happened while we were at CIL last week and when I first heard this I thought it was like a late April Fool's joke. But the Library of Congress has gotten a hold of a copy of the complete archive of all tweets that have ever been done. As somebody from I think MIT tweeted, dear Library of Congress, could you please get rid of the night of December 27th? But if you've ever tweeted anything, the Library of Congress now has it in their archive. I don't think they're going to try to catalog every single individual tweet or anything like that. Not sure exactly what they're going to do with it, but that's a heck of a lot of data. Well, they have digital archives of things they've been doing in other areas for a long time. And this is just another one that actually Twitter approached them saying, hey, what do you think? And they topped amongst themselves, I guess, would be the Library of Congress and decided yes, this is something important that does need to be saved. And actually, because it's got a link to the Aeodist blog, he actually blogged about it with very nice, why would the Library of Congress want these? And so he's got a nice blog post about that. So definitely go back and read that and you can get a good idea of the reasoning behind it all. Speaking of Twitter, I gave, Chris and I both gave Twitter presentations while we were at the conference. Oh, that's right, your sister's at pace. Okay, I'm going to bring this one up. I'm going to let Chris to talk about this one. I just thought it was cool, actually. We were actually, my sister is also a librarian. She's at Pace University in New York. And we were out to dinner together and talking about Twitter and things. My sister Sarah Burns file and Michael and she mentioned that Pace University, the students came up with a Twitter feed called Stuff Your Pace. Basically what it is is any free food that might be available somewhere on campus, someone will tweet about it. So basically, you know, there was this meeting in this boardroom here and there was food delivered and there's leftover food. The food's still there, go and grab the leftovers. Or there's actually free pizza being given away for just, you know, Spinal's week or something, whatever. So poor college students with no money and no way to get their own foods. This is a great use of it that they just came up with themselves and people, the students follow it and then can go and get some free lunch and leftovers. And then the food doesn't get thrown away, which is another like green thing about it, which is also a nice little side effect. Lots of these things when you do catering to a meeting, if someone's left over nine times at a tent, it probably just gets tossed. In this case, it doesn't get tossed, the students get to benefit from it. So just a very creative, interesting thing that she just said, hey, we've got this thing. We can talk about it. So I mean, I just, I just thought it's just so creative and so different. And, you know, people are always asking me why should we use Twitter and I'm not saying you need to do this exact same thing. But, you know, everybody just will Twitter is just about what somebody had for breakfast. Well, here's one as to where you can get breakfast. I mean, you know, it's just there's always something creative and something a little different you can do with Twitter. And I just, I just had to share that one. I thought that was creative. I'm going to jump around on my list just a little bit here. Let's go ahead and stick with Twitter for a moment. If your library say does have a Twitter account, you're using that. Here's a new service. I learned about called Twitter poll. And you can easily kind of post a multiple choice or yes, no sort of question to Twitter. It will send its weed out saying, here's the question. Click this link to answer the question. Take you to a page and you can just easily do a very simple poll. You can ask your patrons, you know, okay, our budget is being cut. Should we cut our hours or should we cut services? I mean, I'm sorry. I'm a little pessimistic these days with it with things. Excuse me. But just so again, another use of Twitter and creating polls. Now with that, the other one I learned about. Some people find that Twitter is a little constraining at 140 characters. Little limiting. Little limiting. Some of us are a little more verbose than that. So somebody has created Woofer. You know, you have tweeted woofers and tweeters speakers. That's the connection. Yes. I was thinking dogs that I didn't understand. Well, they still the dog things, but they have new service here called woofer. And in this case, you have to type in a minimum of 1400 characters or else it won't post. So for those of us who have a lot more to say and really just don't want to be limited to 140 characters. Here is a service in which you have to post at least 1400 characters. It looks like we have somebody raising their hands. Nikki, I have unmuted you. You have a question or comment? Go ahead, Nikki. We have you unmuted. Okay. We are not hearing you coming through. So what I think we'll do at this point is either you hate your handrails accidentally, which has happened before, or if you could just go ahead and type your question into the questions area of GoToWebinar and we'll deal with your question or comment that way. I'll give you one more chance to see if we can hear you. Nope. We're not hearing anything. Okay. So it looks like we're having some technology issues there. So I'm going to go ahead and move on to a couple more links here. We're getting close to our time. Changing angles just a little bit here. Something also I found out about at CIL is a lot of talk about mobile access to services. And some people are asking, well, what do I need to do to my website to make sure it's going to work on mobile devices? This is a little geekier here. We're getting a little higher on the technology level here. The World Wide Web Consortium does do a validation of your code behind your website. They have a new service available called the Mobile OK Checker. And what this will do is you will put in your website, your URL, and you can have it check your website to see how well it will work on mobile devices. This will check code, but we'll also check things like load time and embedded media, general design of the site, things like that, and kind of give you a kind of scale of zero to 100% how well your website's going to work on a mobile device. And I've put in a couple of websites I know, none of which I will actually pull up live here because it will be severely embarrassing to all people involved. And I will admit, including my own website, I thought it was going to get a pretty high score and I got a score in like the low 20% good sort of thing. I was in the red zone. Have you really actively tried to make it? No. That's a thing too. I mean, you can just take a website that just has been put up there as a website and try and slap it in there and see what happens. Right. Which is fine, but if you haven't worked to try and make it work with mobile then sure. Exactly. And I recently moved my site to WordPress and I thought, hey, WordPress should be pretty mobile friendly. But I did find that a lot of the problems I had were with the content I was writing. I was using some embedded media things and some other issues. And I embed a lot of YouTube videos. Now, YouTube isn't necessarily non-mobile friendly, but on my home page I had like seven of them and it said, wait too many. Yeah. But my website is a blog versus maybe a static, the library's home page which may not be a blog or I'll have a lot more attacks. So just basically all I want to do here is point out this tool. If you're wondering how well you think your website will do on a mobile device, A, find somebody with a mobile device, look at it. That's a good thing. But if you want to get a little more geeky about it, you can kind of pull up your website here and it will do a check for you and give you some good ideas as to what things you might have to deal with to make your website a little more mobile friendly. So a couple more links here I wanted to talk about. I've got a book and a Nebraska specific thing. I'm going to pull up here. This is a book I just started reading. This is not a light read. The index and end notes are the last 150 pages of the book. Christa just gave me that one. The index and footnotes are 150 pages. Yes. Like I said, it's not a light read, but for those of us that are interested in this concept of intellectual property and how in piracy and where did this idea come from and how has it changed over the ages as to what is considered piracy? Wonderful book. I've maybe about 30 pages into it myself. Like I said, it's not a light read, but very interesting. And so I thought maybe each month I'd try to throw in a book of things people might be interested in. Book reviews. So not quite a review, but maybe a light recommendation for a very heavy read. But this is the sort of stuff I read in my spare time, which I'm not sure. And lastly, I will point out for everybody listening to us in Nebraska is that the conference proposal deadline for NLA NEMA 2010 has been extended to April 30th, the end of the month, which is next Friday. Next Friday. One week. So I encourage everybody to send a proposal. We'd rather have more proposals and have to not pick them than not enough proposals and have to beg people later to present. So I'm the chair of ITAR this year. If you've got a tech-related one, give me or Karen Dalziel, our vice chair, looking for the right word. A line fill out the form that is linked to off of this blog post from the NLA blog. We'd be happy to hear from you. Presenting is not as bad as you think. It's actually kind of fun once you get the hang of it. So with that, we started a few minutes late, but I do always want to leave a few minutes at the end of the show. If people have questions about anything that I talked about or other questions that you think I might be able to answer in the next minute and a half, I want to just kind of leave the last couple of minutes open there. If you have a question you'd like to ask the audience, please go ahead and give a hand raise. Or else you can type it in in the questions area of the GoToWebinar interface. And I will be happy to attempt to answer those questions for you. Sometimes I found I like actually randomly answering questions. Put me on the spot. While we're waiting for questions here, I'll share a quick story from CIL. The conference chair asked me to do a, to moderate or facilitate a Twitter session. And I asked her, what does that mean? And she said, well, you stand up and you introduce yourself and give a brief overview of Twitter in about five minutes. And that gives you 40 minutes left to answer questions from the audience about Twitter. And I was like, okay. So in hoping that it wasn't going to like nobody had any questions, of course, everybody had questions. There's more than enough. That's probably the longest and most fun 40 minutes of my life. Marcia earlier here talking about, you know, watching a chat room while I was trying to answer audience questions and take questions via Twitter all at the same time. Not doable. Luckily Christo was in the audience and kind of watching Twitter for me and passing along some questions. So I think maybe I have a little bit of a masochist in the, you know, I'll stand up in front of a room with 100 people and say, ask me questions. I think it went very well though. I had, as you mentioned that, I had on the shuttle bus ride to the airport at the end of the conference, I happened to sit next to a woman who's librarian from Arizona, if I remember correctly, who said, you were at that Twitter thing. I said, which one? And she mentioned it. And I said, oh, and she had all these questions about, she's brand new to Twitter. And she thought that was an awesome thing. Okay. And we'll ask him the questions and stuff. And you never know. I hadn't heard that. Thank you. I didn't have, I had a couple of people stop me in the hallway and say, I'm going to try Twitter now. And I had one lady stop me in the hallway and say, I'm addicted to Twitter. So I apologized and thanked her all at the same time. Okay. Well, I'm not seeing any questions or hand raised in the audience there. So do you want to wrap this up? Sure. Yeah. Oh, and I will throw out some of the links for the Law Library Conversations and the Lincoln City Library Podcast. I will be adding to the bookmarks list for this session. So even though you don't see them there now, I will probably get them added sometime this afternoon. So when the recording for this goes up, this will have all the different things that we talked about to add into it. Good. So, yeah, we will wrap it up then. We've hit our hour. Thank you very much, everyone, for attending. I think that was very interesting. I just loved hearing them talk about the podcasting and everything. Very reminiscent of what I do to you within this live, which is not a podcast. Well, I don't do the podcasting part. It becomes a podcast. But, Richard, I feel for you. I have the same issues with getting this thing going every week. So we're done with today's. Like I said, it has been recorded and will be available to you in the next day or so to watch again. I hope you'll join us next week when we will have a librarian coming in from Blair Public Library talking about cyberbullying, how to deal with that and with your teams and who may be coming into your library and how to handle that in your library. So interesting. So, yeah, I think so. So thank you very much. And we will see you next time. Thanks. Bye-bye.