 Okay, welcome back everybody. We are on to our next lightning round for Big Talk from Small Libraries. This is a destination library on a dime. Wendy Bruneman, the director and Libby Secora, the assistant librarian of the Wall Public Library in Wall, South Dakota. Welcome ladies and go ahead. Thank you. Welcome to a destination library on a dime from the Wall Community Library. This picture here is the Wall Community Library. Wall, South Dakota is a town with a population of about 800 people. Since Wall is basically the metropolitan area of our region, the library caters to the people of Wall, Wasta, Scenic, Interior, and Creighton as well. We have about 470 patrons. The library is open three days per week and our budget is about $20,000 every year. Here's our Dewey's Angels photo of the both of us. I'm Wendy, the one on the right. I'm not a librarian by training. I have a master's degree in anthropology and a bachelor's degree in elementary education. I have worked as an archeologist and a K-8 teacher in a one-room schoolhouse. I was hired in August of 2011 as the only employee of the Wall Community Library. My assistant Libby, Sakura, is a senior in high school this year and she was hired last April of 2012 as a student slash work study slash assistant librarian. Because neither of us has had formal training in library science, we have a little bit of catching up to do. We ask lots of questions of the South Dakota state librarians and actually any other librarian that was foolish enough to walk through our doors. We read lots of articles and we attended a lot of webinars and online conferences. In fact, the Big Talk from Small Libraries conference was a definite source of inspiration. In doing so, we realized that the main drawback of our library was the unappealing presentation of the facility. Oh, if these walls could speak. Our library is stationed in the recycled community hall built in the 1930s. We only have about 670 square feet to work with. It's quite a challenge. Originally, the goal in this library was to fit all the books. It was a good intention because the library wants to offer everything they have available. However, it made the library have cave-like qualities. The building was crowded. The advice that Wendy received was to weed and relocate books. Weeding means to take old books that are damaged, unpopular, or appealing and either get rid of them or move them to storage. When Wendy started this process, her goal was to remove one shelving unit. So the cool thing about our building is that it's constructed of locally sourced stones. It has different kinds of rocks, fossils, and even archaeological artifacts that make up the walls. Removing the shelving unit uncovered and showcased a really nifty fireplace that's original to the building. As you can see, it's built of the same native stones. The fireplace is inoperable. It was capped to make it more economical to heat and cool the building. We bought an electric fireplace insert to provide some ambience and a little bit more heat since it's not the most energy efficient building in the world. The total for that was only $200. Removing the shelf really opened up the area and it also gave us some more room in the children's section. So I bought an alphabet rug from Target and a couple of beanbag chairs from Amazon. The total for that was less than $75. This is a great space for having storytime. As you can see, sometimes kids even hang out in the beanbag chairs and read. We separated the teen literature from the children's section and added a revolving rack to accommodate that section. We gave them their own area, which the teens really love. With the Rebamp Children's Area, it was decided that comfortable seating should be made available for the public. The library purchased three lounge chairs in December 2011, totaling about $1300. This is a great addition for the library because it sets the library up for people to come in and stay at the library. People like to sit in a chair as neither read or chat with other people who come in. Our fiscal year begins in January, so I was suddenly faced with a new pot of money and right away ordered a round commercial-grade library table and four matching chairs to replace the mismatched and, well, frankly, ugly old kitchen table that had obviously been donated by a well-meaning and loyal patron many, many years ago. The total cost for that was $1200 in February of 2012. Now people set up their laptops on the table, our kids will sit and do homework. We even have a group of high school students who set up their computers and books on the table and work together for an hour or two. And you can see the old table in the upper left-hand picture and the new one directly below it. I can see the light now. When Wendy was rearranging the library, she discovered there was a hidden back door. She immediately asked if the city could come and fix it for both economical and emergency issues. For a long time, the door was covered with a large piece of plastic to try to keep it from leaking and cold air. Eventually, the city paid for and installed two brand-new glass doors. This led in lots of natural light, made the library appear much more modern, and, best of all, came at no cost to our library. The most amazing things began to happen as a result of these small steps. People started to come in and stay in the library. Everyone commented on how light and welcoming the library was, and we received a ton of compliments. Groups started to meet. Storytime is now held once a week instead of five times a year. We have a book club that meets monthly. Kids have started hanging out in the library with their friends. We have a high school study group that meets fairly regularly, and other kids who come by to read or do their homework. Even adults will come and sit and chat, read for a while, work at the public workstations, or on their own laptop at the table. The total cost for these changes that we've made has been less than $3,000. Now that we have a place with a capital P, we've been working on our presence outside the library walls. My sister volunteered to start a website for the library. She used a squadoo lens so it cost us nothing. The webpage has current information and events, in addition to links to our online catalog and South Dakota titles to go. Our site for checking out downloadable ebooks and audiobooks. We also have a Facebook account. Our name is Wall Community Library, if you want to like us. We joined Facebook in February 2011 and have gained 55 likes on our page and counting. I recently started a Twitter account for the library, but a level of awesome has not been achieved at this point. Finally, we have ebooks on Overdrive. Personally, I enjoy this feature of our library because it allows me access to several books even when the library is closed. Several of my friends have started using this program and even one of my teachers has begun to utilize this feature quite regularly. This is a very popular program and Wendy and I would definitely recommend it for just about any other library. So for 2013, we already have some plans. We applied for and received the South Dakota Broadband Grant. This grant supplies new computers and other computer hardware for community anchor institutions. Because of this grant, we will be able to replace all three of our hopelessly outdated public computer workstations with brand new computers and a firewall. It's about $3,000 worth of equipment. It's an 80-20 matching grant, so we are responsible for the 20% match. For our match, we will supply software, headphones, and tech support for setup and maintenance of the systems. Cost to us is around $600. For our new large ticket purchases here, we have ordered a new computer table to accommodate all of our new equipment. At $1,400, this will be our most expensive purchase to date, but we feel it will help to complete our library. Plus, we had some money left over from last year that we can devote to the purchase cost. And even though the new table hasn't arrived yet, the new computers are up and running and patrons are raving about the new equipment. It's much faster and easier to use. And the best thing is that it only costs us 20% of what the equipment's worth. Opportunities are out there if you can just track them down. Now we have a place, and a presence, and the library is once again becoming a community gathering place, which after all is one of the main purposes of a library. Are there any questions we can answer at this point? Thank you, ladies. That was absolutely wonderful. And as somebody who has visited the Wall Library yet before you got there, I can say that just between the photos I took and remember being there and kind of how... I mean, I was impressed with what they were doing, but it was kind of dark in there and not very open, as you said, that fit all the books. Just the pictures I've seen, I can't wait to visit again, and you've done some amazing things with it. We did just have one question from the audience, and that was, where did you get the chairs from, actually? What was your source for those? Oh, for the chairs, I went to Alphax Furniture, and they were reasonable in their commercial grade, so they're pretty nice and sturdy. Should hold up for a while for us, especially. They're easy to clean, too, so if you get time to build on them, you just wipe it up. Yeah, we highly recommend non-porous surfaces. We've had some issues with material. We like the ones you can just wipe off. Easy cleaning, always good advice for anything you're offering to the general public, regardless of, you know, for any reason. All right, thank you once again, ladies. That was absolutely wonderful, and thank you for presenting on Big Talk from Small Libraries.