 All right. All right. Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I'm your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is a commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time, but if you're unable to join us Wednesday, that's fine. We do record the show as we are doing today, and then it is posted to our Library Commission, our website for you to watch later at your convenience. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the shows we have on Encompass Live. We do a variety of things on the show, book reviews, interviews, mini-training sessions, demos of services and products, all sorts of things. We have guest speakers that come in sometimes to present for us, and we have the Nebraska Library Commission staff that come in sometimes to present for us, and that's what we're going to do today, but I did want to mention a couple of things here about the show before we get into today's topic. Encompass Live, I mentioned we have a recording, so I'll show you when we get there. Encompass Live first premiered in January 2009, and that is, so as of the end of last year, we have 15 years of Encompass Live. This is the beginning of our 16th year. Wow, my gosh, that's a lot of stuff. That is a lot, yes. And I'm going through some statistics and I'll try to put together some sort of blog post or something of exactly what Ry had mentioned, you know, where all of our presenters are from across the years. We've had presenters from all across the country, and I think from outside of the country a few times too, and even Canada too, so it's a lot, yes. We have done, I did look up, we have done 738 shows. Every year we take off the one year, or the one week that's during our NLA conference, and then since COVID started, the pandemic started in 2020, there's been sometimes here and there we've had to take off on presenters who've had COVID, various issues have happened over the last couple years, so usually there's two or three a year that we don't do, but we have a total as of last week, the end of last December, 738 shows, 15 years, and they're all out there, you want to go watch them? So I'm pretty proud, this is just an idea I came up with as my previous work I was doing, the commission was wrapping up, and I had been doing monthly webinars about some things. I said, we had a weekly webinar about something, about everything, libraries do, we'll see what goes. 15 years later. So that's pretty awesome. Our first two shows were Meet the NLC shows, Meet the NLC part one and part two. We started out with introducing people to what we are and what we do here, so I thought it'd be a good idea to do that again. Probably need an update 15 years later. Now we have had people on from different departments to talk about things they're doing over the years of course in different areas too, but this is going to be, this is as I mentioned two part, we've got four people today and four people next week from the different departments in our Nebraska Library Commission agency here, they're going to talk about that. Who are we? What is the Library Commission? Who are we and what do we do here? Everything you ever wanted to know. If you do have any questions throughout the show, type into your questions section if you go to webinar interface. I'm monitoring that here and I can grab any of your questions or comments or anything for our presenters today. So first up we do have the Director of the Library Commission, Rod Weiner. Good morning, Rod. Good morning and happy New Year to everyone. Yes, happy New Year. Kicking off the new year with this program and my assigned purpose this morning is to offer some introduction and it's good that I start because my colleagues can correct any mistakes I make in my remarks. I'm thankful for that. But to jump way back, the Library Commission was created in 1901, celebrated our 100th year back in early 2000. The Commission is part of the Executive Branch of Nebraska State Government and per state statutes the Commission is responsible for the statewide promotion development and coordination of library services. That is, that was actually the statutory purpose that was written into state law back in 1972. I'm not sure if that same, I don't believe that same statement was in the statutes prior to that time. But in fulfilling those functions the Commission works with all types of libraries as well as doing many things for directly with the public. The Commission was renamed in 1972. Prior to that it was the Nebraska Public Library Commission and the change emphasized the coordinating rule and the intent that the Commission work with all types of libraries and support all types of libraries throughout Nebraska. Also in 1972, and you'll hear more about this later, the 1972 laws included the creation of the Nebraska Publications Clearinghouse with a responsibility for providing government information services and collecting and providing access to state publications. But again, you'll hear more about that in a little while. A word about state library agencies, every state has a state library agency. Also US territories have somewhat the equivalent of a state library agency as well. And that in part is due to the Federal Library Program, the Library Services and Technology Act, which has a major commitment of funding that is allocated to the states under the Grants to States programs. The Commission is one of many boards and commissions in Nebraska state government. I don't have the exact number but I think it's somewhere in the number of 80 or more. And again, others may correct me on that. We have? No, no commission. Nobody shares it. There are lots of them and the Commission is among those. And what that means is as a non-code agency, code agencies are those that are directly under the governor. Non-code agencies are those that have a different governance structure. The Commission has a six member board. Those individuals are appointed by the governor. They serve a three-year term and they can be appointed to a second term. Traditionally, the commission members are appointed from the regional library, regional library system areas. And until several years ago, we had six regions. Now we have restructured in recent years to four. So the governor is not in any way obligated to following that, but for the most part, governors have in that an appointment is made from each of the regions and then there are two at-large members. However, currently we do not have a representative from the Central Plains region and we hope that will change in the coming, well actually this year when new appointments are made. Funding, the Library Commission's funding is about 70% state and 30% federal. Again, the federal being the Library Services and Technology Act allocation that is appropriated annually. So we have a responsibility for administering the LSTA, L-S-T-A that is, and each year we are each every five years we are required to conduct a an evaluation of the Federal Library program in Nebraska and also create a new five-year plan that is submitted to the Federal Institute of Museum and Library Services. And part of that plan we have major goals and a number of objectives under those goals that we use as a guide for distributing funding and for conducting programs and services that use, that make use of those funds. So Krista has asked us to make presentations covering the major functions of the Library Commission ranging from administrative services, planning and data services, reference and information services, government information services, technology and access services, talking book and braille services, and library development. So you'll be hearing about those shortly beginning with those. One other thing I would mention about state library agencies, Nebraska is one of those that is independent in that we are not directly under the governor. That is not the case in all states. Some state library agencies are part of their State Department of Education. They may be under the Secretary of State. They may be part of a larger department that includes other functions such as economic development, parks and recreation, their arts and humanities and so forth. So they are different. Among the surrounding states we have the Wyoming State Library, Colorado State Library, Kansas State Library. Iowa has a different name which I forget. It's under the Department of Education in that state. What's interesting is that we also have a Nebraska State Library. And so sometimes that confuses individuals when they are familiar with other states. And the Nebraska State Library is under the Supreme Court. It's the State Law Library but it is the Nebraska State Library. And we are the Library Commission. So that's my introduction and I think we'll have time for questions later on. Yep, if anyone does have any questions, yeah, type them in when you think of them. I will also mention too while we're looking at the slides here, the links that are on here. When the recording is available later, you will have, we'll provide these slides as well. So all of these links in here, don't worry about trying to scribe them all down. There's going to be more in the future too. You'll have these slides maybe able to get to all the links that we have on here. And I'll just do our website anyway. Rod, I was just thinking when I looked at my old program, everything changed. But not for you. Would that be true, Rod? I mean, I mean in terms of governance and commission, number of systems has decreased, but were there things that really changed a lot? Since you did this 15 years ago. Since your presentation 15 years ago. Yeah, well, of course, we have evolved along with the many other, with many trends such as technology and how we do things. We do a lot more, provide many more services online, even though we were doing those things back 15 years ago. Staffing, structurally, were very much the same as we have been for a number of years. I know for the slides that I just hear, these couple slides for Rod, the same ones that we did use 15 years ago, I just tend to change the links for our website because our URL changed. But all the same information is in the same places on our website. Even our website has changed. Yes, we've designed it. Yes. If you're interested, you can go back, like I said, Oliver, archived it. You can go back and watch this from 15 years ago. All right. Thank you. Thank you so much, Rod. We are now on to learn. You're up next. Okay. I'll have to talk quickly because I think I crammed too much in here. Yeah. Our computer team consists of three people. Myself, Vern Bias, Dose Cleby, and his primary responsibilities are backups and archiving, email management, purchasing, mailing lists, and hardware. And backups are a time-consuming and kind of thankless job that kind of seemed like a lot of effort for a little gain, but they're vital. We use them all the time. When someone needs something and they're there, it's not thankless. It's a lot of thank yous. Been there, done that. And Janet Greaser is our help desk manager. And it's hard to define what she does because she has a hand in just about everything. And she is our primary support for the Mandarin Library Automation System and has really heavy involvement in all the websites and taking care of websites as well as mundane things like predators. And we need two or three of her. Yes. And my job is to kind of oversee everything, try to spend some time on planning for future needs. I've been spending more time on security issues lately than in previous years. And that's kind of frustrating. It feels like non-productive time, but it's really important. And that could easily be a full-time job. And I also do quite a bit of programming, which I enjoy, that frequently involves interactive web pages, forms, various web services, as well as programming that we use internally to manage and monitor things. We try to cross-train as much as we can, but it's difficult. Everybody has more in depth knowledge of certain things than the rest of us. So documentation is really important. We spend a lot of time trying to document among ourselves and for future generations. That's an ongoing challenge. Our job is to manage the commission's computer infrastructure, which includes workstations and staff offices, public access workstations, servers, printers, waterless access points, laptops, and the network that connects everything together internally and to the internet. Besides all the hardware, we also install, configure, and maintain an update software that makes everything work. There are frequent updates to software due to security vulnerabilities that are discovered. So that's a pretty time-consuming part of the job. And many, many other staff outside the computer team contribute to supporting and creating and maintaining online services. So we by no means do it all alone. And it affects everybody in some way or another. And I recently realized that among the three of us, we have more than 100 years of combined experience. I don't know whether to brag about that or apologize. Some of us are getting a little long when we choose this. You're just got his gold watch. When I think about our job, the picture that always comes to mind is the old Ed Sullivan show and the circus acts where all the plates are spinning. They're trying to keep all those plates spinning. And I'm sure a lot of you can identify with that. That's kind of the nature of work. A big part of our job is working with the websites. And I thought it was worth just highlighting those and maybe briefly talking about some of them. The main NLC website, Nebraska Access, Nebraska Memories, the government documents site, and Campus Moodle, which is the training site center for the book, One Book One Nebraska, the NLC blog, and the libraries on the web websites, which are currently 114 of those where we provide websites for libraries that wish to use that service. Our main website is an attempt to bring together all the hundreds of services and resources that the commission provides. And it's a real challenge to bring that together in a way that is accessible and easy to use. And when we designed the site, we went out and looked at all the other 49 state agency sites and hoping to find somebody who had found an idea that magically made this all work. And we really didn't find that. So we did the best we could. It's far from perfect. If I had one bit of advice for people when using our website, I would say start with the search, because we put a lot of effort into that. And I think it's easier than trying to maneuver through the fly-out menus and all of it. It's kind of a busy site and it's just unfortunate that it has to be that way. You put a lot of work into the search engine. Yeah. You did that. And we all do. People as they realize that a given topic isn't covered very well by the search will let us know and we'll focus on improving that. And we really count on that. We appreciate it. I need to do an extended. I thought I'd highlight just a few of the notable online services that are pretty heavily used. This isn't all of them, but some of the ones that are pretty significant. The library directory gets a lot of use. That provides access to staff and libraries of all types, public, academic, school, special, institutional. The library jobs database is heavily used and it provides listings for jobs not only in the grass, but in contiguous states. The book club kits is heavily used. It's grown from a small collection to thousands of titles and it's used heavily. There are various things related to library accreditation, including the application forms and the various forms that contribute data to that. The library calendar focuses a lot on training. Staff certification is also a big feature that's provided in many different ways and supported in many different ways on the website. We provide mailing lists, statewide mailing lists that are focused on various library topics, including one for each of the four systems. The interlibrary loan is pretty heavily used and that allows us to more efficiently process requests for interlibrary loans. The various grants that we offer all require application forms. We spend quite a bit of time on those and we have way welcome feedback on those. It's sometimes challenging to make them understandable. If you're using one of the forms and see a problem by all means, let us know. Overdrive and Libby, we don't post the actual service, but we provide authentication for a number of libraries. The books in serious databases use nationwide. I think it's not focused on Nebraska and I think Lisa will probably touch on that in her part of the presentation. A couple of items that appear on the front page, the libraries and the news, I think is pretty popular. It brings together news articles from various news media that talk about Nebraska libraries. The library buzz is harvested from the various library websites and social media sites. There's a lot of content there and the search feature on each of the websites is something that we've spent a lot of effort on. I want to mention the OmniBase because it's kind of central to a lot of what we do. Years ago, in fact, it's probably like 30 years ago, we were struggling because when something needed to be updated, a staff change or email address change or anything like that, we might have had to make those changes in a dozen or more places and it was real challenging, of course, to keep those all synchronized. So we decided to create what we now call the OmniBase, which is kind of a central database for all the information that we collect and it includes staff data for library staff as well as our staff, addresses, emails, phone numbers, library boards, provides contact information, meeting schedules and other information about library boards and the CE data, which includes certification status and attendance records for the certification, library and certification program is also contained in the OmniBase. I guess I'm getting lost in my notes here, isn't it? I think we're ready for the next slide. There's more on you. Oh, yeah, yeah. You're right. I did lose my place. Thank you. Um, we try to, we use many different sources to update the OmniBase. We get reports from librarians and system directors. Those are important. The Bibliostat Survey provides a lot of the data, especially the statistical data. The supplemental survey helps us to keep the directory information up to date as well as things like social media, sites, websites. That's a really important part of what keeps the OmniBase up to date. We also monitor news sources if we see the library has changed its name or opened a new branch or something like that. We incorporate that into the OmniBase and Dennis spends a lot of his time working with email balances. That tells us something's wrong with an email address if he does research and figures out what needs to be done to make it accurate. And I want to finish up by mentioning that we, like everybody, try to improve our services every day and every way we can think of. And some of the means that we use to do that include monitoring usage and making adjustments when we see things that aren't quite right, watching for problems. We get reports constantly and every 15 minutes letting us know if anything appears to be having problems and then we try to resolve them as quickly as possible. We love to incorporate suggestions from users. That's one of the most important ways that we can improve things. Implementing new and improved technologies is another means. And I really want to emphasize that we welcome and encourage your suggestions and problem reports. That's one of the best ways that we can address making our services better. And that's the end of my presentation. Cool. Krista had to step out of the room. So I think we're just going to go on to Lisa. Yeah. She want to hand me that. Thank you. Let her continue our presentation. So I looked at my slides for 15 years ago. Nobody's here. That was here 15 years ago. The website's different. We had a Twitter account. We had instant messaging. We had Meebo. Lots has changed for sure. So I wanted to just reintroduce you to our team and show you some pictures of who we are. So alphabetically by first name, Amy Owen comes to us from Elwood, Nebraska and seems to know every librarian in the state. And because Amy works with updating the OmniBase, she really does know everybody in the state. She works, I can't tell you how diligently Amy digs through school websites to find library and changes so that when we send out updates for passwords or anything, Amy has already updated and her success is yielded by fewer bounces that Dennis has to deal with. So Amy just hit 10 years here with us but has a history with Omaha Public Library and Amy has a background in not only information science, but information technology. She has two master's degrees. Then we have Kathy Hatterman and some of you are getting messages from Kathy. This picture is taken from one of Kathy's book face Fridays. So I tried to incorporate those and introducing you to our staff. Kathy sends out weekly lists to highlight items that we have in our collection. So we will see her name and I wanted you to know this is an actual book face where you can see Kathy's face. Those come from her. Laura Mooney, I took this picture from her Facebook. I hope she doesn't mind. It's a lovely picture. Laura joined us just a little over a year ago. Is that right? That's correct. Comes to us from history, Nebraska and Laura just got her 25 year service award with the state. So just because she's new here, she comes to us with great background and I'll let Mary tell you more about what Laura does but I want to introduce you to her because Laura sometimes works at the reference desk as she is right now. So you may hear her name and Laura is one of two Laura's we have. We always have duplicate names here. And I come from a Linda Lori Lisa family so I know that Linda's a Lori's and the Lisa's. Anyway, it's really great to have Laura on our staff. She has great background. Linda Klaus, this is one of her book faces where it shows her whole face. Linda works within your library loan really primarily and also works at the reference desk. So we used to have two lindas and now we're down to one. So when you call for Linda, she will be the one who can walk you through. Is in her library loan during Christmas? How's that going to work? When schools are closed just and Linda is always available either by email or phone and is a good person to ask. All of those in her library loan questions about she's also really excellent at finding digital documents and she has a real sleuthing, especially journal articles ability to find those things. So if Linda can't find it, it's not out there. I don't think so she's a valuable member of our team from that perspective to help you all with those. And in her library loan is available to schools and public libraries who really don't have the means and the resources to do that. So that keeps us busy there. Our Mackenzie just joined us a little over a year ago. I think two years in April will be their anniversary and Mackenzie is baptized in book clubs. So I know many of you know their name, but I wanted you to see what they look like. The Mackenzie came to us recently from another from a law library, but is fresher out of library school than most of us. And is a Lincoln native also as a pet sitter on the side. So loves animals as we all do. All of us here at this table and a big animal lover. So she's very good at that. Yeah. Mackenzie does book club spotlights every other week and is really familiar with our collection. Incredibly for how long they have not been here has really got a good sense of our collection. We try to focus on Nebraska titles, Nebraska authors, Nebraska settings and those in our listing all have a little red Nebraska outline. But if you've got a question about something about the book club, Mackenzie is really the great first place to start. Mackenzie also works with our job line and calendar updates. And so in many of those updates are mentioned. Those websites he mentioned Mackenzie is a part of keeping those updates. So that's what Mackenzie looks like. There's Mary and one of Mary's book club or book face Fridays and I loved that book and I loved that. I read that on an airplane one day. Mary will tell you more about what she does, but Mary and I work closely together. I think of our two is being kind of hand in hand. Yes. So I'll let Mary talk about what she does. But that's what Mary looks like and you can see her also. So to highlight our services, Verne created this page for us. And it's not the whole of the page is just the top of it. But you can search for book club kits to borrow from us if you are a librarian, you call yourself a librarian in the school or the organization where you are. I should clarify it does need to be a library or a school library or identify yourself as a library. You can search by reading level, number of copies, perhaps you want to show a DVD after you read it. You can search if you scroll down on this webpage, the Nebraska 150 when we had our set was centennial. There was a list of one of our staff helped to create to highlight 150 books of significance to Nebraska. We try to provide questions, discussion questions. If you have a talking book user in your book club, we will show you those books that are available. Book clubs are not going away. And I double checked our circulation. I asked McKenzie if they had any idea how many we circulated way under guest. It's 1000 over 1000 copies a month titles. So titles do we have now we have 22 over 2200 titles in the collection. And that includes down to reading level, third grade, graphic novels, nonfiction fiction. It's really there are some spent. Yes, thank you. We just included some Spanish titles. Because we were being asked and it was we took a shot in the dark and got some classics and some children's Spanish titles. We'll see how those go. That's a new territory for us to venture into. So that is probably, I think all of us have touched book club kits in some way very and Amy had helped me shop for books, book sales. There was a time when we primarily use use copies. I'm going to keep moving on here. Okay, so book clubs are big, in addition to book clubs, book club wiki describes all the other libraries that are willing to share their books. And Vern has done an amazing job creating a search. So if we don't have it, you can tell which other library has it that would be willing to share. So it's a statewide effort. And it's a unique own, it's a little interlibrary loan system of who's going to lend multiple copies of books. And the systems have as well. All four systems do. So they're all listed there. I think I tried to get them all those are all the libraries in the state that say, yes, we're going to be willing to share. And because they all list their books in different ways, Vernon and I have had to partner to set out those titles for the search engine. But we made you've made it work. I just helped. Our Amy does book face Fridays with Tessa. And this I just picked a couple of my favorites. This is our book shop across the street fancy invention. Sometimes they're just so spot on. They delight me. So Amy provides with Tessa every Friday, a book face Friday. And I think they've been at it for four or five years now. Let's say five. Yeah. So this was one of my favorites. And that's the view from my office window and Leslie and Megan work there. I feel like Mr. Rogers, they're people in my neighborhood and I adore them. So that's, that's a very great book face Friday. And this was a particularly wonderful one Amy did when she was taking her kids to school and ran out to get this picture and had people staring at her. So Amy goes to great lengths to get these book face Fridays. And some are just really worth celebrating. Books and series database is in joint conjunction with the talking book and Braille staff. They had lists and lists and lists of books. And I went to Marin in 2006, I think, and said, let's, let's automate this. So Vern, this is another of Vern's pages where you can search by the author, the book title, or the series titles. So Bosch or Stephanie Plum or Mitford. If you don't remember the order of books, and it's important to you, some for some, it's not important, but we have people who then let us know that our lists are out of date, need to be added, or maybe they question our order. And we really work hard to keep that up to date. Fantastic fiction is a really excellent database. And we certainly can compete with that. But this database also includes the talking book and Braille, digital Braille members, the DB numbers. So that's the enhancement. This one is included. The online catalog, Mary maybe wants to talk more about this, but this is the link to our collection. And you can request books from here. And you can see the Ask a Librarian on the top right. So I wanted to highlight that. Mary's put more work into that than I, so I just point that out. You can get to this from our front page. Here was Rod's Friday Reads. Several of us participate in reviewing books every Friday. And Amy coordinates who is responsible for which week. And then Tessa also posts that in our public media. So our team coordinate this service. Here's what the Interlibrary Loan Request form looks like that Linda works with. Again, this is a Vern form that Vern has created with and tweaked and tweaked. When there's a something, could you do this? Could you add that? Could you change this? Vern will do that. So that is what the Interlibrary Loan Request form looks like for those of you who use that service. Mackenzie helps post our jobs page, which Vern mentioned for the contiguous states. And something we added recently are the jobs you'll notice in the left that allow remote working, which is a new part of our world now. So that could be anywhere and defies that contiguous state requirement. Mackenzie posts things on our calendar. You can post things on our calendar right under January. See the link to add a list. Add to this. Add an item. Yeah, thank you for your part. So you can see we'd like to plan something at our library. Oh, there's already a couple of things planned that day. That might not be a good time or NLA is going on or there's spring workshops. This will allow you to know what's going on throughout the state in terms of other library events, planning, conventions. The ever important library directory Vern mentioned is the way you can search to see who's the who's the director at the Beatrice Public Library. Who's the director of you can see their hours and their emails. And so you have access to all of this because of the work you do to submit your information to us and Amy does to make sure it's accurate. Can I jump in with a note there? One of the features that I hope people are aware of is that you can enter a city name followed by PL Republic Library and find the library quickly that way. You may not know the actual name of the library or have a spell of the writing that makes it a quick shortcut. That is excellent to mention because we have eight lead libraries, nine lead libraries, and then several memorial libraries. So they're not all named. And some that are to spell struck and baits, comes to mind. Yeah, Kravitz. Yeah, right. So this is a wonderful website. Vern mentions searching by city is an excellent way to find what you're looking for. And then lastly, in my team, and that's why I gave you all the pictures, those are the faces that match the voices that will answer the phone when you call the library commission at that 800 number. And that's the basic email you can use for questions. You could text us there, you could visit us. But I wanted to introduce you to the folks who are the voice behind the phone call and never record well, never answering machine of any sort unless we're closed, but there will always be a human voice. And I believe we always all say our names. You'll know who we are when you call. And now you know what we look like. So I'll let Mary have time. I'm Mary Sowers. I'm the government information services librarian and supervisor at the library commission. So there are two people who work with me on my team. Bonnie Hinsle is the state document staff assistant. And Laura Mooney, our newest and government services administrative technician is also doing crossing lines into the reference desk. So Bonnie used to help us on the reference desk, but bowed out of that. And now Laura is helping do things and just put faces with names. Me, Bonnie and Laura, just so if you do call for government services, you'll probably most likely get me, but also you might get Bonnie or Laura. So again, like Lisa said, we love putting faces with names. And so this way you can do that. Here at the commission in government information services, the Nebraska Publications Clearinghouse is by far the largest part of our service umbrella. Like Rod mentioned earlier, the state legislature created the Nebraska Publications Clearinghouse in 1972, making it a service at the library commission. And its purpose is to collect and provide access to all state agency publications released to the public. And this service is for all Nebraska citizens, staff of Nebraska libraries, state agencies, and the Nebraska legislature. We do get calls from state agencies asking for their own publications. And so that is part of our purpose in collecting them. Yeah, we do not distribute or redistribute these publications widely, at least not back to the general public. But we do send copies to the Nebraska State Archives and the Library of Congress. At the moment, we currently have 190,000 print items in the Clearinghouse collection. The Clearinghouse collection also operates and oversees the Nebraska Publications Depository program. And actually, I was going to show you what the Clearinghouse page looks like. But just to give you, yeah, there it is, a little delayed there, with various things that you can go in and take a look at. But that is the main page for the Clearinghouse. You can also get to it by clicking on the Government Documents fly-off menu here. I should be able to click at the powerpoint at the bottom and then go to the left. There we go. Okay, and then I was going to move on to the Depository program is a part of the Clearinghouse, including the Clearinghouse. There are 17 state documents, Depository libraries around the state and as part of that Depository library, all within the same state statute created in 1972 for the Clearinghouse. All Nebraska state agencies are required by state statute to send three print copies of each of their publications to the Clearinghouse. So if you've ever wondered how do you get or how do we get all of these publications, the agencies are required by state statute to send them to us. And it's only three, it used to be four. Yeah, that's correct. Yeah, before the days of online access, they did have to send four print copies. And now it's three because a lot of them have already posted these publications on their own website and they have a URL. So they send us the URL and then we pull that in. And we not only have a print copy, but then we add a URL to the catalog record for those items. All documents in the Clearinghouse collection received are available for request through our online catalog. Or if there's a URL, like I just mentioned in the URL link in the catalog record, you can have instant access to the document by clicking on the link. So I'm going to go back here, put this mouse to work. It's going to put it on something that might help. There we go. Up here at the top of our main webpage is our quick access to the library catalog. I happen to know a particular document number this morning. So I'm just going to type that in. So you can take a look at what a state documents catalog record looks like. And it'll just a brief record will that pops up. And if there's more more than one, there will be several in a list. But then we click on details will give you a more detailed look at the catalog record. And like this particular one, I wanted to show especially because it does have a web link at the bottom of the record. And if we have a URL available for all of these documents, it will be at the bottom like this. And so it's all very consistent. And we don't maintain those URLs. So this is the agencies that send them to us. Once they come, just tell us where to go. We're not maintaining all of these online. No, that's correct. Yes. The agency's maintained their own on their own website. But once we pull it into our catalog, then that becomes the libraries or the library commission, the clearing houses. We have to maintain those. And so all of our government documents will have this URL that starts out with GovDocs.Nebraska.gov. And then usually EPUBs slash EPUBs and the call number in this particular case, the E5700 that yeah. So if you click on that link in the Mandarin database and a cattle online catalog, it will bring up the document itself immediately so that you have immediate access to it. You can download it by clicking on the download button or you can print it off if that is what you need. So that is something that we've worked really, really hard to enhance over the years. And I will touch on that part again a little bit later in what I'm doing. So back to this. We also have, and again this is a Vern item that helped us get here. He helped us redesign a page that we called Nebraska State Agency Publications Online. If you are interested in a quick way to get to a particular state agency's publications, you go to this little drop down menu on this page. You can click on any of the agencies. It will list items not only that we have on our servers, but more likely they're going to be on the state agency's website. This particular agency's Department of Agriculture and this is the cattle feeders directory. This is something that they maintain and so by us maintaining the link on our page and then you get to it, you get the most current information. So I wanted to be sure and point out this. You can also get to our online catalog from that page. So there's lots of ways that you can get around getting to state documents just from this page one. Okay. The Library Commission is also part of the federal depository. There are, let's see, 10 other depositories in the state. We do collect federal government publications, some of us more than others. The commission only currently receives about 2% selection of the materials made available through the program. The largest collection here in the state is at University of Nebraska-Lincoln and they are our regional depository. So they oversee the rest of the federal depositories here in Nebraska. Okay. Actually, I need to update, yeah, a couple of libraries have dropped out in the last couple of years, so I need to update this page. Things like this are always good for finding what you need to fit. Yeah. Okay. Government services also provides reference services and pretty much part of the information services group as a whole, but we do also just specialize in government document reference work. We answer reference questions about state government and its publications. We do research projects related to various things like, for example, the most recent one I've had is a research project about prisoner release after serving good time and so that usually includes searching the various bills to put it into place and any related information and news afterwards. So feel free to call us or send, you can always send your question and writing to the email address there, nlc.ask at Nebraska.gov. And if it doesn't come directly to me, depending on the day, someone in the information services team will see it and make sure that it gets directed to the right person and answer it in a timely manner. Something else that we do as part of the documents program is what I call scan on demand. If you find a document in our catalog that does not have a link to an online version, send us the request and we take these requests as a scan on demand opportunity to scan the item, add it to the catalog and make it available immediately to you, but not only to you, but by adding it to the catalog we make it immediately available to everyone. So that's an important part of what we do. The other couple of things that we do, one of which is new since this was done 15 years ago. The first one that is not new is What's Up Doc, and this is an electronic blog and publication from the Commission Clearinghouse Service, and we list all of the newest state. We don't include federal anymore because we're not adding new items to the federal collection, but we do let you know what we've received at the Library Commission Clearinghouse in the last two months. It used to be a monthly and it's since become a bi-monthly, a little bit easier to maintain. Now not only do I provide links to the actual item in the blog post itself, but I have embedded and again much with the help of and thank you of Vern, I embed the document itself. So again you can see the document immediately. You can download it and print it or you can save it up to you. But this is the most current one. I will have a new one out there later this week for the months of November and December. And then the new blog post that I started several years ago is called Book Briefs. It also is bi-monthly because the Clearinghouse receives documents from every state agency, including the Nebraska University of Nebraska Press. They are a state agency, so they send us books that we choose for the collection. And then I go through and I add a picture that is courtesy of the Press website, but also title, author, any book awards that it might have received and the synopsis of the book also courtesy of the Press website. So we've gotten lots of requests for checkouts of these books from libraries and librarians for their patrons based on this Book Briefs blog post. We'll go as long as it takes to get through everything we're talking about and Mary's last one to speak today. And then if you all do have any questions, type in the questions section and we'll go to them on our interface. Anything you want to know more about the commission from the people here today, remember next week we've got part two for other departments. So to hold your questions for them for next week. Two last things for me as a vast extension of Scan on Demand. When I first started working here, actually I will start my 12th year here next week. Nebraska, I call this the Nebraska State Document Scanning Project. Laura Mooney, her primary job is not only federal documents, what few that we get of those, her primary job is to scan state documents that have not previously been scanned and digitized. And so when she first started here almost a year and a half ago, we were still in the A's and she has now turned the corner, you know, kind of sorta around the corner of the stacks to when she is now in the D's. Yeah, so she is making lots. Yeah, so probably thousands of items that, you know, just since she has started working here, that we want to make as much as possible available online so that people have instant access to it if they find it. And a lot of times if they're doing just a Google search, again, thanks to Vern, their search may pick up on something that we have in our catalog and they can click on it and then click on the URL and get that document instantaneously, which is a real help to people. And especially during the pandemic, that was a real advantage, you know, especially when it came to like the governor's executive orders, we have those on the Nebraska Access website. Those were our number one hit and they got downloaded a lot, thousands of times, you know. So anyway, the very last thing I wanted to mention that falls under government services is the Nebraska Public Documents website. It is currently, this was created in 2006 and 2007 and was a collaboration between the Library Commission, the Nebraska State Historical Society, which is now History Nebraska, excuse me, University of Nebraska Lincoln and the University of Nebraska Omaha. And this was a collaborative effort to provide digital access to historic annual reports that had been published and bound together since the 1870s through 1956. And originally, the collaboration purchased microfilm of these items from the New York Public Library and then students at the UNL campus went through and digitized them. Unfortunately, at that time, the digitization characteristics and access was limited. It did a great job for what they had at the time, but the technology has evolved. So in 2019, former employee Lori Saylors went through and scanned, re-scanned every single item that we currently had the Nebraska Public Documents and re-digitized, which meant that they OCR made much more searchable. Since then, we have been doing lots of cleanup and Verne has figured out how to do much better OCR technology on these documents and so has re-OCRed all of them. Also in the meantime, we have located and added missing items from the collection, some that were already in our catalog in our own Clearinghouse collection, but others that had come to us from donations of old documents and old bound items. So we're very eagerly waiting, awaiting the new website. This current one is being hosted at UNL, but once we get everything finished on our end, then they will turn over hosting to us and we will be hosting the new Nebraska Public Documents website. So hopefully sometime later this year. Yeah, so that's all for me. Feel free to contact us anytime if you have questions or in need of a document. Let's go back to the slides. There we go. There we go. Yeah, it's okay. All right. So that is our... Does anybody have any questions? That is our part one of our Meet the NLC session today, talking about library questions in general, our computer services, information services and government information services. Does anyone have any questions? You can type into the questions section of your webinar interface and see if there's anybody has anything you want to ask. If you didn't see anything during the show, that's okay. If not, you do know where to reach us here, obviously. And I will pop open this since you are doing that there. Our contact page for information and all of our different departments and all of our staff is here. And if you don't know who to call, please just call and let us know what you need and we'll be sure you get connected to the right person to help you call one of our main numbers here and they'll know where to send you to. Yes. You'll talk to one of those people whose picture I showed and now you'll say, then you'll know what we look like. No. So you just got some thank yous coming in. Yeah. What is the Amy question for seven years? Yeah, I'm going to have to do... Hang on, I'm going to have to adjust something. I had technical issues. Chris has been having technical trouble during our presentation today. Oh my gosh. If I could just say one more thing, never hesitate to call us. Really, please don't hesitate to call while we're here in the office. Our job is to help you. Yes, to make your jobs easier. There it is. Okay. Yes. We got thank you, Francie staff and presenters. Different Amy said, thank you for all the help you provided over the years. It's nice to have faces to put to the names Amy but Amy, oh, and from here it said yes. Bookface has been going for seven years. Seven years. Thank you, Amy. As of this March, it'll be seven years. Shoot. I knew we'd been a long time. Yeah. And I didn't want to in any way just say all we do are these. These are a lot of the things we do. I thought of two more things we do that I forgot to talk about. So, Amy, thank you, Amy. Yeah. Amy's been with that. Amy just got her 10-year award. Amy, you were supposed to be in an eye appointment. She's left. It was before. She put thank you before. She's gone. It's okay. Shoot. But we want to help you. We want to make your jobs in your librarianship easier either by checking out books to you, answering questions, providing CE, making a book club collection for you, providing a document. Sometimes it's a little hand-holding. Sometimes it's just, this fits you well and we all do that. Yeah. So, please, I'd like you to think that calling us is a good idea and that we could be helpful and that you'll find the person who can help you solve whatever it is that you're having trouble solving, call us. And I've already described to people who don't know what I do, don't understand libraries and stuff. And my big thing that I described that I do, I work for the Brassville Library Commission. Oh, commission. Oh my gosh. And we help librarians do their jobs. Yes. We're going to make we do whatever we can to give you training, resources, consulting, grants. We'll talk about some of that next week. Yeah. Everything and anything to think of that a librarian might need to do in the state. We're here to help you do that and do better and serve your communities the best way you can. If you get thank yous from your community members, then we've all done our job. Yeah. Yes. And Byrne's certainly done his job. Yeah. Yeah. We tease Byrne that he can't ever retire. We would be lost without him. That goes for you, too, Rod. Yeah, too, Rod. I'm just going to bring in someone to mentor to teach everything you know, too. No, you don't transfer knowledge. We just don't get to go. No, no. Nothing like the human tech. All right. All right. I think that's it then. Thank you, everyone. Thank you all for being here. Thank you, Rod, for coming in remotely. I'm going to pop to our Encompass Live website. If you use your search engine of choice and just type in Encompass Live, we are the first and only thing that comes up. Nobody's allowed to use that name. I'm not copyrighted or trademarked it, but for now, if you can see, it's just us. And that will bring us to our main page and our archive page. There it goes. So here you have our upcoming shows. I mentioned earlier about recording. Today's show is recorded. All of our recordings are posted to the Nebraska Library Commission's YouTube channel for our archives. The slides will be available, too, through our slide share account. These are upcoming shows. And next week is the second half of today's Meet the NLC Part 2, when you'll be hearing from me talking about library development. Tessa Terry, our communications coordinator, gave Craymore Director of our Talking Book and Braille Service, and Deborah Dregos, our Technology and Access Services Director. So that's the other four main departments at the Nebraska Library Commission. So please do register and sign up and join us for those that session. And there's our upcoming shows for January and February. But the archives are right here beneath our upcoming shows. Most recent one at the top of the page. So that's the one from last week, before last year's. Today's will be posted. Today's will be there by the end of the day tomorrow with the link to the slides. So you'll be able to watch it. Everyone who attended today's show and registered for today's show can email from me directly to you, let you know that it's available. We also push our things out to our social media. We have up here, you can see our Facebook page. We have a Facebook page. We use Instagram and Twitter. That's all the things we use so much. And we use the hashtag of, let's see if I have one here. Yeah. And come live, hashtag. This is our reminder to log into, oh, here's a meet these presenters, reminder about today's show. And here's the notice about the recording from last week's going up. So if you do like to use Facebook, give us a like over there or follow our hashtag and come live on the other media. I'm going to go back to page year. And while we're on our archives page, I want to show you there is a search feature here. So you're wondering who did a show on any particular topic. We've got 15 years of them. We probably have done something. You can do a search. You can do search the whole archives or just the most recent 12 months if you want just something very current. But if you are searching the full show archives, do just pay attention to the original broadcast date. As I said, these all have the date when they were originally done. Many of the shows will be fine to still watch good resources and useful information that stand the test of time, but some things will become old and outdated. Resources may have changed drastically. Some may no longer exist. Links may be broken. We do not have the staff to check double check links and things out of here. So if you find something broken, let me know. And we can on a case by case basis fix that. People may not work at the same place where they worked at when they first presented for us. So do pay attention. So just pay attention to that original broadcast date if you watch anything older on here. For Nebraska library staff and board members, you can earn continuing education credits for both watching our live shows here and the recordings. So do be aware of that if you're trying to earn CE court credits towards your certification for your boards or your libraries and your library for your boards and your library staff and your accreditation, which those are both needed for your library itself. You can earn CE credits for watching the recordings and the live shows. All right. So that wraps up for today. Thank you everybody for being here. Thank you all for being here. Good to see you Rod. Happy anniversary. Yes, 15 years ago today. Well, today this week was the first show. Yeah. Wow. Crazy. Yes. All right. And we'll hopefully see you next week or on future episodes when we cut this live. Bye bye. Bye.