 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Christa Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the 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 on Wednesdays, that's fine. Would you record the show as we are doing today? And it will be available for you to watch later at your convenience. And I will show you at the end of today's show, where you can access all of our recordings. Both the live show and the recorded shows 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 topics we have on the show. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries. Does that be similar to your state library? So we provide services, training, consulting, et cetera, et cetera to all types of libraries in the state. So you will find shows on Encompass Live for all types of libraries. Public academic K-12 corrections, museums, archives. Our only criteria is that something to do with libraries. We do book reviews, interviews, mini-training sessions, demos of services and products, all sorts of things. This today is the last Wednesday of the month. So that means it's pretty sweet tech day. Yay. The last Wednesday of the month, Amanda Sweet, our technology innovation librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission joins us. Good morning. Good morning. Could tell us about cool techie things going on. Could be anything. And today she's going to talk about last month's Internet Librarian 2022 conference. All the cool things that were there that you missed if you were unable to attend. And even when you do attend, you can never go to everything. So it's kind of nice to see what else was out there. True, true. I mean, there's always that. Yeah, there's multiple tracks as with any conference. Multiple things happening at the same time. So yeah, this is good to get an idea of what maybe you didn't see. So I'll hand it over to you, Amanda, to take it away and tell us all about it. So there was a lot going on there. And for those of you who didn't know, Internet Librarian is one of the leading tech conferences for librarians. And so this year it was actually run by Brian Fitchman, because Jane was out thick for this one. She wasn't able to make it for whatever reason. So Brian took over this one. He did an awesome job. And so in this case, I'm going to talk about there was a lot going on. So I just kind of plucked out some different trends and tracks. So in this overview session, I'll be talking about how laggers are starting to help communities work through their own problems in their own way. So right now, we're starting to shift over from more of a tackle one problem at a time to actually starting to address problems fully and systemically. How can the library help in that full problem solving process instead of just doing one little thing at a time, make it more comprehensive. And then the next trend that I'll be talking about is in order to make that more comprehensive and be able to do that whole problem solving process, we need new ways of actually communicating, working together and working with our partner organizations within the community. And lots of that stuff is changing. So we'll kind of talk about some of the presenters that found new and awesome ways to do that. And then I'll talk about how technology and innovation is helping to change the game and offering new ways to solve those community problems and how libraries are introducing new technologies, leveraging new technologies and changing the way they do things. And then to round it all out, it seems like every one of these conferences, they're trying to predict the future. They always have like a futurist or someone saying like, this is what's going to go on. So I'll talk about kind of the changing trend of are we just trying to predict the future? Or do we actually have a hand in shaping the future? And what can we do about that? So I'll start by diving into in order to tackle community problems, I put in this little mini framework just to give you something familiar, something you've probably seen before. This is the design thinking process where when libraries are actually helping their community to work through problems like racial inequities or climate action or insert your preferred problem here. It's actually a whole series of organizations working together to be able to tackle that to address that problem. So you start by working as a community to understand and kind of define what that problem is all about. And then you start figuring out, well, how do we work together to solve this? Which organizations are doing what? Can we join an existing effort? Or do we have to go shuffle over and start to create something new? What are the new technology tools that are available to help us kind of ideate and create new solutions that we wouldn't have known existed before? And then where can we go to actually test some of the stuff out? How can we start doing finding really cheap, fun, cool, quick ways to test out, fail fast and do this as a community instead of just trying to work on these problems individually or one organization at a time instead of duplicating efforts how we work together? So that's kind of the primer that we'll use to kind of frame out this little recap for the whole conference. So this slide is a lot, but so let's kind of pick this apart a little bit. This little honeycomb is something that I put together after the whole conference was over, because this whole thing didn't make a whole lot of sense until I was able to take a step back process and kind of put all the threads of everything together. So you go back here and say, as a community, we want to be able to understand other people's perspectives, empathize, and then define problems in a way that is workable, something we can do something about. So in library land, and as a community as a whole, we're already doing this in a variety of different ways, but we don't always collect the information or use the information effectively. So some of the, a lot of the sessions talked about community conversations to start plucking out those problems that really mattered to people. We've all mostly been doing like town hall meetings or different things like that to say, to kind of like air out our grievances and kind of put out what we care about. And a lot of times in writing groups, book discussions, we talk about what we care about. We talk about our everyday problems and how it relates to the threads and themes that are coming out in our books, writing, and everything. And another session that came out in the presentation is empathy building with virtual reality. There was a community that put together an entire, like they put together an entire immersive experience in virtual reality to help people see the world from other people's perspectives. And like their session was actually called cultivating racial equity and inclusion using VR. So if you start searching around for that and just looking for that experience, like that is one of the incredible ways that libraries can start helping to build that shared understanding of a problem. But there were quite a few libraries that said we're tackling our community problems when we introduce people to the problem using VR. But you're not actually completely tackling the problem when you just introduce the, like introduce it and help build that shared understanding. You're tackling the problem when you help people work through the rest of this process. So what I found in a lot of these different sessions is that there was a tendency to say that when we help people emphasize and come together to talk about the problem, we're tackling the problem. But you're not. So how do you actually bring people together to say, to go beyond just building that shared understanding to actually start ideating and prototyping? So when I started digging into what does the library do to help people share ideas, build prototypes, test things out and actually work through that full process. And then you'll see that the number of activities got smaller. And the sessions that I saw and just like what I've seen just overall is occasionally community conversations in town hall meetings will shift over into ideation. But not always. Maker spaces sometimes have opportunities to ideate and prototype different designs. Like they say, you just found out that virtual reality existed and you want to be able to use it as a tool to solve a problem. Does your library offer an opportunity just to experiment and put on the headset and be able to immerse yourself in some free existing virtual world? Or do you also offer opportunities to start developing your own content and connect with other with different learning pathways and partner organizations to possibly develop some system that solves the local problem? Virtual reality is really awesome for developing instructional services for building over those empathy experiences. If you want to be able to, if you had a group in your community that was like an underrepresented group, like I'm Native American. So if you wanted to represent the Native American community and you had like a group that was really interested in using virtual reality to build like a storytelling session, like an immersive storytelling session, how is a library? Would you be able to connect them to the resources that would let them do that? So in a makerspace environment, how do you take that next stage to say we're not just introducing the technology or introducing the problem? We're helping you work through that whole process. And in some cases I've seen like some of the sessions showed that they had entrepreneurs that came in as guest speakers to the library or they had like small business associations or different groups that came in that walked people through that process and offered to be a resource. And in some cases some communities are starting to build learning hubs and resources like that. But it's not, most of it's not cohesive. It's kind of all over the place right now. So that's one of the changing trends is how do we actually start to bring all this together? And so that brings me over to if you want to be able to basically see what I saw. Internet Librarian put together a page that has all the presentations. So in my little recap list, you can think of this as my like sources listed, but most like 90% of the presentations on here, I chose ones that actually made their slide deck available publicly on the Internet Librarian website. So you can skip through and if you're interested in any of these, then cool. And I'll also kind of give like a brief floor vote. You can help people build a shared understanding by building curated archives. Like there was a black digital archive that was telling someone like the the black stories on campus in Pittsburgh. And I know that there's a bunch of those popping up. So you can start kind of take those archives and take it the next step of the way. And while you're mentioning slides, I will mention so in case anyone asks. Yes, Amanda slides will be available with the recording after this show as well. So all these things and the links she has there that find presentations here, you'll all have access to this afterwards. And so in order for all of this to happen, a lot of stuff needs to change. So the next thing on here is how do you shift over from a disjointed chaos to actually working together and working smoothly across organizations and incorporating the library as part of a larger community that's working towards shared goals. So how does that you have to basically make a lot of changes just to get to that point? So that was another big section of that of this conference was how do you restructure the library so that you can leverage your community partnerships? And I don't know how many of you know about Simon Sinek and I'm sure he's not the only one who said this, but he said that most organizations and most leaders don't know the game that they're playing. They don't know who else is working on the same problems and who else is working towards those shared goals. So and a lot of you probably also heard that we're starting to shift over from organization-centric. So instead of just thinking the libraries are own little island and we're all about books and we're doing our own thing, we're working in ecosystems. So we have an ecosystem that might be working toward improving tech access in the community. You have an ecosystem that's improving the climate change crisis and other ecosystem that's improving racial inequity in the workplace. Like insert a problem, insert a technology tool, you have an ecosystem that's working for it. The library is just embedded within that ecosystem. And in some communities you might be leading the ecosystem because you don't like your community doesn't even think in ecosystems and you don't think in systems. But the library more often than not is going to be joining an ecosystem and just uncovering what's already there. And then the other kind of general theme across this was how can the library play a role in building this, like basically how do you build a knowledge repository? You have this half mess of different topics that come from these different little disparate pieces. You have a bunch of different sources of information. Most of the sources of information is behind a paywall. If you have any conferences and paid webinars or like community conversations, usually it's a one and done or if you weren't able to play, you don't have access to the information. So one of the things is libraries are starting to build like starting to aggregate some of that information. My session at the conference was called Library Problems. So this is the big thing of what I talked about, which was how to braid those disparate pieces together and turn the library into the aggregated information that's going to bring together ecosystems to be able to address the problems that have been facing our communities for ever in a day. Like, none of these problems are new. We're just changing the way that we're dealing with them. And so the other thread is just overall the way that we're addressing everything is changing. We've gone over to digital first. So in order to bring people together, offer shared resources, give everyone a voice to the quality and all the ease that are the buzzwords of the day. We're switching over to hybrid services. So it's not just focusing on the library as a place. We're shifting over to how do we revamp our website and how do we make this a more appealing place to visit digitally? Because if you have a horrible website, people are just going to pick it away. It's unfortunate and you might have the most amazing information on the planet, but half these sessions in here were about make your websites less and then trying to help people rethink what the library looks like. I know you've altered the library's more than just books. And I hate to say it again, but I'm kind of, it was in every session. If you're going to be, most people don't think in ecosystems. When I went to this conference and when I went to talk to other people, I found out that I'm kind of a weirdo that does think in ecosystems. I don't think, it totally makes sense to me, but yeah. And I thought that it made sense to everyone. I thought that people just looked at it and was like, yep, they're thinking in systems. And instead I started talking about it and going, no, we don't. So it's sort of, if your library used to be an island and your library used to just meet with a small group of people as one representative from each different demographic and shaped your events and policies and procedures based on that, how do you let people know that the library has changed and is changing? And if you have revamped your website, have you let people know that that is now a new thing? And if you now offer hybrid services that are trying to reach a wider audience, how do you reach those people? So, and then the other thing is none of this change is going to happen if your organization is a hot mess. If you don't treat each other well, if you don't communicate information well, if you don't even have your own internal knowledge network that says, here's the information repository. If you want to know what's going on, go here. And if you don't have kind of like a change map to get your organization right first, then you're not going to be able to play nicely with others. And you're going to be kind of behind the curve when, as everyone starts working together to do all this cool stuff. And if you have like an organizational structure that says we're really taught for like a huge top down organization, you need to go through this person and this person to be able to share an idea when you're basically finding out that you're blocking innovation instead of supporting it. And there were just a bunch of sessions about how do you cultivate ideas and help your leadership and employees grow together. And that was, that's a good chunk of it. And so there's two sides to this. One is you have the organization that's shifting, but then you also have individuals that are trying to sort themselves out because most libraries are trying to recruit new talents. They're trying to rebrand the library to job seekers to say, we're not boring. Come over here. And so right now, if you're like, the library is not traditionally viewed as the center of innovation. Like most of us know there's a ton of innovation going on in libraries. We're using all the new school technology, AI is a thing, in that a thing is a thing. We have smart libraries for all over the place. But that's not true for every library. So if a job seekers first experience with a Shushi library and they just wanted you to sit quietly with your book, then you need the library to have that growth mindset and advertise that growth mindset before you can recruit the talent that has that growth mindset that you want to attract. It's hard to break that first impression. Yeah, pretty much. And this isn't just true for libraries. It's true for like, it's true in manufacturing it everywhere. And the other thing is that organizations are getting used to changing constantly, but individuals are also getting used to changing constantly. The career cycle, as a lot of you know, has changed. Now people have up to like 11 different careers in their lifetime, like that was a Bureau of Labor statistic. And they're now a, like stuff's changing. And people aren't used to that rapid change. They're not used to the fact that jobs that existed 10 years ago aren't going to exist in five or 10 years. And if you go to a four year degree and prepare for stuff, then in that fifth year, everything shifted in half of what you just learned in the past four years, maybe irrelevant. And especially in the land of tech, that's not necessarily always true in the general, like a managerial class or like something like that. But if it's tech stuff, that's usually like that change, that cycle change is changing. And there's also a greater emphasis on getting your mind right. It's you're going to be dealing with constant change uncertainty. And you need to have like a strong will, a strong support system. And if you want to be able to surround you, you want to be able to surround yourself with an environment that's going to be supportive enough that you can take time out to work on yourself, figure out your own priorities, values and focus, and then figure out how you align that with an organization and how to avoid the organizations that are still kind of hot mess. And so that's the whole thing. So if you want to go, this was a, there's a lot of sessions that talk about this. This is, there's probably even more from this list, but I didn't even, there's only some to put in a slide and everyone gave their presentation. So you can sit through this, find what's more helpful to you. I recommend going to the tech tools to transition to a hybrid work environment because that's going to be helpful to a lot of people. I'm not trying to make the slide deck, the one slide deck to work at all, because I mean, that's why people put together their slides to use them. And so then the other one is from Talks with the Healthy, Improving Organizational Culture and Strategic Tools to Bridge to the Future because she talks about a lot about changing the needs assessment of the community, shifting cultural goals and kind of like practical ways to change how you do stuff. And then the Remote Customer Service, Engagement and Ghosting is a really good one. Ghosting as a whole is one of my pet peeves. So it's like anytime I see that as a bee and I'm like, yes, let's do this thing. But so that's a really good one to start looking into. And Library of Problems is me. So I mean change the self-promotion. And so let's jump over to our next trend here, which was once you kind of start, once the library itself starts building an understanding of the overall problem solving process and starts understanding which problems are most relevant and then start shifting over to saying this is the change that we need to make to become more innovative and become more attractive leads to visit and then more attractive leads to work. Then we'll start shifting over to say there's some new stuff that people need to know. There's new technologies. There's new ways to innovate. There's new process improvements. There's new behavioral and cultural changes. We're changing the library, but how do we introduce new technology into our communities so that the library can help our community be stronger? And so that's maker spaces. That's the learning hub partnerships. That's the workforce development partnerships. That's anything that's helping your community to leverage technology to do some good and live a better life. So some of the tech trends that we're going on are on the left-hand side. The handy-dandy little honeycomb is flucking out the types of technology that were featured in the conference and are just featured in general. I have a bunch of pages that are all about all this stuff. So of course I gravitated toward it at the conference, asked someone else. They probably paid attention to other stuff. But AI, the Internet of Things, the supporting the smart city and the smart cities are in both rural communities and those big, giant communities like New York, but they have a whole bunch of different resources to help with that. And I talked about virtual reality being a way to build empathy and to help build that shared understanding, but you can also jump over to augmented reality to help an instructional divine entertainment and just a mess of different stuff. There was a really awesome session about a community that designed a farm bot. So that was kind of like a practical application of someone who said we need a better way to be able to automate our farming capabilities so that we can basically grow more food, to grow, to grow, to support more people without having so many people necessary to moderate equipment because we don't have enough people that are interested in farming in our area to do that. So they built the farm bot, both as a learning tool to show the process of how to design and build a robot, but also to meet a community needs. So if you need a farm bot tool, some of it's a consortium. And they also talk a lot about the future of blockchain. So this is all of that new fancy emerging technology that people are trying to find out where it fits. So in the role of the library, most of the sessions were about finding new ways to provide access to the technology. Most of the makerspace sessions on this list were about how do we start building makerspaces to support that hybrid environment that is, we're not always just a physical environment, we're also a digital resource repository, and we provide remote access to all these resources because a lot of this stuff you don't actually need to be on site to be able to do. It's true. It's in the interwebs. So much is now, yeah. Yeah. Which is great. It makes it so much more accessible, accessibility to so many more people. Huge improvement, I think. And so we have the access to the technology, but then once people have access to it, they a lot, like when people are interested in it after they've explored it, understood it, they're curious about it. It's sometimes hard for people to just like go home and take like a class on edX or for Sarah and just be able to have that felt discipline and just learn it without being able to talk to another human. So online learning is awesome and done it. Like it's how I got through a lot of different stuff and learned a lot of stuff. But some sessions started talking about learning hubs and learning communities. And so there have been some libraries that said we got a LinkedIn subscription. If you're curious about some classes, we're going to start bringing like a we have like 12 different people that are interested in learning Excel. We have 20 different people that are learning about change management. We have 40 different people that are learning about like software development. We're going to we're going to have these little meetup groups so that people can come into the library and they can take the class. So that's going to be your sense of accountability because you can't pay for in person classes that's too expensive or it's not on your schedule. We are going to get them to the library where we have the open sessions so that you can drop in and just talk to people about it and start building your own little mini ecosystems so that you can keep going doing what you want to do. And then there's the can these learning hubs only be online or are there different ways that you can build a hybrid learning hub or build access to hybrid resources to say that you can access our makerspace tools and you can access our curated information resources but you can go into the physical library if you need to use a headset or into the physical library if you need to access our robotics kits but you can also go to our main library website and start connecting over to a curated collection of resources and we're changing the way the library is changing the way that we're tracking library use so you're going to that digital first mentality but then you're also tracking your not just the number of visits to your websites but how long people stay engaged with each different page which links were put on that different page what people actually interacted with and starting to say not just use that to inform your the design of your website but using that to say to justify the existence of your library because that isn't always a metric that's put into all of your like justification reports for like library boards and I'm already do some don't I don't know how you're that up right now and so then you have and most libraries stop at access to technology they say we set up this amazing feature rich um maker space you've got a laser cutter over there you've got a 3d printer over there you've got some a vr station over here you've got some sensors and robotics over here go to town every so often we have a trainer that comes in and shows you how to use it but this is another thing that I talked about in the library problem session and it's sort of a theme that's been cropping up in small ways is you have access to technology but how do you build access to the problems people like the problem solving process isn't just about you don't start with technology and then find problems to fit but that is what has been happening instead usually in that design process you start with a collection of problems you say that our organization has been we're trying to build out new software we are trying to experiment with machine learning to build a better suggestion model so that we can get people over to our books and resources better we don't have the in-house resources to be able to do that but we're going to post this problem on a little shared board that says we just introduced artificial intelligence machine learning to our community now we're going to match it over to this problem to say if you're curious about it come try out your new skills or learn your new skills to solve our problem and putting over to say these are the pathways that you can use join our learning hub or join our knowledge management system to be able to help you work through that process of using technology to solve these problems so right now most libraries have the access to the tech but they don't have a library of problems they don't have a brainstorming or an inspiration session to say this is why we need technology and so that's kind of one way that libraries can start shifting and then this jumps back over into that knowledge management which is the curation of the information resources to say what the tech is all about because there's a lot of like smoke oil in the tech field there's a lot of like boot camps that are just like not worth your time there's a lot of people trying like people with a million different opinions so the library can help start vetting out these resources to say this is what you need go here and on that note I'll also put in this link to these high tech pages as with everyone in library land I do have to make some updates to these but so in the chat I put in some of the curated information resources that pair up with this different technology that basically says what it's all about some different activities and resources you can use to explore an experiment with it and kind of what can go haywire if we don't care about using tech for good and just like a variety of different stuff so you can check that out if you want to and many of the resources that are in this session listing here gives you more information about how libraries can use the specific technology within their community how they started basically building like a decentralized makerspace system so instead of saying all of our equipment is right here we're going to start leveraging the mobile the mobile makerspaces we'll take it out and we're going to take this on the road we're going to mail you over a tech kit so you can use it at home we have an intake kit that just and the another one I wanted to highlight was the fostering entrepreneurship and library makerspace that was Nick Tansy I think his last name is he talks about how libraries can support entrepreneurship in kind of a more comprehensive way so that could be a helpful one if you're trying to do that in your own community and um the only one that doesn't have a presentation listed is digital twins combining AR with VR and AR but if I put it on there because if you're interested in digital twins you can still google it you can use it as a keyword search so that you can start digging exploring it on your own and Chad Marin always gives an awesome update on XR which is like augmented reality virtual reality mixed reality all that good stuff yeah we've had him on on well you've had him on here on Encompass Live before look at our archives for anything yeah that's awesome yeah and so then that goes into kind of our last little theme of the day which is with all this change and all this new stuff going on you're pretty much always going to feel like you're falling like you're going to have every time you have to shift over to a new idea new concept new thing new technology most people are going to have that kind of plummety butterfly feeling in their stomach and it's like how do you make that shift over to say we're not going to just let change happen we're going to take control and shape that better future because eventually you land and you're all good but in that moment it doesn't feel like it so how can you prepare as a library and as an individual to be a creator of change in the shape or the future instead of just letting that moment happen because it's not a good feeling and we can do something about it so some of the themes that came out in the sessions and just in general library land life from what I've seen around is the then I'll point to the new year threat risk then I'll actually tie you over to a specific slide deck the teammates in the hot water if you go to the um Stephen Abrams slide deck he actually gives a really comprehensive kind of view of how libraries have been changing and like the and like the changes that have stuck after COVID and he also gives a really good framework for assessing the risks and threats that are facing your library in ways that you can start to kind of basically take control of it instead of just letting it happen so a lot of this actually came from that presentation so that's like a really good slide deck to start thinking through and I put digital first in there just because it's freaking everywhere and it's not going anywhere and there's also the general theme that there's kind of like the this is probably just the fact that all that everyone has wanted COVID to end that we're kind of thinking that it's in the downswing and it's like we're all good but if you listen to like the Bill Gates trend and you listen to like the trend of scientists everywhere this is just one of many COVID's we're going to have probably another pandemic that's going to come out and if we don't just keep preparing for it you're going to be blindsided again so that's sort of like your overarching threat that's just like in the time to COVID and so some of these sessions also if you look at the evaluation and adaptation how change a lot is to thrive shift back over to that tea bags and hot water and looking at the strategic tools which also appeared previously in another game to start trying to change the way that you do community needs assessments change the way that you structure and look at your organization and accept and understand that the services that you have available right now are going to look drastically different if you want to survive in the future and yeah and they're just kind of tips and techniques to be able to do your library evaluations differently and start to work with partners to evaluate instead of just doing it specifically within the library because when you do your evaluations individually as an or like individually as an organization you wind up duplicating resources ignoring problems that you could be developing services around to bring more people in and starting to do that so that reflection and evaluation systemically as a community instead of an organization and so I've already talked about this one a lot here but if you do have any questions about it you can go over to you know email me about it I know that I don't have all of the answers that you're looking for so you could also look at the at the most of these information sessions most of the presenters give their contact information at the end of their slide deck so if you do have super specific questions I would recommend just reaching out to the speakers they put the contact information because they like to know that people are actually out there listening to the words coming out of their mouth and when they get questions it feels good and and they're happy to to chat with you definitely I mean they are putting these presentations together for to share what they've figured out a little piece and um definitely if there's something you're you know at the conference live in person they would have had people coming up and saying I want to talk more about this or let's go over here can we meet for coffee or something but that can continue afterwards with emails them definitely I know that I like after my session I got that little warm feeling when people want to went out for coffee and they had questions and I was like you do listen and so I think we have about 10 minutes so I do have a couple of things I can go over but I'll see if there's any questions first um let's see um yeah if anybody does have any questions go ahead and type into the question section of your go-to webinar interface um anything that Amanda mentioned that you wanted you wanted to chat more about or explore um any of these topics that she mentioned that you have any experience thought input on um did and now I know the whole the um title of this session is what you missed from uh internet librarian but I wonder sometimes is there anyone here who attended internet librarian and saw other sessions or something that you want to share about um you could do that as well um in the chat um and you mentioned yourself huh can people unmute themselves with this they can't I can do that for them yes if you want to be unmuted to share something I can I can do that yeah you can't do it yourself unless I do on my side yeah okay yeah a little bit more control here um but like you mentioned earlier there's a lot here and a lot to go through yeah and it's me it's a big conference it's how many days plus pre-conference I mean and I also helped with one of the like the games and gadgets workshop in right Monday at the start of it uh that was like that was actually one of the things I was going to talk about now if no one had any questions um I don't see anything coming in nope but I'll keep an eye on if anyone does come up with anything like as a matter of fact we still got about 10 minutes left in our showtime so plenty of time to talk about things or show anything else and so I will just talk about some of like the specific game gadget tech trends that came up just because there's always like other what we've done in the past as a technology petting zoos type things yeah um because you always you know there's always new devices new tablets new just anything and you know not everybody can get their hands on it but it's great that some places can bring them together and say here we'll show you all of it so what I'm going to do here is this was actually a slide that I meant to put together but life just didn't work out that way before I put this together so I'm going to put together a tech gadget trends or tech gadget recommendations and you're going to see me put this together live feels special I know how to create slides live in impression so for AI VR and AR which is artificial intelligence virtual reality and augmented reality and robotics I just came across a new tech kit that's called kai's plan so kai's plan is really awesome because it's kind of it's the only tech it's the only ed tech thing that I come across that actually blends together the virtual world and robotics in the way that they do so the way it works is that you have this giant adventure mat you lay the adventure mat out on the floor and then you have these little actually here I'm setting it up for the library commission but this is one of the little robots that has like a little ripper set and it's got like a little qr code on the ripper with robot you put this robot on top of that adventure mat and then you can use it to pick up little objects on there you can navigate through the like physical world and they have like an automated warehouse mat and a mars rober mat those are the two that I have but it teaches the like the concepts of smart warehouses and it teaches the concept like practical applications and how this stuff is used and the augmented reality part of it comes in when you download it's like a the kai's plan app onto your phone it's called kai's eye and you set up like a little camera station they give like a tripod with a kit and you aim your smartphone at the mat so that it can read all the qr codes in the mat and it builds a virtual world inside of the app that reflects what's physically happening in real space so you'll see the physical robot moving on the mat but then you'll also see your virtual robot moving in virtual space so this is starting to give the concept of that digital twin it's starting to give that concept of prototyping physical environments in the virtual world while you are you're syncing the virtual and the physical world together and it's just like it's really cool to be able to see that side by side if you get a chance go to kai's plan like just search for kai's plan and watch the video how it works because it's like the only thing that i found so far that actually blends all that together and really reflects how robotics and uh how like that good like the digital world and like the physical world is changing and how you can use that virtual world to start prototyping and building a better physical world to make that work better and it's just really cool i geeked out on it so hard and this is actually going to be one of the kits that's available through the the tech kids that kids through the mail that we do awesome i was wondering if we were going to be getting some of those already have them there's one right there that's very adorable there too yes yeah and so that is the one that just came to mind immediately the other one that just added an ai and robotics block was the finch 2.0 and the finch just started a new series of so if you've heard of um uh google has a teachable machine and teachable machine introduces the machine learning concept that will allow a computer to recognize images it'll recognize audio and it'll recognize like like i used it to build like a robot that uses that will navigate a maze using voice commands so i went into google's teachable machine and it's just like you don't need to know how to code you just go into it give it a bunch of different examples of one word and then you can train a model that will understand um it it's limited to one second long words so i had to use all one full of the words but now i can recognize go left right and then i program the robot to be able to respond based on those commands and the finch 2.0 made by bernberry technology it has a whole tutorial that will show you how to do it and then what i did was just adapt it to build the maze and this is a session that um that's was uh your your pre-sweet tech session at the end of september yeah yeah that's right yeah program your robot using voice commands yeah and so i put that one in there just in case you want to be able to play around with that and then another one that came up was the so a lot of times i feature like the technology that's like um kind of some of its big like the finch 2.0 has a beginner level the ai part of it is probably more intermediate to advanced so for people that are working more toward like the beginner end of the spectrum um a lot of you have probably heard about the asa about evo it's been on brand quarter forever and a day i ordered mine through ediporium's website and ediporium will let you do a pre-order but um i don't think it's gonna get shipped out into january like i think that's what their tech support told me but the asa about evo is the one that is screen free and code free options so you use um colored markers to draw a little you can either draw a straight black line and then the robot will follow that line and change color to match that the color of the line or you can draw a little color like color codes that's basically like a pattern drawn in marker on a piece of paper that tells the robot whether it's just spin around turn left right or go forward and it's a way to introduce those coding concepts without like all you need is the robot and some paper and markers and i recommend the chisel tip markers because if you use the round tip markers the robot won't follow the right just saying oh so there's probably not in there huh um it might be in there but i don't know i don't know how to say it and so for absolute beginners and younger users and then some story driven tech is the and i'm going to double check the the name of this because i always get it like a tiny bit wrong okay the tony box so the tony box is just kind of a fun one because it's basically like a giant speaker cube and it's you can put little figurines on top of it like they have a whole Disney line of figurines and when you put that figurine on top of the box the box will start telling stories or it'll start playing little songs that's just like a it's a way to keep kids entertained and start building like a little interactive object so you can tilt the box one way to rewind you can like shake it it'll change tracks you can tilt it and move fast forward so it's like that type of device for super young users so if you're looking and you can also record your own stories if you have a certain figurine that you can put on top so it's kind of a way to it's a really fun tool for libraries just because stories and i've seen the ads for that i didn't realize how much it could do though or how much the children could do with them yeah and so if you want to kind of give students who like give kids the voice when they're trying to tell their own story and then make it like interactive and tactile it's just a cool way to do it and then i'm going to jump over to oh the other cool thing that i saw was and a lot of you probably seen this one already but it's like a it's used for webinars and conferences and at the speaker in the shape of an owl and that owl you felt yeah we're we're getting one here we're getting one at the commission are we finally getting one yes fine i just got emailed yesterday yes it's oh it's like um it looks like an owl yes um you just look like owl oh dojo y'all um virtual meeting webcam or something um and it in one piece of equipment is your um microphone speaker and a 360 degree camera yeah so that if you sit that in the middle of a room you have a conference table and how much people in it and you have people coming in remotely as well everyone can keep coming in remotely can see everybody in that table there's a panoramic view of everyone so you can see everyone who's at the table it is motion and sound activated when someone speaks a new like here if you can see here you've got my my webcam box and amandas the owl would have a panoramic view of the whole room but then when someone speaks a second camera or multiple other camera view will pop up a new window and zoom into that person's face and if another person speaks it'll zoom into that one and i've seen it do up to three different people zoomed in so you can rather than just see this big room of just people way far away you see that but you see um it zooms in closer and then it will pop to someone else who's talking because it goes by it does it automatically by sound um sound and motion i think the most good sound but um oh it's so slick and so um yes all of our regional library systems have them um they've just gotten them within the last few months um using some arpa grant funds or other funds that they had and um well we tested it out a couple weeks ago at a meeting here borrowed one and it was uh so i received that now we are purchasing our own for meetings here that we hosted the library commission so it's a good way to combine um people who are meeting in person with people who are remoting in from other locations all in one shot um all in one makes it much more personal um seeing the people's faces up close seeing it pop around to people um it's just one piece of equipment previously we would have to plug in a microphone a speaker a webcam all into whatever computer is running that um remote the postings location one device is all it is and it looks like an owl it lights up little eyes and when you first boot it up turn it on it it it hoots at you yeah just a little hoot oh that's awesome i mean it's i didn't know about the food but it's it's cute but it's such an awesome technology highly recommended yes and i really want to play with that now well i just got the email yesterday we're getting it so we'll see when it comes in and so on here i also added the pie top which is basically the raspberry pies made easier so that it actually has more curated understandable tutorials instead of like the wild wild west of raspberry type pie tutorials that are out there now yeah if you want to learn circuitry and learn sensors and learn robotics or learn hardware and all that stuff without losing your mind trying to find tutorials that are actually legitimately more beginners then you can also you can use pie top to learn the internet of things artificial intelligence like and robotics so i added that one and i'll put in the concepts you learn here AI robotics pie pie top and i see that we're at 1105 so i won't keep you too much longer here um i'll ask one more time if there are any other questions but then i'll just let you wrap it up see um yeah nothing came in anybody have any uh last minute desperate questions you want to ask of amanda anything you want to comment on um and so this is her presentation here and she'll send me the link we'll get that on our google slide so we can um share that with you all and i will put this in to the chat here yeah my chat box so there it is it's moved um yeah so i'll share the link to you all now but it will also be available um when the recording is up as well so if you don't grab it right now that's okay um as usual let's send it over here too uh it will be on the archive page as always there it goes whoops gotta hit send before something will send oh it'll do that yeah all right um just some thank yous coming through right now so i think we can yeah do a little wrap up here i am going to move over here pull back pull presenter control to my screen here so i can do my wrap up um yeah if anyone does have any questions go ahead and type them in i've got a few last minute things to do here um thanks so much man this is great um every um there's two companion conferences i would say um internet librarian in the fall in Monterey california when it's in person and computers and libraries conference which is in the spring in washington march march yeah that one too so if you can make it yeah in arlington virginia typically um when it's in person um of course they did a virtual for the last few years and now they're going um getting back into in person as as some places are um doing some um hybrid events too which is great when there's some a little both uh so um and amanda has come in before to talk about both those conferences sometime so this is great to always get um like i said in um what did you miss what uh cool what topics what are the trends um as amanda said it's not a i always liked it when i would i used to go um it's not a huge conference with like an ala where there's like 20 000 people it's a much smaller group so there's a lot more um it's not as overwhelming i think it is very you know techy related you know it's the internet conference for librarians and information managers but it is you know a lot of technology related things but it's i think it's broadening out to all sorts of topics but is it a lot of smaller groups you can get a lot more i think networking in um with other people and um it's not as uh overwhelming i think it's some of those gigantic conferences like those giant ala ones you can barely even think and breathe it's a lot it's a lot yeah um it's nice and gently brand to in the fall to go to monterey california yeah well it was my first time there yeah because it's been virtual for so long now thank you um all right so i think we'll wrap it up here um as i said we are recording and um i will show you here you know get over to our encompass live page um if you if you use your search engine of choice and type in encompass live we're the only thing called that on the internet um that will bring you to our main page we have our upcoming shows and our archive shows are listed here most recent one at the top page so this is last week's show here um today's will be here um when it is ready i will email everyone who attended today's show and uh registered registered for today's show to let you know when the recording is ready um i've got to export it's got to come out of go to webinar go onto our youtube channel and then i'll take some time getting that ready i should be some time tomorrow and that's all done uh while i'm here i'll show you there is a search feature for in our archives you can search our full show archives or just the most recent 12 months if you want something just current and that is because this is our full show archives um if i went all the way to the bottom of this page it would go back to 2009 when um encompass live first premiered as long as we have a place to host our recordings we will always have them up here but do pay attention when you do watch an archive recording to the original broadcast date some shows will stand the test of time it'll be good good information some things will become old outdated um things have changed links might be broken resources may be totally different people who presented may be working at a totally different library now so just pay attention to that if you are watching any of our archive shows um you can look up a man if you want to know all Amanda's shows look up her name or um pretty sweet tech and i'd mentioned the one you uh you're programming a robot using voice commands that finch 2.0 that she was mentioning that was a couple weeks a couple months ago i mean you can find all of hers shows in our archives there as well um we also do have a facebook page if you like to um follow us on facebook and give us a like we do reminders up there of he's going to log in right now um our speakers we let people know when recordings are up um also on twitter and instagram we use the end comp live hashtag for anything related to encompass live uh so here here's the link for the slides that you'll get afterwards and to that high tech um page that Amanda had shared so things about them and we kind of briefly mentioned the tech kits that are available these are for Nebraska libraries you can request tech kits through the mail um to test out things um Amanda has put together we have multiples of a lot of these correct um there's 15 copies of most of them yeah so if you want to borrow something to either do a program at your library or just to learn about the the robot or the drone or whatever that you've never been able to get your hands on before you can borrow them from here at the library commission this is for Nebraska libraries and a few other states have asked me about um duplicating this system so if you are from another state and you want to set up a similar system you can also email me and I can help you work through that right to tell how Amanda because this has been it's been doing this for a couple of years now I know it started out kind of as a soft launch and then became more I mean COVID happened so that kind of right is right with things yeah and that's what those boxes behind you you were talking about that's our part of our in your camera there behind you the tech kits yeah that would be sent out that's why my office so that wrapped up for today's show um I'll be joining us in a future episode um mandolin back of course last wednesday the month december 28th january 25th um I am working on getting some things scheduled you can see here I don't have anything on the calendar official yet for the next couple weeks but I'm in conversations with people I gotta just gotta get some confirmations done so keep an eye on our schedule here one last thing I do want to mention is in addition to doing this weekly show here and Compass Live we also at the Nebraska Library Commission host the big talk from small libraries online conference um this is a national conference with presenters from all across the country and sometimes elsewhere we've had canate people from canada as well and it is co-sponsored by the association for rural and small libraries this is a conference specifically where small libraries are the presenters all of our presenters are from libraries with a population served or an fte of 10 000 or less that is our definition of small so if um the conference is always the last friday of february it's done online exclusively it's just online using our go-to webinar software like we're doing here and the call for speakers is open now uh the deadline is friday december 16th to submit a proposal to our conference so please do um if you are a small library submit a proposal to me um or if you know of one that should you think they should share something that they're doing uh send them over to our site we do um 50 minute presentations and we do a lightning round session and low for the lunchtime hour or so so if you just have a short session uh 10 minute presentation you can do that as well so please do submit proposals to that and spread the word for me please be spread the word like i said this is a national conference this is not a nebraska thing we're just the one that happens to host it um presenters and attendees from all across the country anywhere all across the world anybody can attend it's free and open to anybody just like our encompass live all right so that wraps it up for today's show i don't need to see any other last minute desperate questions so i think that's it for today thank you so much amanda good to see you again thank you everybody for being here with us and we'll see you all on a future episode of encompass live bye