 Good morning everybody, this is Dr. Bill Fisher. I'm with the School of Library and Information Science at San Jose State University and I'm the coordinator of the school's colloquium series and I want to welcome you to our first colloquia session for the spring 2014 semester. I'm delighted to introduce our speaker today, Dr. Christine Koontz. Dr. Koontz is a faculty member of the School of Library and Information Science at Florida State's College of Communication and Information and she also is a part-time faculty member for SLIS. So she teaches both for FSU as well as for San Jose State. At FSU, in addition to her teaching responsibilities, Dr. Koontz has responsibility for the Geolib program which is a database of information from the U.S. Public Library Geographic Database which provides a good deal of census and other type of information regarding some 16,000 communities in the United States with public libraries. However, today, Dr. Koontz will be speaking to us about some of her experiences in the international arena, specifically how working through the International Federation of Library Associations or IFLA, she made contact with librarians from the Russia State Library and with her expertise and background in marketing, helped them develop a marketing plan for libraries in Russia. And so in addition to all the focus on Russia this week and next with regard to the Olympics, we also have a little focus on the libraries in Russia. So Dr. Koontz, let me turn the microphone over to you. Okay. Well, thank you very much. Can everyone hear me loud and clear? All right. Terrific. And thank you to Dr. Bill Fisher and Randy Chang for their work on setting up the spring colloquium. I'm excited to be a part of it. It celebrates my decade of teaching at Santa Fe State which I've learned a great deal from so many of my students in the LIBR 283 marketing class. And I've featured several case studies from students at San Jose in a new book and guide that we have coming out marketing and social media, myself and another professor, Lori Mon. So San Jose State has contributed greatly to my professional life. And I really appreciate this opportunity today. A year ago, I was in Russia, obviously not for the Olympics. I was singularly in Moscow. And it was the result of an invitation I had received a year earlier from a fellow colleague, Nila Lodzikia. And she asked me if in fact the IFLA Management Marketing Section Committee, of which I'm a member, were to accept the invitation to come to Moscow in 2013, would I consider giving a marketing workshop to librarians in the Moscow region? So this was in the work for about a year. I can tell you right now I have great empathy and understanding for those who needed to get visas to go to Russia for anything related to even business or work or the current Olympics, a very difficult complicated process. We take for granted in the United States many of our facile procedures and policies and the way we are used to operating in the United States. But this of course isn't true in other countries. Excuse me. This is one of the benefits of belonging to an international library organization. And I emphasize the library as a profession. Obviously, I'm a member of the American Library Association, the Florida Library Association. And I've had great benefits from those two memberships. With IFLA I joined in 1997, really pretty much right after email started, which I think greatly enhanced work with IFLA and its committees. Just the ability to communicate quickly and to set up meetings such as this and to communicate. So a tremendous amount of work has gone on with this committee. I'm honored that I've been a part of it in such a vital way and really enjoy all the opportunities to participate that IFLA has afforded. This is unique my trip to Russia. And I hope that if any of you attending or those maybe listening to the recording at a later date has been to Russia that you'll communicate with me and share your experiences at the right time. So again, a little bit more about IFLA and the committee I'm on, that's me to the right. In my next life I want to be much more of dark complexion. Having grown up in Florida I have really suffered from too much sun and the damage of being born in Miami. So when I went to Moscow, Russia you can imagine the little coat I had on was not really cutting it. I had to have many, many layers on me. It was the coldest climate that I've ever been in. And it was February. Our committee is comprised of people from around the world, those attending, Nadia Tamar to my left in the pictures from Algeria. We had people from France, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Finland, Canada and the US. And each of us had our own difficulties getting visas to get into Moscow. So there's a lot of intricate detailed information again that has to be supplied in its bureaucracy times 10. So be prepared for any of that if you're traveling abroad to any country to consider the time ahead you need to really do the planning and to be able to participate. One member from the US who was from the US was not able to come to Moscow because she was not able to get her visa in time. It was very disappointing. So these pictures are within walking distance on the left of the Russian State Library which is right downtown. This is in the entryway and it has a lot of aspects of modernity and then a lot of aspects which allow you to see that Russia is struggling in building to be a modern society from being very closed off from many countries for different politics and reasons for various decades and reasons. The remnants of all this is obvious and certainly many of the younger people are born into a new era where they don't have the memories of the past but just really all the hopes and desire to participate in the global world as they are beginning to be allowed to see it. So again, this was the mid-year meeting of the International Library Association Management and Marketing section. If working with IFLA is attractive to you, I believe it's 78 years old, you certainly would be welcome to contact me about any of the particulars. Not every section has a mid-year meeting. It certainly enhanced the work of our committee and made us one of the most productive in IFLA but again, there is expense associated with any kind of committee whether it's statewide, you're going to the California Library Association, US, ALA or IFLA in whatever country is chosen. Again, this section started in 1997. That happened to be the first year I attended IFLA and I was quickly attracted to it because of my interest in background and professional training and marketing. So some of the things I've done while a committee member besides helping out with workshops such as this in which I helped design and develop the content, marketing workshops, not quite as full as this have taken place all over the world that I've been involved with. Nigeria, Burkina Faso, let's see, London, Leone France, Shanghai, Bangkok, Thailand, let's see, who am I leaving out? Cape Town, South Africa and probably several others. And again, these are sometimes more difficult to develop because you have to have a lot of pre-knowledge about your audience, right? And a lot of knowledge about the context within which your content will land. So again, to retrieve some background, I was told that many of the librarians attending would be from the Moscow area. Moscow obviously is a very large populated piece of extraordinarily large and somewhat semi-populated Russian many areas. And so I was told that the workshop was attended via webcast by over a thousand librarians. So again, this is what I was told. I don't have any specific documentation to verify this, but this was what I was told about a week after the workshop was over. And of course it was recorded. But again, if you think of a public library in the United States, which is small and rural, you might think in fact of libraries in Moscow as being similar, not all, some are larger, more urban, more splendid, but there are many which are small and definitely burdened with trying to do the work that we as librarians wish to do with lack of funding, but probably more importantly, a lack of access to as many information resources as we have in the United States, either freely or by design of collection development. So again, this is an area which on the surface looks very urban and up to date, but as you dig into underlying areas, they are definitely developing as a new Russia, hopefully under new leadership. So again, while as in the United States, some libraries have closed, there have been many also closing in Russia. So you find the librarians are in a state of kind of accepting the status quo, not because it's what they passionately would choose to do, but because they don't have resources to do otherwise. And so again, you find the librarians that would be attending a marketing workshop to have very mixed background and mixed feelings about marketing, which I'll define coming up in a few more slides. So again, say thanks to the librarians, they are brave. It has come to us with few losses. Librarians truly are brave in Russia. They're brave because they're underpaid, they're brave because they lack quick access to resources and may not get the resources that they hope for any individual customer because of lack of money and lack of access. So the meeting that I went to, to get the full picture, I came a day early to do the marketing workshop. I actually got there and the morning before the next day, I sat with many of the librarians in the Russian State Library and talked with them and was interviewed by them for their professional publications, which would for them be like their American libraries, theirs was the Russian Library Association. And again, interview style where they would ask me questions, the whole interview was sent back to me for editing and I returned it. I haven't seen it in publication, it would only be published in Russian, so there was really no need for them to send it to me. What was interesting was that after the interviews were over, I was asked to sign a lot of paperwork, kind of giving over the interview, as well as the workshop materials which I developed. So I did that. That was a decision I made kind of on the spot. I didn't see any point in anything otherwise. So be it, as they say. So again, there was a lot of photo taking, a lot of documenting, a lot of excitement, if you will, about an international group coming into Moscow, into the Russian State Library, and specifically about someone from the United States coming to quote, teach class. The afternoon of the workshop was a round table discussion which would include the members of the committee, again, which were from all the countries that I listed, as well as directors of the Russian State Library, who some attended the workshop and some who just came for the round table. Then we had a meeting of the International Marketing Award jury, which is an award we developed 10 years ago, which was really to help further marketing education and award libraries, any library, any part of the world who was conducting valuable marketing services or programming. And then we had the regular meeting of our committee and of course a tour of the beautiful cultural sites in Moscow. So again, libraries in Moscow are very much like us. They do more with less and they care about their customers. The main differences I've said earlier is that when I say less, I mean, L, E, S, S, capitalized and care about their customers, the ones they can identify and find out about. Again, there's not the vast amount of data that we enjoy in the United States by which to explore potential customer markets or even better understand actual customer markets. Some of the libraries are magnificent and splendid and monumental as they are in our country and some are very small and almost like storefronts. So again, this was kind of the original webcast. It was a two hour, there was a translator, which was very, very helpful and it was sponsored by RLA. Now, for those of you who may or may not know, the American Library Association was founded in 1876 and has certainly been formidable in our country for many, many reasons issues and also the probably most important to those of us who work on the academic side, the American Library Association provides accreditation for a library and information study schools in the United States. For example, at Florida State, our school has been accredited since 1951. It was born in 1947 and these accreditation processes go on every seven years and San Jose is going through their accreditation right now. So again, considering the two countries side by side, RLA has only existed since 1994. While ALA has many individuals who belong such as me, I've always had an individual membership which I've paid for, RLA is comprised only of member groups. So again, currently they have 36 chapters of various interest groups and they hope to continue developing and maturing and they just sponsor conferences such as this. And so because I was already going to be in Moscow, then I was able to conduct the workshop and it wasn't an additional expense for them. So again, these photos are of some of the young people who attended the workshop and specifically I focus on them because they came and really grabbed my elbow and asked me to come visit their libraries. This was the most rewarding part of the trip to Moscow for me. As I've already told you, I'm from Florida. I get cold very easily. It was extraordinarily cold and there are limitations of time and distance on the trip. And so to really be able to see through the eyes of new professionals in Russia, their libraries was definitely exciting. The libraries were not large. They were limited. The staff had very limited spacing, for example, cubicles that would be maybe the size of one of our offices. Very, very tight quarters. Again, librarians are not well paid in Russia. And so the fact that it's attracting this real highly enthusiastic group of young people in Russia, I think has great forbearing on the future for information professionals in Russia and as it develops and becomes out of some of the controlled areas of the past. So again, picture this now if you had had my marketing class which I see a familiar name or two. Again, this is the basis of how I teach marketing, looking at the beginning of the review of the external environment, proactively scanning all these factors that affect your organization and then reviewing and knowing the internal organization and then developing your products and services to suit customers for what they want and need as you scan and get to know your community. Well, this was the first kind of collision in the marketing workshop. Data is not freely or readily available in Russia. And I'm not gonna speak to why or appear to be knowledgeable. I don't know, I can only make assumptions. But I do know that there's not, of course, and there are many, many countries in the world that this is true that are of all different flavors. That there's not a lot of census data available. For example, in Canada, census data is expensive. In our country, it's not. We're very fortunate. Always encourage students and librarians to use US census data, which is freely available usually through local city or county planning departments to get to know their community or potential community. This type of data isn't available in many countries and it's not available in Russia. So again, I felt I needed to start off and introduce what is marketing. Make sure we're all speaking the same language. There was a translator. She was terrific. She was very well spoken in English and in Russian. And she was, had traveled. She was, had been exposed to Western views and understood marketing. And perhaps she was chosen for this reason, but she was a real boon and bonus for me in the setting that I was in. So again, to come to terms with the subject matter and what I was gonna be presenting, what is marketing? It was important that I distinguish it from Shirley promotion. That marketing is a systematic planning tool that's based on marketing research, segmentation. Then you develop your products and services and next strategy and evaluate. There's confusion all over the world about marketing is that promotion. Years ago when I first started teaching marketing, I had students leave the classroom, go into the library and look up marketing in library literature. And lo and behold, it would be house under promotion. Again, this is the August tone of the library profession. At that time it was a tone, it wasn't digitized. And promotion was the head heading and marketing was the subhead. So again, that would be like putting a little pinky finger as the heading and body as the subunit. So no one has a corner on the confusion. What I left with them was a series of exercises that they could do with their staff or as individuals. There certainly wasn't time in the morning workshop to go through exercises, but I did leave these with them. Everything you're seeing right now, which is formalized was translated into Russian. It was dispersed in print and digital. It was very funny to see all my work that I'm so familiar with and really another language with different alphabetic characters. So again, this was also of interest and kind of a light bulb for all of us that what we take as ordinary as mission statements isn't quite the norm necessarily in other settings. So while mission statements have been around in the United States since the 80s, this may not be true in every other part of the world. And this is extremely important for successful marketing to occur because you need a mission statement which really does express what business you're in, who you serve, that your staff and stakeholders have agreed upon and that educates stakeholders and new customers on what the purpose of your organization is. So I decided to go ahead with the four-step marketing model and present the workshop with certain variations to the Moscow librarians. I think again of greatest interest was and somewhat puzzlement was how would they get the data to really examine who potential customer groups are. The concept of segmentation was very interesting and then the ready and fluid and more dynamic development of products and services to respond to new market information was of interest as well. The evaluation component is always obscure but definitely is necessary in order to have the resources you need to fight budget cuts or to get new resources. So again, some of these were not necessarily new concepts but they were concepts that aren't discussed frequently. So marketing research, again, just the whole concept of having data readily available was not a fresh feeling to those attending. In looking at this, there was interest and some buzz around the room about the external environments and the concept of a librarian or staff proactively gathering information proactively and then having access to customer data such as demographics, where they live, basically how much they might use the library, how they use it and any type of benefit that they might gain from their relationship with the library. So I encouraged in light of the short time that I had with them and that I've been with them and saw that the lack of data was a problem to use any data that they did have that's on hand, that you always have more data than you think, even if it may come from number of visits or some rudimentary secondhand or secondary data or information that you can get from local government about sheer population numbers, perhaps language spoken, age, education related information that might come from local schools. I was kind of ransacking my brain for information that might be available. This particular list was helpful to further examine what some of these concepts mean to consider the economy. This was certainly something well understood by all and again that many of the people that they serve at least elicited by those who chose to speak. In fact, some were immigrants who lived temporarily in the city for work and sometimes might come to some libraries. The concept of competition was really not as strong in regard that we look at it in the United States. In the United States when we think of public libraries and competition we're thinking about public funding which is definitely each of us are knocking at the same door, police and fire, schools and libraries are all, you know, kind of feeding from the same public trough. Competition, I believe, is a lesser known concept at this time for the library field in Russia because you don't have widespread access to the internet at home like you do even in the United States. So the concept of being able to access sundry in any internal records was also a little bit difficult. When you think about, you know, the access most of us have, we can go to an internet, our strategic plan is on the website. Certainly if you requested any of the customer feedback you might get them if you actually conducted customer feedback and then planning documents or if you had the opportunity to apply for grants what those proposals would look like. So again what you're going through here is you're realizing that you're dealing with the whole profession and population of people who don't have easy access to some of the data that we do. So customer research and the environmental scanning were the most interest to the young librarians. And I'm sorry to use what may look like age as I'm here. It certainly not meant that but I can only tell you that the ones who appeared to be young were the ones who could speak English probably because they had the opportunity to take English in school and they felt they understood that some of the concepts I was communicating and wanted to come up to me and communicate with me and felt confident enough to invite me to come and visit their libraries. So again that's the only distinction here by age. I was more than happy to go with anyone of any age to any library but that is not the way it shaped out. So again this shows you on the right this is a library. There's a room to the right of the photo. It was mostly like closed in stacks, very limited. These are the artworks of a local artist who's apparently quite well known. But again there didn't appear to be at least on the days that I visited a general hum and entry and exit of the general public even though these were public libraries. So the concept of customer groups they did have some recognition. They have a children's library which is quite heralded and well known in Moscow. I didn't visit that and they communicated that they did outreach from the library to children's groups in the Moscow area. I don't know how those children were grouped beyond schools but there was discussion of some outreach. So often I'll tell this story especially when I'm in an international setting. My friend Daniel Riyunye, a Kenyan library professor, he and a fellow professor conducted all the steps of marketing. They did marketing research. They identified a segment and they developed products and services to meet the needs of that segment and then evaluated and the current project with Camelmobile is currently still in effect upon my last reading. I always tell this story because it's a fun, colorful way to emphasize how systematic marketing can work and be beneficial. Simply the professors knew there were school age children in Kenya that weren't being exposed to any type of school or reading material. So they estimated the numbers of those children and then targeted six villages and asked each village that ended up participating to donate a camel. Each camel had books and a tent from an international group and the camels went into these rural areas and the tents were set up with the books and then percentages were taken of the number of children who were reached through this method and this was extremely successful with Camelmobile and really indicate how valuable the fourth step of marketing can be where you really get measures of success or it could be lack of success. In this case they were successful. Lack of success simply helps you stop a program. This helped continue the funding for it. So again, I think any of you who've traveled or have been in very different cultures, you'll realize that some stories go over well, some don't. For example, when I was being interviewed prior to the workshop, I was being asked a series of questions. Some I felt very suited and four and qualified to answer. Some I didn't. One I didn't feel qualified for was Dr. Kuntz, what is the future of the book? I said well, let's see, I'm not really someone who studies that aspect within our profession. There are many who do. I can certainly get citations for you when I get back home if this is something of interest but for this article I don't feel like I have the spontaneity of information to really provide. And then I made a quick joke. I said well, of course, they'll always be in Amazon.com. You know, that may not even be that funny to any of you attending. Maybe it wasn't that funny to me. But it was kind of funny in a sense. Well, these kind of jokes aren't, it's not that they're not funny. They're just not quickly understood or processed because of the cultural differences. So again, that was fortunate for me to kind of bomb out before the workshop because I realized I shouldn't intercede with some of the jokes that I might often desire to or warm comments or quick comments might not be appropriate even for a group of people who, you know, we look very much alike and share Western behavior but probably have very different concepts of humor. So again, talking about fact that most libraries do have a litany of products which are sold at a sum of customer cost, those costs being time, gas, parking, all these things to our litany of products and services ranging from not only books and computer access and story times but also the librarian in our country is a product. We have a channel of delivery, the library, we have websites, we have branches, we have bookmobiles, we have outreach, we have a wide assortment of places or channels of delivery. And then we have our promotion. Again, which I reiterated is very far down the marketing food chain. Marketing promotion are not the same. Of course, promotion is a tool of marketing and it comes to true value within the marketing mix strategy. So this was of some interest to this discernment. And I was glad about that because this is important because it's often confused with promotion in many countries and by many people in many professions. So again, on that note, our jury, as I mentioned earlier, did meet. This was after the workshop where we review applications for the marketing award. And again, in continuity, this is one of the major efforts and successful ventures of our committee, all volunteer work by the way, to develop this award to create an understanding of what true marketing is and not just give the award out freely for fun promotional campaigns. By the way, in this room, if you see the book case, they're on the right. This is another one of the several ways. I think Americans were much more brash and, you know, flamboyant, certainly amongst, if that's not true, but as a culture and population. And I kept being guided over towards the book case. And so, you know, obviously at some point I realized that, you know, they really wanted me to look at the book case in the library, in the Russian state library where our meetings were held. And when I looked in the book case, it was truly every single thing I have ever written. I literally fell backwards. I've never been so complimented in any setting I've been in. Even my own office, there are a couple of things I didn't have, which they gave me copies of. So it was a great honor to be treated in such a manner. And if you'd like to know more about the award, please go to isla.org and look up International Marketing Award. So last year, the winner who was awarded in Singapore was from Estonia, Tartu University. And this was very exemplary because she had used the tenets of marketing and they had targeted a segment of visually disabled students with talking books. Again, in countries which even appear to be as modern as the United States, there isn't the attention or legislation for the disabled physically, visually, mentally that there currently is in our country. And so these types of international efforts that our profession can be a part of is really broadening and widening to share our values in such an extensive way. And it's exciting to see the effect that our profession can have by quickly learning from each other and especially in international setting where there isn't the control of your country. So again, to go through this, I think this is a good choice on my part. I'm not bragging, but to kind of give this example of a goal, increase services to older residents who cannot come to the library, this is certainly true in Moscow and in the aging population there in consideration of outreach and home visit programs, trying to identify how many people that would be and then developing your strategy of what you would offer and possibly even partnering with other organizations. Some of these concepts and strategies may seem ho-hum to us or been there, done that, but that's not true in other cultures and stages of development in other countries in the world. So again, in the marketing evaluation I presented, this was again back to the stressing of the importance of data for the library in order to really sell the impact that it's having on the population in fight for the funds that may be competed for. I think this was kind of a new concept as well, the consideration of using data that is gathered to compete for funding from government or from the funding agency. This was kind of a new concept. So again, at the end of the marketing workshop, of course, there was time for questions and if you'd like to read more of my memories, you know, written in greater extent, you can go to theifla.org and certainly look at the newsletter which I wrote a piece for. The touring of the country, they do have a rich culture. Again, it's bright and beautiful in pockets, gorgeous, monumental, of course, architecture and buildings and famous, you know, as the dolls, the trinkets, the outfits, the costumes. Again, this is difficult to access quickly, not the gift shops, but certainly some of the architecture and tours. There had to be a great deal of permission in grouping and exchange of documents to visit different places. All right. Well, I'd like to leave time for questions or anything I might have omitted that I can think of that I meant to say. What Dr. Coons didn't mention was that at the ifla meeting in Singapore this past August, the librarians from Russia did in fact give her a plaque, I believe it was, an award recognizing her efforts and thanking her in the sort of a public fashion for the workshop which I happen to be at. I've had the opportunity to attend the last couple of ifla meetings, which annual meetings which are always held in August and that's how I knew she had done this and got her to do this presentation for us. So it was good that they were thinking of her and recognizing her in this particular manner. And they did and I thought that was very impressive and also strategic in that there was a lot of tension as you recall and remains tension over the policies for, you know, gay citizens in Russia. So I think when you're in a profession and especially like the library field, we have a lot of opportunity to transcend country policies with our own intellectual freedom and policies of our profession, which are more prevalent in the international group. And I appreciated their presence in giving me such a lovely place. Absolutely. Amy, go ahead and grab a mic and make your comment or ask your question, please. Hi, thanks so much for this presentation. It's really wonderful. I was wondering, Dr. Coons, will you have an opportunity to hear from anybody in Russia in the next year or two or three to see, you know, what, if anything they've been able to do with the material you gave them? I will see Neela, the colleague that invited me next week for the first time as the group will come to the United States to Washington. It may seem odd that I didn't gather feedback. There were some questions at the end. And, you know, I hesitate from sounding critical. I'm not. The questions seem to be somewhat formal because of the setting. I don't think there was, I don't think it was the tradition or the norm for a lot of questioning to go on unless it was seemingly formal. Or acceptable. I just don't think the culture of question asking is as prevalent there. For example, the discussion round table which was held after the workshop. We had six committee members from Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, Norway, Finland, the United States, and none of these people were asked or allowed to speak. The only people that discussed anything were representatives of the Russian State Library. So, eliciting feedback is difficult and somewhat saddening. I couldn't agree with you more. I could only see any glimmer of positivity in the faces of the librarians who communicated with me and asked me to visit their libraries and the hope that I saw. They understood it. They got it. They just knew they simply didn't have the data to do the full gamut. But I don't think that the imprint will fade. Hopefully, as Russia continues or may not a Russian authority don't know. Hopefully, you know, as, let's face it. I mean, young people all over the world are grabbing so much information when they came from the internet that it's just an unstoppable force. And I'm so glad that libraries are part of internet access. So, I was curious. You weren't able, no individual offered to strike up a personal, you know, ongoing communication, professional communication with you from the time that you left, you know, to ask any other questions or anything like that? No. And I definitely left that door open. There were several that I became friends with on Facebook. And, you know, for some reason that has disappeared. There was a feedback form that was filled out. Everybody painstakingly filled it out. One young woman who worked at a science library stood up and said that she didn't think the classical marketing approach I presented would work for Russia. And so, I did notice she was highlighted on their website. It was in Russian. So, I really couldn't tell the full text of it. But I thought that was interesting that her comment, her one comment seemed to be so celebrated. I didn't have one more question. Sorry. Are there any Russian students at San Jose in the library program or down in Florida? We don't have any in Florida. We do have one staff member who's from Georgia. And I think in ISLA, you know, there are great contingencies of Russian to attend. Russia has been generous in their support of ISLA. I don't think the ISLA conference has taken place there since the late 90s. But again, I thought it was exciting that this workshop, even though there wasn't a lot of monetary expense, there was a tremendous expense of staff time and the marketing of the marketing workshop in the translator. I thought showed an investment in reaching out and looking outward and opening up opportunities. I would like to know, very much like you do, what traces have, you know, left? Were there any sparks that really may have happened? I can certainly ask Milo when I see her next week. We've got a lot of e-mail that goes on out of some of these countries like it does for us. I'm not sure if we have any current students at SLIS right now from Russia or even any of the former republics. I think we had one or two at one time, but I honestly don't keep up with the demographics enough to let you know. And I don't know if it was going to get back to Russia any time soon because the last time they were there there was tanks in front of the hotel where a lot of the members were staying. That happened to be when the latest iteration of the revolution happened. And I don't remember all the names of the political figures, but yeah, there were some of the people I knew there were trying to get out. If they could get out, some people couldn't get out and ended up staying there a longer period of time. So until things calmed down a little bit more in Russia, I don't know that if was going to get back there any time soon. But Russia does send a fair contingent of people. I have not seen the young people that were in these photos, which was very reassuring. They have a tendency to be mostly directors and more senior people than some of the younger people that were in some of the slides here that Dr. Kuhn showed us. I have another question that I don't want to, you know, push in front of Bev or anybody. But I was wondering as far as IFLA, Dr. Kuhn, have you had occasion to meet any students working, you know, on any of the committees, your committee or somebody else's? And if you have or haven't, would you have any advice or suggestions for a student who's interested in the IFLA? Absolutely. In fact, there was a program I sponsored and paid for the memberships of two students a few years back. The program fell apart because what was discovered, of course, which is reasonable is that it's just too expensive to go to IFLA for most students. And while IFLA does provide some scholarships for travel to professional librarians from developing countries, the students who, you know, might participate just simply didn't have the extension of funds, you know, to go to some of these countries. But there is more and more interest. I think there is a student paper competition now that one of the committees is sponsoring and which is excellent. My advice is really if you really want to participate internationally, you really need to be generous of your time and spirit as well as, you know, access the funds. That's almost the third thing. The first two things are more important to really want to contribute and do so, you know, lacking recognition, although I appreciate recognition I've gotten while within IFLA. There are many, many years where that simply wasn't so and I just screwed around and worked really hard and did projects and did things because I wanted to and I wanted to be a part of helping people in other countries specifically understand marketing. The first year I was involved, I got permission from the American Marketing Association to use their dictionary to write a marketing glossary that transferred and transposed the concepts and settings of business into the library and that glossary has been, you know, translated into every language as far as I know, even Egyptian. So, you know, I wasn't sure I'd ever get to go to IFLA again but I decided to throw my hat in with IFLA and continue, of course, to work with my state association in ALA. But I think as a student it's difficult to go to any level of conferences, you know, local, state, national, international because you're not working full-time and you don't have a lot of discretionary funding but there's certainly ways to, you know, work with professors who are working on projects if and when you can. Thank you. Well, that's very kind of you, Bev. I hope so. I felt that was so with the, especially the way the light bulbs were just on in their faces and they just tuddled around me at the break and said they really understood environmental scanning and they thought it was essential. They were just very excited about the information. You know, marketing is largely common sense so to have it presented in a systematic, learnable fashion. So, you know, as far as signing over my materials to the Russian State Library, I would come see, come saw, you know, whatever. Go for it. Let me, I'm going to go ahead and verbalize. I just kept signing my name on every piece of paper. Comments. Say, well, my gift to you. That's because you're a rock star over there. Let me verbalize Bev's comments because we will have a YouTube version of this in the chat box won't be available. So, Dr. Coons was just responding to a comment made that said that they were certain that the learning from her workshop over there will be used quietly and creatively by Russian librarians working at making changes in small steps. So, that was the comment that Dr. Coons was just responding to. Any other questions or comments? If not, let me thank you for participating. Let me thank Dr. Coons again for her presentation. Our second spring colloquium will take place in about five weeks on Wednesday, the 19th of March, again at 12 o'clock Pacific time and will be on daylight savings time, I believe, by then. And it'll be on a somewhat related topic, more marketing or not marketing but promotion or what's I think now considered or called advocacy will have representatives from an organization called everylibrary.org and this group tries to help predominantly public libraries that are dealing with a local election or referendum or something like that and they provide in effect consulting type assistance to these libraries to make them more successful with some of these local elections and we've got the two co-founders of that organization, one of whom is a SLIS graduate and they will be talking to us about what that organization does and some of the libraries and everything that they've been a part of. So, that will take place on the 19th of March and again, thank you for participating.