 All right, our last lightning round session of the day for Big Talk with Small Libraries 2018 is getting the band back together. Not the kind of band you might be thinking of, but that's okay. Adidas Sikin, good morning, good afternoon. Sorry, it's afternoon for me. And she is from Manchester University in North Manchester, Indiana, and she is the Instruction Access Services Librarian there, and she's going to talk to us about cats, maybe? Not quite, but there is a cat. Good. Oh man, I minimized that, didn't I? I just want to make sure I haven't broken anything. Okay, yeah. So my name is Adidas. I'm the Instruction Access Services Librarian at Manchester University. I am also in charge of supervising about trying to get everything 15 to 20 student workers a semester, and we started using band about a year and a half ago because we were having just a really rough time trying to sort of out communicating with our student workers through email because they're absolutely horrible at checking their email on any sort of regular basis. So whenever they needed to exchange shifts or we needed to put out announcements to them, they would always find out about it way too late or sometimes not at all. So I had already been using band, which is a mobile app. It is also web-based for a while anyway with other stuff. And so I thought, hey, we might as well try this out with our student workers, see what happens because they're on their phones all the time anyway. And we've had a really good experience with it. So I just kind of wanted to quickly cover some of the highlights of it for anybody who might be interested. It is completely free. Like I mentioned, there is a web version of it also, if you're concerned about individuals who might not have mobile devices. And I'm actually just showing you my phone screen right now. So sorry to stare at my phone the entire time. So in my library desk workers group, I got like cute little pictures of them and stuff. I'm going to stir it out by showing you the setup for the band. It's completely free to create one. I went ahead and I would probably recommend setting the band type to secret. That means that it's invite only. So when I hire a new student worker, they'll get an invite, they'll download the app and join the group. It's really important for this part though that they could we not that we have them make sure that they're signing up in the correct time zone. I had a student worker who was at home. It was over Christmas break. She signed up on central time. And we're on Eastern time. And it was chaos for about two weeks because she couldn't figure out why she was always an hour late to everything that she said she was going to go to. And then we get an alert that goes out anytime somebody joins and anytime somebody posts member privileges are also really important. I am the only admin, but you can create as many admins as you would like. And I have said it so that I'm the only person that can delete content. And I did that just to make sure that we don't have any issues with, you know, well, they said they're going to take my shift and then they didn't and now that post doesn't exist. So that's something that I recommend adding photos, comments, posts, etc. That's open to everybody, but as for deleting materials, that's just me and anybody else I would make an admin. So this is super handy. You can have all of your students, I'll go back to mine really quick, create a profile. Some of my coworkers really wanted there to the pictures of students that they could go look for. So you can see who it is. They can also add their phone number. And it's here because you can actually text them through that or if I get text from my student workers, I'll know who it's coming from then. So lots of ways for communication there. But for the most part, we really use it for switching shifts. So if something comes up, even at the last minute, they can easily post that they need somebody to cover it. So these are all my actual student workers. So, you know, I need a shift covered, somebody gets it, I need a shift covered, somebody gets it. We're going to do March Madness. We do fun, silly things in there also, they can obviously trying to point with my finger and it's on the screen. You know, comment, I can see who all has viewed it and also who hasn't yet, which is pretty handy. And I just love the fact that out of these, we've been getting almost like instantaneous responses. So see, I'm posted this 946, somebody already took her shift within that minute. Like an hour later at that one, a minute later here, a minute later on the next one. So that's been really nice. The students will get a notification on their home screen saying, hey, somebody's posted a shift. Sorry if that's making anybody nauseous. Does anybody want to take it? And almost instantly, we've got somebody to take it. I'm also able to put in notices on here. I always type important anyway, but you can remove from important notices, remove from normal notices or take any post and change it into an important notice. I also really like the calendar feature. So I'm going through all this super quick. If anybody has any questions, feel free to come back at me later. When we go ahead and add a calendar event, like we did Secret Santa over the winter, I can set the location, we can set the time. One of the things I really like is that they can get a reminder. So if you have a house coming up, they'll get an alert say an hour beforehand that they need to be somewhere or at something. And I tie the events in a lot of times with polls. So say for the Secret Santa, I put together a poll. Do you want to participate? Yes or no? You know, unselect and multi-select. I can see who said yes. I can see who said no. We also do this a lot of time for scheduling, like trainings to figure out what time would be best for everybody because trying to coordinate student workers is a lot like herding cats. So this has just been super handy for us to be able to keep track of everyone. Switch shifts, do fun things, share absurd pictures. Your cat was actually appropriate for this. Absolutely. I know, right? But yeah, so I can also post up their schedules so they can go back and look at that anytime. Just cute pictures of them being silly, you know, that sort of stuff. So it's also been a great kind of opportunity for bonding and everybody to have fun with each other. But it's done so much for us in terms of getting the issues of like urgent communications out and making sure shifts have gotten covered. And it works a thousand percent better than us trying to send out emails. And I would say those are probably the highlights. I think I got slightly under time on that one if anybody has any questions. Oh, that's great. Thank you. Someone does have a question actually. And I'm not sure if you mentioned at the beginning or not. Can you have, can you have multiple accounts within the same band? For example, one where you would be with having the same kind of conversations and communications with adult librarians and one for the student workers? Yes. So one of the handy things is that there's a chat room also. There's a default that will include everybody, which we never use. Yeah, the very there's a default at the bottom that includes everyone. So if I have to put a message out to that, I can. But a lot of times, you know, I can create a private chat room that would just be me in the other librarians. There's only four of us total. So that's probably not super necessary. But if somebody has a specific question or needs to talk about something in particular, I can create a private chat room just with them to address whatever the issue is. Okay, great. Awesome. So it could say you've been you've been mostly using it for the student workers, though. Yes. Yeah. And when things come up, I can put the notices in there. I don't know, crazy stuff happening with making sure the windows are closed or here's something that we noticed didn't happen correctly. Or, you know, this person isn't allowed to borrow something right now, or if this item comes in, give it back to us. So it's good. It's much better for pushing out alerts than the emails that we used before. And like I said, just getting shift changes covered. It's so much easier. That is really slick product. Yeah. And someone did say in all caps, thank you so much. This is great. And they're probably obviously gonna go and try and use it now. They're library. So yeah, and I like this is mostly just me. I love the fact that you can get additional little stickers that are super cute too. And now those are all over the place now on your Facebook and Instagram. Yeah. I know, right. My students don't go for it too much, but I do. I love them too. Yeah. So, yeah. Awesome. All right. Well, that was the only question that came up for you. But now that was a great overview of that of your band there. That was great. Thank you so much, Edita. And I'm happy to answer any other questions if somebody emails me or all of our emails are on the website. Yep. If you need to reach out to any of our presenters today, you definitely look for them on our website. So thank you very much. I'm going to pull back.