 Good morning, everyone, and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host and one of your presenters today, Chris DePorter here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar show 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. We do record the show as we are doing today, and we post that on our website for you to watch 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 recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. The Nebraska Library Commission, we are the state agency for libraries here in Nebraska, so we provide services to all types of libraries in the state, so you will find topics on Encompass Live for all types of libraries. Academic, public, K-12, corrections, museums, archives, et cetera, et cetera. Basically, our only criteria is something to do with libraries, something libraries are doing, something resources and services we think may be useful to them. We do book reviews, interviews, mini-training sessions, demos of services, all sorts of things. We sometimes bring in guest speakers from across Nebraska and across the country, but we also have our own Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes do presentations on things that we think may be of use to our libraries, and that's what we're doing this morning. Joining me today is Holly Duggan, who is our CE coordinator, our Continuing Education Coordinator here at the Library Commission. Good morning, Holly. Great. We are going to talk to you today together about here at the Nebraska Library Commission, our public librarian and library board certification programs. It's two separate programs, not all switched together and how you can improve your library service to your Nebraska communities by participating in both of these programs. I wish I knew how long ago these were started. That would have been something I could have looked up. I'm not really even sure, but for as long as both Holly and I have been here at the commission, I've been here for 20 years. We have had certification programs for library boards and a certification program for library staff. Both of these programs have a basic similar setup with different goals. I think that's a good description of it. Yeah. The idea is to keep up for both library staff. This is not just library directors, but any staff members can participate in the librarian certification program. From when you start your library studies and become a library staff person, and years later you're still doing it, things can change over time and you need to learn and keep up on what's going on in the field. Continuing education, lifelong learning, the buzzwords in this area of course, and that's what these programs are both for. They are for you as your library staff and your library board members to keep up with just knowing how to do your jobs. This will definitely improve your library service to your community as you're keeping up with new trends, new things going on. Just reminding yourself of how things could be done, should be done. Well, and also even if you're not a librarian yet, if you're looking for a job or interested, the program is open to anyone in Nebraska. That's true. That's right. Yeah. I keep talking about staff using it. But yeah, if you do check on what we say, it's any Nebraska residents currently employed or planning to be employed. So even if you're just wondering what it's like, these are programs that you can participate in and take training that we offer through them. It's all free. That's a key point too that I think is very important to have people be. None of this costs anything. There's no fee to like a membership fee or a fee to sign up to join the program or to attend any of the courses or classes that we offer. Everything is covered by the library commission. So it's just free training, free education for you to keep up to speed on what you need to do as a library staff member or as a library board member. Both of these programs also, I'm only going to mention this briefly here, or mainly today we're talking about is the two certification programs, but both the board library board certification and the public librarian certification also feed into our public library accreditation program. Libraries can also become accredited and help by being accredited and meeting certain criteria of what you do at your library. You can receive extra funding from the library commission. You can be eligible for grants that you can apply to, apply for both from us and from other places. And it just shows to your community that you have reached this level of service that can be very impressive to them. Your board needs to be certified in order for your library to be accredited and your library director needs to be certified in order for your board, for your library to be accredited. Other library staff can also be certified and it does add into your accreditation, but it's not a requirement. Just the director is the one required one. So we're not going to talk about accreditation today. That's a whole other big topic of its own. Today we're going to talk about the certification programs. And we have a here, and if you want to pop it out there in our fly out menu there, Holly, you see there we've got the board certification, the librarian certification and library accreditation sections all together there in one pop out fly out menu. They call it all the information you need to know about all of them. And today we're going to go into the two certification programs and then other time you'll hear about accreditation. Don't worry about that. So I think Holly, I'll hand it over to you to start off with our since right there at the top of the boards and how they their whole process will start with the library boards. So the library board certification, I'm actually we'll do this a little out of order, but to start with we have this library board status review page. And this is where you can where you can go to see if your library is currently certified, the date of the expiration certification for boards is every three years, you need to earn 20 hours of continuing education activities and we'll go into what counts as an activity in a little bit. But that's as a group, so not each member earns 20 hours as a board. Five members, you have to earn 20 hours, which is a lot less intimidating. I mean, you can easily, hopefully add less than five hours per person if you've got a five member board. Yeah, so if you can just add in, you know, a quick half hour to some regular board meetings when you're all together, it adds up really quickly. And that's true, too. If you're all sitting together and watch like a half hour video, that's not a half hour of C. That's a half hour times each person. So yeah, you have four board members. That's to see you've made up all in one half hour time period. Yeah, and we'll go over what counts as C. And how to submit that, but it does add up really quickly. So we're not trying to burden or we don't want this program to be like busy work. It's supposed to be encouraging and helpful, but it's just the 20 hours every three years. So on the status page, you can click your library to see even more details. If you want to see what activities have been reported, how many hours. So this library, Ainsworth, they've met the current C's, zero C's needed. And you can see your date and you can see the current board members that we have listed. If any of this looks wrong or maybe you need to update board members, you can just let us know right here. And we can get that fixed for you. And I like too that it also tells you when you're up due up next to. So it's 20 credits. It's C is good to keep them certified through September of this year. Yep. So then it's September 30th. Have to start over again, starting with your next. Yeah, there's a siren. Yeah, Wednesday, 22 siren testing. We're fine. Yep. So that's that status page. And that's just that's a good place to start. If just to check where your board is at currently. And then so we go back to this home page, this fly out menu. And I just I want to quick point out this library board manual because it's important. If you haven't looked at it, it's a really great resource for especially new board members or just sort of refresh yourself. If you go down to this first chapter under basics and you scroll down just a little bit, you'll see these board responsibilities. So these, I love that document. That's like one of my go tos. It's super helpful. And we have you can click here to make a principal PDF that you can just have for quick reference. And these responsibilities. You should be familiar with. And this is when we start talking about what is eligible for a credit. We want the activities to be relevant to these responsibilities as a board member. So this is why some activities like classroom management or a webinar about retirement or Google. Those aren't eligible because they're not directly related to your responsibilities as a board member and improving your library service, if that makes sense. They're they're good things to know. And that's great that you're doing some of the things, but they don't have to do with the how your job and what you need to do to be a board member. And you know, because we do get some like, well, they're related. There's some things the library does, that's fine. But that's the library staff's job. Your job is these things. So you need to focus on for earning your C.E. for your certification, focus on those responsibilities. Yes. OK, so going back to the home page and this fly out menu again. Looking at the actual about the board certification page. You can see again, the program is designed to increase the board involvement and improve the effectiveness in the library service to your community. And that's really our goal with this program. Scrolling down, you can see the different C.E. activities that you can do, you know, webinars, workshops, lectures, library conferences. We have minimum of 20 minutes is a is a half of C.E. credit and then, you know, it goes from there. And we have a lot of resources on this page for trustees. This trustee, oops. This trustee academy, this is part of United for Libraries, which Nebraska has a statewide membership, so it's free for you to use. It is a series of courses and they also have all sorts of other webinars and like online conferences sometimes that are really relevant to board members. And if you have OK, so we used to have a single username and password for this resource. Changed all this, yeah. Yes, it changed, I think, about a year ago. So if you haven't logged in in a while, it's a little different. You can just go to find your state. Scroll down to Nebraska and you can either register for an account or if you forgot your password, it only takes a minute or two to do. But if you need help doing this, just let me know and I can help walk you through it or. So now one statewide thing that everybody uses, each person has their own personal account. Yes, that's much easier to track everything, I assume, than to let you use what you've done and what you've watched. And yeah, and they'll send out certificates after you watch programs. So it is it's a lot nicer. It's just that we just don't have that old username and password anymore. So then the trustee academy is a series of courses that they put together covering competency is working with your library director. An overview about library budget and funding, intellectual freedom, advocacy, really good courses. And they're not too long. I think the longest one is maybe a half hour. They updated them, the videos about two years ago, I think. And then we have the short takes for trustees. These videos, they're only about 10 minutes long. They are intended to be included for your regular board meeting. 10 minute video, we ask about 15 minutes of discussion. And that's a super easy way to earn CE hours. Just short video, short discussion, you're done. And then we also have a few other short videos. Some previous Income to Slive videos and some other training down below. And then we have the FAQ that we talked about the status, what counts for a CE activity. And again, related to those duties as a library board member sponsored by a reputable agency. And it can be in person or remote and it could be recorded. So we're not trying to limit the number of activities as long as it improves library service and it's related to those responsibilities. Helps you do your job as a board member. Yeah, try and think of things that can make you better, be a better board member, be a better library. And if there's something that you're not sure if it counts, you can always contact me ahead of time and I'm happy to look at it and let you know. Or for library directors or presidents, if there's an activity that you're trying to plan for your board and you want to earn CE credit for it, I'm happy to work with you to make sure we meet those requirements and I can let you know how much CE it'll be worth. Some boards have done presentations with some of the system directors, which have been really, which all of the system directors are great resources. And that's another way to fit in a meeting and learn more about resources available. And just different- If you have one of the system directors come to your board meeting and talk about what they can do for you or what things they should be doing as a board, those kind of training type. Yeah, yeah, it's a personal things like that, yeah. Yeah, so it's a little more tailored to your specific board. So we can definitely work that way too. And then at the bottom, we just have some guidelines for what's not eligible. So show social events, book club meetings, general work related things that we've sort of mentioned. So does anyone have any questions about just that portion of it? And then we'll go back up and I'll show you how to submit ours. If anybody has any questions, go ahead and type them into the questions section of your go-to-webinar interface. Anything you wanna know about and you can hear confused about any particular maybe activities you're wondering about for your library, go ahead and type it in there. Now, do they have to start off ahead of time before they submit ours, like joining the program, like telling us they're gonna be doing this or is that just like an automatic, like, because there's a submit ICE activity, but then there's a to apply for certification or update board members below that. That's what I'm wondering about the difference. Oh, so, okay. So check the status of your board. If your board doesn't have certification at all, for some reason and you wanna start that process, then you would apply first. If your board's already in the program, even if you're lapsed, you can go ahead and do the activities and report them to us. And if you need to update a board member, that's okay, we can do that at any time. This whole process, none of it is automatic. It's all our department, Linda Babcock, and I go through the submission. So if we have a question about who's doing what or if we need to update board members, we can do that manually. So when you submit an activity, it's not automatically on your record. So if we have any questions, we can reach out and fix whatever we need to fix first. These are our board members so that we know when they do something, there's something that it's connected to a library that it's for, yeah. So looking at the board certification status page, if you've got any sort of expiration date, if there's a date in that column, even if it's in red because it's a lapsed, you've already in the program. But if it's blank, that means you've never actually done that sign up with us to get your board certified. Yeah, correct, okay, cool. But I can, okay, so if you do need to start certification, it's just a quick application, just your library name, board president, email, and then we can reach out for more information if we need to get you started. And if you are one of the libraries that are lapsed, again, that's okay, we can work with you, just reach out to me or Linda Backpock and we can work with you on a plan to get you back certified. And then so if you need to submit your hours, so after you've done a CE activity, you'll come to this report form and it's just name, library name, your name, email, what activity was done, date, who participated, so if there's more than one person, so like in a meeting, the names of who participated and then the number of hours. And then you'll just scroll, hit submit. And again, if you have any questions about filling out this form, especially with the number of hours, sometimes it gets a little confusing. Just let us know, Linda and I are happy to help you figure it out. And you'll get a copy, so once you submit this, you'll get a copy and we'll get a copy. I think that's the basics of library board certification unless anyone has a question. It doesn't look like anybody typed anything in after I reminded them, but if at any time you think of anything, go ahead and type it in there. We can jump back to board certification, no problem. Yeah. Okay, so then librarian certification is again, this fly out menu and then we'll start right at the top for this one. So librarian certification, these are again, free program open to anyone in Nebraska or employed in a Nebraska library. The goal is to improve library service throughout the state, sort of as a motivation to keep developing your skills and knowledge and provide some guidelines and it recognizes all of the librarians who are working hard to update and go above and beyond doing their job and learning and keeping up to date with all the new information and trends and everything. So first, if you're not yet in the program, you will submit an application, which is right here. We just need your name, email, address. If you're not working in a library, that's fine. You can just click none in current position again. If you're not in a library, you can just none. The certification levels, so the levels are based on your education level. So whether or not you have the degrees and then these L's is whether or not you have a certificate or a higher degree in library science specifically. So if you only, if you have a bachelor's degree plus the certificate in library science, you'd be the 3L versus maybe you have a bachelor's degree in psychology, but you don't have that library science extra piece, it would be a level three. And again, if you have any questions at all about what level you are or how many hours you have, let me know and I can help you. The idea behind this is if you have a library science background, great. If you don't, that's totally fine. You'll just need to take a set of the basic skills courses, which I'll show you in a little bit. But the basic skills. That's something very important here in Nebraska and possibly other states across the country when we have so many rural areas and libraries and rural areas and the people there just having a library degree just isn't gonna be a thing, but they are great people running the library and they have great knowledge and skills and life experiences, but you know, there's knowledge about how to run the library, but for the certification here that we have, we have these extra classes to get you some of that library school type education without having to go to library school. And you're just running a library like 10, 15 hours a week. You probably don't need to get your master's degree in or anything in library science. No, but you do need to know some of the basics of what am I doing here? And that's why I've got this great basic skills program that will teach you that. Yep. They're online courses free, free education. Yeah, online, they're free. And we'll talk about it, but it's just a series of introductory level library science courses. And that's all the differences between the L and not L. And so we have that here. If you have the library science, yes, if you don't have it, you'll just need the basic skills classes. So whether or not you have the library science degree, your certifications are good for three years and you will need to earn a total of 45 hours in those three years. And if you're taking the basic skills classes, those hours count towards your total. So we're not asking you to do 45 hours plus the classes. If that makes sense, those classes are a part of your total. So then the three years, and then much like the board certification, earning hours, the CE activities are planned learning experiences designed to bring about specific knowledge or skills related to library science and library services. So this might be a little more general than the library boards, since the boards have to be their specific responsibilities, but we do have some guidelines which we'll go through. So let's see. Did that and then, okay, let's talk about the basic skills real quick. So the basic skills classes, we have six required courses that are offered throughout the year. Collection management, community, communication, customer service, intellectual freedom and introduction to cataloging. Again, these classes are all online and they're free and they last about two weeks. And then we have these different electives throughout the year that you can choose seven of. And again, you don't need to complete these, you know, in your first year, you have three years to do this. And then we have the schedule, the basic skills classes here. Does anybody have questions about the application or the basic skills part of the certification? Yeah, if you have any questions, go ahead and let us know about the programs or the courses. And the classes are taught. Some of the courses here too are taught by us, me, Holly, some of our other commission staff and some of our system directors. And they're offered once a year throughout the year. You can kinda see the schedule. Yeah. And generally it's the same schedule every year. So don't think, okay, what's it gonna be in 2022? Usually they're all in the same order. And it's about the same time every year. Last year, of course, things to get moved around a bit due to COVID. But I think for the most part we're back on schedule. Yes, yep. And as you see, Holly, I'd say they're usually about two weeks, each class is two weeks long, except for those self-paced ones because they are something you do on your own without a lot of guidance or instructor involvement. Or instructor involvement, the communication one and the intro to cataloging, as you can see, those are month-long ones. But you get a whole month to do everything in there. Yeah. Okay. Then if we come back to this menu and we come down to, let's do how to earn CE. So much like the board page, we have our guidelines up top, what counts as CE and, or I guess what kind of activities. So again, you have the webinars, conferences, same kind of timeline. It has to be at least 20 minutes. And it goes from there. You can, if you do have some library science classes that you've taken within your certification period, you can request or you can report those for CE credit up to 20 hours. So that's usually about two classes. You'll just need to contact me or Linda and we can get those added to your record. They just have to be library science classes. Online courses we'll talk about in a second and then some of these different activities like teaching leadership activities are all gonna be, they're eligible for CE but you'll just need to contact us for how many. And I'll show you the CE report form in a second. What counts, it needs to be organized for the purpose of teaching or learning about library science, sponsored by a reputable organization in the least 20 minutes long. And again, if you're not sure if something counts, you can contact us ahead of time and I can let you know. So how do I check my CE hours? If you go to this CE record review, first name, last name, password or password lookup if you need it, you can submit it and then you can see how many hours you have and for which activities. So the board certification obviously is public, anyone can see it, but your own record obviously is personal and we don't share that information between staff members or anyone else at your library. And it has that automatic password lookup in there too, right? For if you don't know, that'll just automatically generate something for them. Yeah, so if you click on it, it'll just ask for your name and your city submit and then it'll send it to your email that we have on record. I know we did that a lot. I don't know what my, how do I know what my password is to get into that? Yeah. So that you can just do that and it'll send it to you or you can just again contact me or Linda and we can send that to you as well. Okay. So then back to this page. College academic courses do count as long as they're within your three year period. Online non-academic courses. So things like library juice or Code Academy classes that you take online. These are a little different. A lot of them do count but the way different organizations determine continuing education hours or units are all different and the way each student takes online classes are different. So if I take a class, it might take me five hours. If Krista takes the same class, you might go through it in two hours. So there's no standard time. So the way we do it is for online courses, it's one CE per week module or topic that the course covers. So a four week online class is for CE credits. Does that make sense? Mm-hmm. Makes sense to me. Yeah. Okay. Cause yeah, you're right. You can't tell how long it's gonna take somebody. It's so similar to our basic skills courses. They're a lot of times you earn a certain amount of credit for taking them. Yeah. And yeah. That's what we're gonna say. We've have had people go through like a basic skills class in like the first three days. Yeah. Please all the assignments and okay. But other people take those, yeah. Depends on how fast you read, how much time you have to dedicate to it. So it's just, there's no way to tell time-wise how much. That's why we do is one CE per module. And less, so the only exception is courses that are provided by ALA, the American Library Association or one of its affiliates right here, this link. Courses that are offered by these association affiliates, they will usually tell you this course is you know, 10 hours, then we'll go with that just because it's from ALA. And it's, you'll usually have it on your certificate after you complete the course. And for those courses, you need to complete the whole course so you can't do just like one or two modules and get credit for that. The whole class needs to be completed. And again, ask us if you have any questions at all. If you are an instructor for a training course or a presentation, you can earn credit hours for that. You can get credit for participating in professional associations as a leader. So it's like a president or section chair. Attending the usual meetings don't count, but we wanna recognize that leadership position that you've held that you've done. So just contact us about those. Same thing with about getting published, reading an article or a book. So those have a little different requirements. You'll contact me or Linda with what you read, a brief summary, and then you can see here, it has to be nonfiction, library science within the last five years. And then again, we have just a short list of some of the sample things that don't or that aren't eligible for CE credit, general job related activities, travel and things like that. So any questions there? Okay, so I'm going back to our fly out menu. When you need to submit credits, you can click here. You'll fill this out, event format. So did you watch the recording or watch the webinar live or was it recorded? Something you attended in person, a conference or other and we might contact you. So which one of those would be for if I was the actual presenter, I was doing the teaching? So for example, whatever your format was of it or is that another? So for example, if you wanted to submit this income to slide that you were doing, you would do the live webinar and then obviously presenter, speaker, you. And then that way you could double just as it. Oh, okay. Or conference and workshop, same thing. And again, you can always email to, if you have questions or you just wanna make sure we know that's perfectly okay. But with this conference, if you attend the conference workshops, there's only two sessions listed, but as you type, more. It'll open and add more if you fill up the previous one. Cool. And then as you've done all at once. Yeah. So you don't have to list two sessions at a time. It'll keep going. Something also, I'll let you finish up on this. Oh no, I just gonna say if you need like the start date and end date is right there. And then you'll just submit it. You'll get a copy and then we'll get a copy. And again, we'll manually add this to your record. So it won't show up immediately. But I always have to give Linda at least a week or so to get everything done. As I was gonna mention, for some conferences like Nebraska ones, the Nebraska Library Association conference and our Big Talk from Small Libraries online conference, I know those do. We also create special CE reporting forms for them for our library people here. So you may sometimes get notifications from us saying, okay, for this particular big event, don't use your regular CE form. I mean, you can if you want to, but we pre-made this one where it actually just lists, here's all the sessions. Well, for the Big Talk ones, one day, here's each session, just check the box in front of the ones you did and send it to us that way to make it easier for you. Yeah. But there's usually a red box reminding you. So if you can forget it. It's over there right now, yeah. Yeah. Okay, so I think that is the basics of librarian certification unless anyone has questions. Did you go through the application form for this one too? For first getting? Yeah, just the name, email, some addresses and then your level that you'll just pick. Right. And again, if you click the wrong level by accident, just that's fine, we can update it. So I think that that's what I'm trying to think of the kind of questions that I get sometimes and sometimes it is, I submitted CE but I don't see anything happening. I'm like, well, you actually have to do this first both for the board and the librarian. Tell us you want to participate in the certification program. And then when you submit CE, we know that that's something you're interested in. It's not just submit a CE request and we automatically do that for you. You have to do this first step. And I think sometimes some people forget about that or miss that for at first a little bit. Yeah. And so let's say you're going to a conference or one of the workshops and you haven't applied for certification yet. That's okay. But yeah, you can pull out the certification and still get credit for the conference or workshop because we'll see the dates. So you can fill out the certification and attend a workshop the same day. That's okay. There's not, you don't need to wait for approval from us before you start attending. Different activities or watching webinars. It's just that again, we manually do this. So it might just take a few days for us to get it all entered. Did you want to, oh, I know that I think that's what you're going to talk about with the librarian certification. I think went through the whole thing. I think that's the basics. I was just going to show under this education and training link. We also have the basic skills classes information here. We have different training opportunities with on our calendar. You can go and see, you know, what's coming up, different workshops. You can see the basic skills classes are listed with information about registration dates and how many CE hours. So if there's anything on this calendar, you know, like different meetings, you can see if it's how many CE hours are eligible. Let's see. And then we have some different links for CE opportunities. So we have this list of some free online learning courses that you can look into. We have. There are options out there now. Yeah. We've always had a lot of these available out there. We know, I mean, we do this show every week and doing it for over 10 years. But lots of other organizations have been doing online sessions that there's so many things. But there's, I think after this past year, there's even more. Many things that were in online or in person only have become online either in instead of or in addition to or just some places they're saying, hey, let's jump into that online field for the first time. And then we also have, and here's the income to slide. You can watch any of the recordings too and submit those for CE hours. Let's see. We have the list of free webinars that I'll be updating. We have the Web Junction is another really great for both librarians and boards. It's free to use. They have lots of different free training. Oops. Oops. Free training, a lot of upcoming webinars. They have a course catalog of all sorts of different topics that you can go through, watch webinars, go through their courses and everything through Web Junction is eligible for. See, there's a section there too. Friends, trustees and volunteers. So this could be for your board members as well, not just your staff. There'd be things in your referrals. They have a lot of really great courses. So even if you just wanna spend some time clicking around to see just what they have. Oops. If you go back to Web Junction, yeah, they just, and then they have like the upcoming ones. So they have a mental health first aid and a community places one this month. And you may see sometimes in there some of our Encompass Live Shows, they do contact me periodically to say, hey, we'd like to actually link to some of your topics because they fit into, some of your shows because they fit into some of our topics that we are putting together here. So you'll see a lot of crossover. Sometimes where it looks like Web Junction is offering an Encompass Live thing. It's just they're linking to our recording because it fits into some program they're doing. Yeah. You'll see that they link to lots of other organizations too. You'll see, it's not all originally created by them necessarily. Some are and some are working with other partner organizations. Yes. And then there's also this monthly list that I mentioned. And it has just the list of everything. I think Wyoming is the one that puts this together every month. I think that's why Wyoming is really good at organizing this for everybody. Yeah, it's awesome. They have the different topics and just a whole list of here's some specifically for boards. So you can go through and sort of look at your schedule for the month. And for a lot of these webinars, if you can't watch it live, just go ahead and register. And a lot of them will send out the recording that you can watch later and still get a CE credit for it. They have everything, school, libraries, technology, training, volunteers, and then below they have more details about what each webinar is about. Okay. So I think that is everything I want. That sounds like there's so much out there it can be kind of overwhelming, I think. I mean, we have a lot of librarians or library boards that contact us saying, oh my gosh, we need to get our hours. I don't know what to do. And then I look at this and I'm like, now I'm the other way. I don't know which one to do. There's so many which I have to pick from. That's one thing. If there is a topic or if you're feeling overwhelmed, I'm like, what should I start with? What should I do? You're more than welcome to email me and I can send you just a shorter list of maybe some things to start with. Get your foot in the water kind of thing. Yeah. So you can kind of get started at least. And I definitely, on the board side, those short takes and those trusty things are really good, basic, especially when you have, as we do on the board members, do switch often, getting new board members up to speed on what did I get myself into? What the heck was I supposed to be getting here? I mean, we're a board manual, which is great for that as well. We were highly recommended the board manual and the director's guidebook. They have all the, in depth about how you do your job, but sometimes watching a short, depending on how you learn, your learning style and what best works for you. I can watch a 10 minute video on one of these short takes things and it got me to figure out what am I supposed to be doing as this new board member that I've at this library. Decided. Good to, especially with new members and getting on the same page as a whole board with your director. So everyone sort of has those same expectations and sort of all know what they're doing. The trustee and board sessions, probably a good idea that a library director watch them as well, if you can. So then you can still understand too what a board, your board is supposed to be doing. And you guys all know, you've all watched this same session, not just the board, but the director too. So they know, okay, this is what you guys know and now I know it too. And now we can all work together smoothly. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, this United for Libraries, they have all sorts of different videos and webinars more than just the trustee academy or the short takes. They have different events. Like they're doing a national library conversation with Dan Rather. Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Tomorrow night. That's another good one for the boards and director to just sort of clip through and even just see what all is here for you. Did anybody have any questions? Please do type into your questions section. Any more questions about the board certification, the librarian certification for staff and directors, what you can and can't attend or apply for? I think we've gone through everything very, very cleanly and in-depth and covered everything there is about each one. It can get a little confusing, I think sometimes, but that's why we have all this information on there for you, certifications leading into accreditation, Holly and Linda, definitely great resources for any questions if you have any and you're trying to get all your records. And something else too, you talked about working with them on getting, if they've lapsed, getting back. Also, if it's getting close to when you're due to be renewing any of your certifications and you're struggling for whatever reasons. This last year we had the COVID-19 pandemic. The year before here in Nebraska in the Midwest we had flooding, there's been something every year. And they are willing to work with you on both certifications, the board and the staff on if you need extensions, if there's special circumstances, extenuating circumstances. Just call or email and say, hey, here's the situation, here's what's our problem is, what can we do? And Linda's really good at putting together a plan for if you do this many hours by this date you'll be fine and we'll extend you. We did that proactively for some libraries over this past year too. We just reached out and said, hey, we're gonna work together to see if you need any extra extension on this because we know your library might be closed down, your staff or your boards are not able to do what they need to from this past year. And that's fine, we will do that. And the same thing with the accreditation which both of these certifications lead into. Accreditation is what I'm in charge of. So when your public libraries, your library's own accreditation comes up, same thing, if you are struggling, keep in touch with us. Just let us know what's going on at any time and what we can work with you. With the accreditation we actually extended everybody for now two years just because of with the COVID-19 pandemic there's just no way for everybody, including me, to get everything in addition to reacting to the pandemic. Also you have this other thing, that's fine. But just let us know and we can work with you. This is a program, well, all these programs, the certification programs and the accreditation programs are all things run by us here at the Nebraska Library Commission. There is, these are not, if you're not from Nebraska or if you're talking to colleagues elsewhere, this is not a national program type thing. It's not run by ALA or IMLS or anything. Each state on their own does this if they want to. There are other states that don't have certification or don't have accreditation. So this is just done by us here at the Library Commission, me, Holly and Linda. And so we can work with you and to make sure, as you said earlier Holly, that you're successful in your learning, in your education and in providing services to your community after you go through all these programs. Definitely. All right, I don't see any other questions coming in. Okay. So I think we're almost at the top of the hour, 11 again here. We started a little late, but that's okay. Yeah. Technical issues this morning, but we figured it out. We got it. And if there are questions later, just let me know. Oh yeah. Email me. Then we can work, figure it out. Yep, reach out to us and we'll answer your questions then. Any last words before I do my wrap up here? No, I think that's everything. Trying to make sure I am. All right, just clicking on things behind the scenes here. All right. All right, so as you said, if you have any other questions, let us know, I'm gonna pull back, present your control to my screen now so that I can wrap up today's show. There we go. All right. So thank you everybody for attending. Thank you, Holly, for being here with me this morning to talk about our certification programs. I think we're really proud of them. They really do help keep our libraries on track and up to speed on what they need to know to do their jobs. And they work, can be a lot sometimes for a new director coming in, I think, and a new board members. I get that feeling sometimes. But we're here to work with you on it and make sure that you, as I think you said earlier, we're not making this, we don't want this to be a burden on anyone. It's something that's supposed to help you. So just let us know if there's something happening or if you're struggling and there's always extensions and discussions that can be had with you about it. Just don't worry too much about it. Definitely. Yeah. So thank you everybody. That will be it for today's show. This is our Encompass Live page here. Our archives, as Holly showed you earlier, are right here underneath our upcoming shows. Today's show will be at the top of the list here. It's always the most recent one at the top. And it will have a link to the recording which you post to our YouTube channel. And then there are links to all of our certification pages that are in the show description. So you really get to those as well. All I'm here, I'll show you. This is where you can search our full archives. Do you want to look up any specific topics? Like as Holly was mentioning, you can watch any of these to earn CE credit for your librarian certification or your library board certification. Just put a topic in here and you'll come up with it. You can see I've got the most, you can search the whole show archives or just most recent 12 months. That is because this is the full archives for Encompass Live. We have been doing the show since January 2009. So we have over 10 years worth of recordings here. That's a lot. Some of the shows do stand the test of time and you'll be able to watch them whenever and get good information on them. But some things may become outdated on here and expired, links might not work anymore. Programs might be completely different. Some services might not exist anymore or have changed drastically. So just pay attention to the original broadcast date if you are searching the full archives. So you can at least know when this particular show was broadcast. So you can say, okay, this was actually from three years ago. So maybe it's not the best one about digital literacy. I don't know. It might be great. So just pay attention to the date when you are watching these. But there is no, you can watch something. I don't think you have any rules about how old something is for certification. Do we, Holly? Just for books or classes, not for webinars, no. Yeah, so you can watch something as old as you want to on here. And as long as it's the right topic, it's good to go. Yeah, back to my website page. We do also have a Facebook page. I've got a link here to our Encompassive Facebook page and here it is over here. We post reminders about the shows that are coming up when our recordings are available. Where's it from last week? There we go. So you can just keep an eye on us over here if you do like to use Facebook. Otherwise, elsewhere on social media, I know Twitter, Instagram, not sure where else. We use the EnComp Live, a little abbreviation there for Encompass Live to look for that hashtag. You'll see things that our social media people are posting about the show. So that was our update for today's show. I hope you guys, next week we're gonna be talking about strategic planning. Easier than it looks. It is, yeah. Simple approach to strategic planning. Patrick Bodley, who's the Director at Independence Public Library in Oregon, is gonna be with us to talk about, give you some tips and tricks on how to do great strategic planning for your library. So please do sign up for that one. You see all of our other dates coming up here in April and into May. So always keep an eye on our schedule to see when new things will be added to the calendar. That wraps it up for today. Thank you very much everybody for being here with us this morning. With us this morning, we're still checking everything behind the scenes here, okay? And we hope to see you at a future episode of Encompass Live. Thank you. Bye.