 Okay, folks, we are back. It is two o'clock central time, top of the hour. We are into, we have three left to go, so we're more than halfway through today. Next up, we have Karen Lemke and Elizabeth Von Treffek-Kirkin. I think I said that right. Please correct me if I'm wrong. The Pine River Library in Colorado, I probably butchered that, and I apologize. But I butchered it humorously for the sounds of it. They're going to be talking about circulating electronics, the good, the bad, and the ugly, sort of like my pronunciation. So go ahead and take it away. Alright, thank you so much. I am Karen Lemke, and this is... Elizabeth Von Treffek-Kirkin. And we are here to present about circulating electronics, and we're really excited to do this and be part of this today. It's been really enjoyable and entertaining, and it's really been a pleasure to be part of this. So before we get started, I wanted to tell you just a little bit about our library. We are based out of beautiful Southwest Colorado in Bayfield, Colorado, and it's a wonderful little town. The town itself has a population of about 2,300. However, we have a lot of residents in the surrounding area that do call Bayfield home. The 2010 census data indicates that we have about 8,200 people in our zip code. And our little library actually just got a little bit bigger. We just finished a 4,000 square foot expansion, and that was to accommodate for the growth that we had in the last decade or so. We originally had about 8,000 square feet, and we were able to add 4,000 square feet. So now we have a 12,000 square foot building. The project really literally just finished. We opened five days ago, so we're a little frazzled, but it's been really, really exciting to have this great new space for our community. So as librarians, especially in small libraries, we do find ourselves being very inventive, much like Jacob von Hogg Flume, the inventor of time travel. Maybe you've heard of him. Maybe you will in the future. Much like Jacob, we staffers of small libraries really have to find some new and inventive ways to be a part of our local community. And our presentation that we have today will be focusing on one of the programs that we have, and it's broken down into three parts, the good, the bad, and the ugly of circulating electronics. By our title, you may think that we have this negative tendency that we're leaning towards the negative, but we really feel that the good does outweigh the positive. And we're hoping that if you've thought about having a tech lending program at your own library, but you've been afraid, then maybe this presentation will encourage you to go forward and to move on with your own tech lending program. So we started our program by giving our patrons really some different devices to choose from. At first, when we started the program, it was pretty limited, but we do like this idea and we really adopted this philosophy that patrons should be able to try out different devices, especially patrons that are living in rural areas that might not have access to them. And so back in 2008, when we were thinking about circulating electronics, we didn't really have many patrons that had e-readers, and so we just started out with laptops. I remember back at the circulation desk when I first started in 2007 and in 2008, we had patrons that would come to our desk and they would say, oh, I have this great device, it's a Kindle, and they pull out this huge device that reminds you of one of those old cell phones, and they were so excited about it. And those were the conversations that we were having back in 2007 and 2008. But quickly, that really, really changed. So we started out with these laptops, and around the end of 2008, we were able to receive some Sony e-readers. We first started out with one for our staff for us to try out, and then soon after that, we became part of the Sony library program. We received three e-readers from them, and we also had some marketing materials and some on-site training. By late 2010, our library joined the Across Colorado Digital Consortium, or ACDC, to provide digital titles to our patrons, and we are one of over 25 libraries in this consortium, and we have access to over 8,000 e-reader, audio, and video titles. But as the years progressed and as we were more exposed to this digital content, we quickly realized that we needed more than just these laptops and a few e-readers. So we decided to go ahead and add some more devices. And this is a partial list. We're actually still adding devices in a few, probably in a month or so, we'll be adding a whole array of tablets to this list. But right now we have some early edition nooks. We have some of the basic black and white nooks, color nooks, kindle, kindle fires. We have six Sony e-readers. Three of those were from the original program. We have 13 different MP3 players, and we have various brands that we circulate because, again, we want to give our patrons the opportunity to compare a Sony Walkman to a Zen Creative. So we have different types that patrons can check out. We also have a TomTom and a Garmin for checkout. Again, the laptops that we have and a flip camera and a projector that we've been able to check out for patrons. You know, we have 43 devices at our last official count. Again, we're not going to be adding some soon. To give you an idea of what that means, our library has roughly 8,000 patrons. Our annual circulations are roughly 95,000 items. But those total devices that we had, those 43 devices that we've had since 2008, they have checked out a total of 940 times. And this actually, this data is a little stale. We need to update this again. We need to go back through and add those. It's actually more than 940 by now. But that even breaks down to an average of 22 checkouts per item. So when you're comparing that to books that are in the collection, videos that are in the collection, we get good circulation stats on these items. And we've figured out some ways to help make this program good. And we really do have a lot of devices that we're checking out. And so we come up with some ways to make it easier for our patrons and a better experience for our patrons. And the first thing we do is we offer a variety of handouts. And we have handouts for everything, at least we try to. We have handouts for people that are using iPads. We don't even circulate those yet. We will soon. But we try and make it as easy as possible for all of our patrons to be able to access the content that we have and to be able to use the devices, whether they are their own devices or they're the library's devices. We also handouts just describing the gadgets that we have at the library so that we can promote those easily and that staff can promote those easily. And then again, we try and gear each of these handouts to the specific devices as much as we can. We again just want to make it so simple and so easy for patrons. Some of them that may be really afraid of using technology, if they have these handouts, then they're really just more equipped to use this technology and to really support it. We really like to promote the technology that we have and we really like to get it out there into our community. A lot of libraries that we know do tech petting zoos. And we love those programs. We think they're great. We think they definitely have a place in libraries, but we've come up with a couple of other ones to help promote the items that we have. One of the first ones that we did was a Donuts and Download Program where we had just installed a download station here in our library. And so one Saturday morning, we stopped by and picked up a bunch of donuts and we told everyone that wanted to come in and see our new download station. They could come in and get a donut and download some items. So that was successful. We had about 30 people, which for us was a good turnout to a program, and they came in. They had a donut and asked us questions about the download station. We've also started using digital story times. Recently we started doing some story times within our schools on some of their late start days. And it's been a great partnership for us with the schools. And I work with some of the older elementary kids and they really like to have an interactive title. There's so much into interactive content. So we try and make sure that we have at least one of those titles be digital and Elizabeth will talk a little bit more, but she does most of the programming with our children and she's worked other ways to incorporate digital aspects into her story times. The last thing that we do that I want to talk about right now is our book discussion group. A group that meets once a month, it's really the non-committal book club. So patrons can either just join when they really like the title that we're talking about or they can come to every single book discussion that we have. Whenever we're doing a book discussion, we make sure that we put the book title on at least one of our set of devices so that we have multiple copies available. It increases the number of copies that we can check out to patrons. And for some of our patrons that are just interested in being part of the book club and not necessarily looking for a gadget, they might try a gadget out for the very first time and it's been a great way to get people to really try these out if they've been a little hesitant. Actually the very, very last thing I wanted to talk about as far as promoting these, we just did our expansion and that was a big project and we were really excited about it. One of the things that we really pushed for was this meat case is what we like to call it. Some like to call it the jewelry case. I think meat case is just more fun. It's meant to replicate the meat case that you would find in the grocery store with all the prime cuts of meat. This is our version with the meat being all of those wonderful gadgets that we have. We're able to display them before they were in a drawer behind our massive circulation desk. Our circulation desk in this renovation expansion project has been removed and we've replaced it with a much smaller service pod or service desk and directly behind one of our service desks we have this meat case. Patrons can walk up and look at all of the gadgets that we have available for checkout and it's a great way to promote the devices that we have. We have patrons that we've had in here for years and despite all of our great efforts, they never knew we had these devices until they actually saw them in this case. I recommend meat cases for everyone. Six is the magic number when it comes to e-readers. Nooks and Kindles and Sonys can all have shared content and so we have six devices, six Nooks, Nook devices, six Kindle devices, six Sony devices. That's what we aim for because we can buy the book, the title and then we can have it on six different devices and that's just really worked out. We've been able to just have those titles available especially we'll talk a little bit about best sellers later on and just having those more copies available is great. Elizabeth is going to go into more detail about more parts of our program. I was fortunate to be able to go over the good stuff, the positive aspects about our tech lending program but since Elizabeth is much smarter, she gets to handle the badge and the ugly things. Okay, the bad. Well, I don't want to discourage people from having this program because I think it's awesome. But just to give everyone a realistic overview, I need to touch on a few things that we've learned that are less than beautiful about this type of lending. Oh, because technology can be scary. We have a little video to illustrate that. And here it is. That makes me laugh. Okay, so certainly the patrons can be afraid of technology but we found, unfortunately, even our staff members were afraid of these readers. When patrons first started coming in with their readers and there were a few people on our staff who were terrified of these moments where the patrons would walk up with their reader and we would be expected to help this person and it could be any kind of reader, you never know. So one of the things we did, first we made that decision to have our electronics circulating program be about finding different kinds of readers. I know some libraries will have like Durango Library which is also here in Southwest Colorado. They are awesome and all of their readers are nooks and that's the decision they made because it's easier for them to manage and I understand that. But for us, we wanted it to be a wonderful way for our patrons to explore some different technologies before they made their purchase. Unfortunately, that was a little terrifying to some of our staff just the thought of having to know different devices and I think in the long run it's been beneficial but what we did was we required every staff member to take home each device at least one night. So for some of them they needed to keep them longer than one night in order to get a grip on how to use it but I really feel like that policy of us insisting everyone take each one home made a huge difference. So each staff member has experience with each type of device and I think it's really given them a level of comfort not just to help patrons with the devices that we circulate but also to help patrons who come in with their own gadgets, their own devices and we're able to help them better. Everyone who works here is able to help them better not just Karen and I. Okay, so another thing that's not as pleasant as I would like that you probably will be dealing with if you use Overdrive is Adobe Digital Editions. Now this piece of software is necessary for any device non-kindle in order to download eBooks. So Adobe just has cornered this market and this particular piece of software is extremely functional but it's not the easiest thing to use. Some of the vendors including 3M have integrated this into their software to the point where it's very painless. Overdrive has not yet done that. So we found a couple of little tricks that we can use to make Adobe Digital Editions a little bit easier to manage on our end. This first trick I got from Deb in Durango which is the town I just mentioned which is close to us. They use Nook devices only but on Nook and Sony devices and it turns out kindles as well. When the device comes back from the patron you can plug it into your computer like a flash drive, open it up like a file folder to look at the files and you can just delete the Adobe Digital Editions folder on the device and that will wipe out your patron's information and anything they checked out. The previous patron and clear it out for the next patron. That's a great tip. Thank you Deb. You're awesome for teaching us that it saved us a lot of time before we would have to go in and I don't even want to get into it but it was complicated. So another trick that we've learned, Adobe Digital Editions a little bit persnickety when it comes to the order in which you do things so it's much easier if you plug in your device before you download your title. So that's just a little tip that we've been able to share with our patrons. It saves a lot of possible difficulty. Sometimes Adobe Digital Editions for some reason if you check out the item and then plug in your device it thinks you're a different person and it's annoying but it can be avoided. Also Adobe has these really crazy limits of how many readers you can have and how many computers you can attach to per Adobe Digital Editions account. So if you try to make an Adobe account for your library which is how we started, what we started with you can only do six devices and then you're going to bump up against your maximum limit. So we always encourage our patrons to use their own Adobe account with the devices. Sometimes it's just too intimidating we'll let them use ours but it's problematic. It's much easier if they use their own. Another thing we kind of learned during the process of circulating these electronics the first iPad that we bought we just circulated it within the staff luckily and we learned that some of these devices are harder than others but many of them make it difficult to log out from things because these devices really are designed to be individual. The manufacturers of the devices intend for them to be used by one person. They don't expect you to ever log out of anything and we learned that if you sign into your email account on an iPad it is extremely difficult to log back out. So we advise patrons not to use these for their banking certainly but even just email or Facebook you can use them for that but please don't do it unless you understand how to get back out before you turn it in because this could become a privacy issue and it's just it's unrealistic to think that we will check every possible every possible I just found a typo I'm sorry I apologize for that every possible site you might have logged into and log you out it's not going to happen we have to put that on us on the patron to be responsible to log out of everything they get into. Another thing that has become an issue that we've had to learn about is to we use device card which I'll show you guys an example of in a minute but you want to make sure that all the pieces come back with each it's easy enough to forget the charger in the wall or you know just mislead the cord or forget the card that goes in it but we put a card in each and it tells every patron what they need to put back in the container and that's very useful because some of those AC adapters are proprietary and they're expensive it isn't like you can just run over to radio check and get another one for $10 so you I also advise that you write your library's name on it in Sharpie or put a sticker and somehow identify those things because they're easy to lose easy for patrons to lose and sometimes difficult to replace sometimes the cords are in two pieces that was confusing to some of our staff members because you know that has that power supply so make sure that all the pieces of the cords come back. Here's an example of our device cards. This particular reader I think it's been retired but there are similar readers in our collection still and see it just reminds the patron put the reader in there. Remember the case the cord the adapter the little piece of literature we want these things back and please don't put it in the drop box where it will get smashed and destroyed and you can make yours obviously with your own logo and whatever you like to have but they're very useful and we have found them to be effective in getting all the parts back okay so that was what's bad but but wait there's more it gets worse so some of the uglier things I will now share with you that we have learned throughout this process first one things come back extremely gross and dirty and I mean it's gross we wish we could wash all of our laptops in the sink like this cool keyboard that Karen found but unfortunately we have kind of more conventional electronics that don't wash well so we had to develop a method of dealing with that and this is our beautiful laptop update box and when the devices come back the cards that you see in the front of the box there those keep track of our updates we want to make sure that Java and flash and windows and everything gets updated on those laptops when they come back because you know of course we have safety software on there so that we can't have them automatically update we have to manually do them and these cards prevent us from doing duplicating work it just tells us okay Java's been updated recently you don't need to mess with it or whatever and each laptop has its own little card where we keep track of the updates and you can see behind the cards we have LCD screen cleaning wipes which those work on the laptop screen and on the reader screens as well we use those the green works wipes you can use any product that you're comfortable with but we use those to kind of clean the laptops themselves and the keyboards and the other container you see in there is the compressed air we use that to get dog hairs and funk and oh my goodness I can tell you all the most disgusting things out of the inside of the keyboard the bags come back sometimes smelling like smoke or they have food on them and I haven't really found a really great way to clean the bags so right now we just kind of do soap and water touch spot clean those and it's not ideal but it works okay so another ugly aspect obviously is loss and people ask me about that a lot but it's really considering the 42 devices I think we've had some pretty great results the one e-reader that was damaged was a really responsible patron who broke it she came and told us she paid for it we replaced it the three laptops one was replaced by an irresponsible patron who has not taken care of it and two died of just being old and done and they died we only use existing laptops that we've pulled out of our laptop lab for the circulating laptops these are not brand new laptops that we're purchasing to circulate so I expect some of this loss you know they're already old before we circulate them we have newer laptops in our laptop lab and when we replace those they trickle down into our circulating program so please keep in mind that we have lost three since 2008 but they were pretty old so that's to be expected if you started with all new laptops I imagine there would be less of that so yeah it's expensive this program can be expensive but I know TechSoup sells re-manufactured hardware you can get laptops from them really reasonably I've seen them $200-300 on there so you could always start it with a pretty small amount we spent nothing when we started we had Sony give us some readers and we had laptops that we already had that were going to be what do we call it when we sell the computers surplus sale we were going to surplus sale sell them and we decided instead to create this program where we circulate them so for us it was really kind of zero investment other than our time to kind of set this program up and then as it was so successful it was easy enough to get permission to purchase items because they were they circulate much better than books really dollar for dollar they circulate everything circulates so well that it's easily justified okay one thing that we learned circulating these is people get very attached to these electronics when they take them home they love having them and when we first started the laptop circulating program we allowed people to renew and we learned quickly that when someone has a laptop in their house for two weeks or more they really feel a strong sense of ownership of that item and they are reluctant to return it and when they do return it they're so gross they're so much grosser if they keep them for long periods then if they return them after a week so we revised the policy so that now they need to return it after a week now if there are additional laptops available they can return one and take another right away but these laptops need frequent updates they need attention they need to be in the library these patrons need to understand that they're ours that we share with all the patrons and it's not just theirs to take home and keep forever and so we did change that policy so let's take a look at some of our rules that we've kind of developed throughout this process we no longer renew things so you need to bring it back and give it to us and if there's another one you can check it out you're not going to renew it we do have fines on these items it's $2 a day on the laptops and the GPS units we at this time do not have fines on the readers but that's something that we've explored possibly adding because we've had a couple of people take advantage and not return the readers in a timely fashion which can be frustrating especially if someone's waiting we have the patrons sign a device form and I don't know whose idea it was but I think it's brilliant we have only one form we'll give you a look at that and we put all of the electronics on it and it basically says I acknowledge that if I break this or lose it I need to pay for it to be replaced and so for each item we have here in this table it could cost up to this so if someone is responsible and they come up to us I never want to charge them more than whatever it costs us to replace it if they're going to be a jerk you could use these figures to kind of be punitive if you were so inclined the only thing I've had someone replace at this point is the reader and I just charge her what it costs me to get a new one because she was so terrific the woman who has not paid for her laptop has a bigger fine on her card because I'm kind of furious with her for not taking care of it so you could certainly do whatever works for your library but this for us is very very useful and helpful and it's been successful for us okay so just to kind of recap we feel like even though I've just spent 20 minutes telling you what's bad about this program I just wanted to give you an honest kind of overview I do in general believe that these programs are a great idea and mostly because our patrons love this our patrons are thrilled to have this opportunity especially in such a small town to come and look at these different electronics before they purchase one you should know that we don't have a Best Buy or Circuit City or anything like that in this town so if they want to see e-readers the library is their only real option other than looking at them online so it's really nice that we can offer this and also being in a rural area which I think many of you probably all of you can relate to many of our patrons don't have a computer at home and they can come and check out a laptop from us and that really makes the difference maybe their kids can do homework at home that they weren't able to do before and I noticed patrons really appreciating in using these devices and it's been wonderful another thing is our best sellers we're a small library so most of the time if a book is new we have one copy or two maybe two if it's hugely popular we'll have two copies and there get to be some serious holds and it's nice we can put a best seller on say the Sony's and that's six items so we'll have six more copies of a best seller all of a sudden from buying one which is usually $14.99 or so so that's been a really wonderful way for us to kind of get best sellers into our patrons hands sooner and once they get a device maybe they were a patron who wouldn't have otherwise checked out a device and it gives them the opportunity to try something that they wouldn't have otherwise tried and I've found many patrons converted to loving devices because they wanted to read 50 shades and didn't want to wait a month and so we gave it to them on a device and now they want to buy their own so it's been a really great experience for us would you like to add something here? I want to add two things about that because one of my favorite stories is about a patron that came in and she was going on she's an elderly woman and was going on a train trip and we kind of convinced her to try one of these devices out she was so worried about taking it and even the night that we were checking it out to her and giving it to her she was not really okay with this device so she took some good old fashioned paper books with her as well and when she came back from that trip she was just so excited about how she was able to use it how she enjoyed using it and she never would have and it was just wonderful to hear her say that she really appreciated the program that we had and that she was able to try this device out so it really allows us to move with our patrons and move at their speeds but it also really allows us to move forward since we have the devices we understand them better we're more apt to be familiar with a variety of devices because we circulate a variety of devices and we don't get just patrons that use Kindles we get patrons that use Sonys that use Kobos that use a number of devices and the more that we are exposed to as a staff and that our patrons are exposed to I just feel a more technological education we have so it really helps us to be more relevant and be more cutting edge it also just is it's opening some more avenues for our programming with our digital story times and having some more interactive programming I wanted to find out from everyone that's participating today if you can in the chat box can you tell us by yes or no do you offer some kind of technology program and if yes if you could list some of the devices that you have for checkout and you guys can all do that in the chat boxes and then also if we have any questions we would love to take those yeah there is quite a lot of questions here actually and okay let's see I'm just going to start at the top here oh one person is has just some concerns about if someone who doesn't know anything about computers is running this kind of a program and the device comes back that is as I said a mess that would be a problem I would guess that an answer to that would be well you really should be able to support the program or get someone on board and then how would you deal with that that's great this is Liz okay well first of all you can always just reset your devices to zero and it's a pretty simple process so if you're not going to load your devices with content you can just get them back each time wipe them out to zero and then circulate it from there if you do load them with content you want to choose a device that easily reloads content something that reloads using Wi-Fi as opposed to being plugged in which I believe all the new devices any device that you're going to buy that's retail device that's brand new right now it's going to load that way some of the older devices that we have some of the Sony's they didn't always used to work that way they used to many of them deliver only through USB many and they most I think all of them still have that functionality as an option but most of them deliver purchase content through Wi-Fi so you could wipe it clean turn on the Wi-Fi let it reload and then recirculate it worst case scenario if it comes back completely filled with who knows what and I would say if you don't have somebody on staff it's available to do that we actually presented this at our statewide conference back in October and we had a library director that was very leery about having a program herself because she wasn't comfortable with the technology so we just spent an afternoon with her so we're all librarians and we'd like to share this information so both Liz and I are welcome to receive questions through our email and everything we do like to to help other libraries if they have questions great okay for handouts do you create your own handouts or do you use materials applied by each of the individual manufacturers of the devices I pretty much hate any handouts that are provided to me I like to create my own so I'm kind of a little persnickety about that so I created all the handouts that I have I use publisher to create handouts and again those are things that I am willing to share with anyone that wants to see examples of handouts but going through what I did is I just went through with each device I went through the process I set up accounts on each device I downloaded books on each device and that is the best way not only to learn but also to be able to create a good handout that's really going to be helpful to your patrons great for the download station what items were patrons downloading at that station we have that download station originally was we started off having it for audio books and we actually really continue kind of saving that computer for just downloading audio books we live like many of you live in rural areas and some of many of our patrons do not have any internet access or they have dial up still they needed a place to be able to download content and that's what they mostly download there are a few videos that are available in our consortium but we tell them if they have an e-reader it's best to just do it on their own with their own computer or if they have the wifi capability built into their device which the newer devices do then they can just come sit in the library and do it right then and they can even do that with audio books too on certain devices but we really try and have that station we paid a pretty hefty chunk of money to have that download station and we bought that through overdrive and so we really gear that towards our audio books and we have multiple questions from people about the items are they frequently stolen do people just not return them at all rather than just saying I don't want to own it myself because I've had it for two weeks but have things just completely gone missing I thought I covered that but no we've never had anything stolen stolen we have some good honest patrons that's the Sony library plan that you're part of is that something that other libraries can still get in on I think that was for 2009 and it's over but you can call Sony and they have a they have a library only help line which I can Google here and I'll get it for you in a second but I think anyone can use that's really nice it's great you get a person right away and they help you with Sony devices of course now I can't I don't recall if this was mentioned earlier or not is this something that both adults and children can borrow these or is it just built you have to be an adult to check out a device we the device form that we fill out really would not be you know legally binding if it was signed by a minor we have told parents that if they're interested in letting their we don't care if their children are using the device but they are the responsible ones for that device so they have to be they have to have an adult library card to be able to to check them out and in the future we would like to move some of our older devices and make them you know more available to like our teens maybe doing like a 13 and up we've tossed that idea around because there are some many patrons that are under 18 and they would really like to be able to check these items out so hopefully we can offer that in the future what kind of safety your security software do you have anything like that that you put on the computers or is it mainly just the wipe them back to start when they come back okay I'm gonna have I'm gonna make Liz take this one it's a hard question so we have to the readers know there's no software but you can always wipe it back to original state that's kind of our backup plan with the laptops we have two softwares that we use clean slate which we get really inexpensively through our state library and smart shields which is another basically it just keeps the hard drive how it is every time it restarts it goes back to its original state and those are the two that we use the most clean slate is a little bit easier to use and less expensive so I'm leaning towards clean slate more and more and that's that's what we use I have a follow-up question that one being being very familiar with that sort of software and I recommended but do you warn the patrons that you know if you save something this hard drive and then you reboot it while you've got it checked out it's gone yes we do and we actually check them out with flash drives for a while because we were so concerned about that particular issue and the flash drives were mostly not used so now we just tell it's on the device card I believe it says don't save anything to this computer we have so many repeat patrons at this point I don't know it's rare that we get a new patron using those laptops I mean now maybe since we've reopened and we have the meat case that might be something that we need to reiterate to our staff to make sure we remind people another option a lot of libraries do and I think this is what Dranga doesn't circulate laptops but you can just make a clone of it before you circulate it and then you could just restore it to original state that way it's another option I feel like it's more work but it may not be depending on how comfortable your IT staff is with that alright thanks I've got a couple of different questions I wanted to know seems to be a lot of work goes into maintaining and keeping up these computers when they come the devices when they come back in both I guess the software and physically cleaning them how much time do you think that takes you about like per week is it a huge thing or is it just kind of oh this is going to scare some people off you know maybe 10 hours a week and I share it with another staffer and she's terrific so I'm saying 10 hours between the both of us okay we've got a whole bunch of stuff coming in on this one so she's got to filter it out do you actually charge anything for doing the cleaning on them depending on how dirty they come back and I think they need physically dirty you know I haven't I like that idea though and it's interesting to pursue we do have one particular patron who uses laptops a lot and they come back smelling like smoke so strongly like smoke I have to put it outside so no we haven't but it's an interesting idea now if the library has an Amazon account can that content from that account that is purchased or downloaded be loaded onto something that is non Kindle okay so Kindle has an app so if you're going to circulate tablets with Kindle apps yes that would count as one of your seats for your items and you can have six and it's not always exactly the same I know that if you buy things from J.K. Rowling she lets you have eight and they don't have to all be the same kind of device but as far as Kindle, Sony and Nook six is the number and a device with an app acting as a Nook or a Kindle counts as one does that answer your question? but to add you're not going to put a Kindle book on a Sony reader right same with a Nook specific we do have our devices preloaded where we go to the Sony store and we purchase those titles from the Sony store and those only work on the Sony readers same with Nook we go to the Nook store and purchase them and that actually brings up another interesting point is we had to since we use these devices we have to make sure that we place our order and then we immediately remove our credit card from the account so that patrons can't go back through and accidentally order something on their own and that has happened unfortunately but it was just once we've got reports here from libraries where devices come back and somebody's purchased content and we basically had to say somehow you left the library's credit card attached or else that wouldn't have been possible although yes yes so disconnect the credit card do not leave the credit card attached to the account we had to kind of go in a different way with Kindle where we had to we actually purchase a gift card to Amazon so that we can buy content and then we make sure that we use all of that gift card I think we leave a few cents on there so somebody cannot add to that device because it wants you to always have some kind of payment option connected to it that's a great idea we've got a couple of people asking you to explain more about that digital story time okay so right now what we've been doing you have to know that we've been closed for two months because we were remodeling the only programming that we were doing in the last eight to twelve weeks whatever has been outreached so we take an iPad out to well, Karen's been doing it really with the big kids I am working on getting some digital story times going with our new smart board which is in my early literacy room and that's going to be a little different but I think what you're asking about is the iPad so I'm going to give it to Karen I always try to find at least one app that kind of fits into our theme and I usually find a free app and actually Liz found one for me that was the Talking Yeti when we were doing we were doing monsters so it was fantastic, the kids loved it they each had a turn saying something and then the Talking Yeti would say it back and they all found that just absolutely enjoyable, they loved it um a technical question about mp3 is checking out those what can the patron actually do with that other than downloading an audio book onto it or are they generally using it to take three players? that's a great question and we actually had our mp3 players didn't move as well as I had hoped when we first got them and I think that's part of the reason because we had blank mtmp3 players and people could download audio books here and it did happen, I found myself downloading it more frequently than the patron and so what we decided to do during this closure is we bought some audio books that we own and we can put those on up to six devices no, three, audio books only let you have three so we put some actual books on there now and I know that they're going to circulate a lot better I'm still working on getting the harry potter audio books which we really want to put on but my credit card won't do it it thinks it's fraudulent because it's a UK purchase so I still have some calling to do on that credit card to make that work but we're putting some audio books we have put some and we're putting some more on and I think they'll circulate better when there's something on there for people to try have you had any issues or what to do about with ADA accessibility? I'm not understanding the the question for people that need special I understand what that is but what was the question as far as how to handle those issues or have you had any because of ADA accessibility on the left on the things you're checking out we have a volunteer who's in a wheelchair and she's able to use all of these devices so I guess I don't really understand what element of ADA these things wouldn't be accessible to you saying an MP3 player is no good for a deaf person so they check out a reader I don't get it the clarification is that they've been told that nooks are not ADA accessible because there's no audio component on the older ones I would offer our MP3 players for somebody that would need to hear it in an audio form and then vice versa that someone who is deaf to offer them an e-reader so I know people that are looking for audiobooks yes you can do audiobooks on some of the newer readers our readers do not have audio capability they're old they're already old so but our kindle fire and color yeah we could you can have some audiobooks so you offer the various types of devices so that there is not a problem there's always something that someone can use that's how I feel is that we do try and offer something for everyone and I'm thinking maybe somebody is referring to a recent article that was on library link of the day that talked about that but I really do feel that since we're not limiting ourselves to just one device just one type of device that we really are providing something for everyone so that we are out of the time for this session if there are lots of other questions that came in if we didn't get to ask your question you can contact them their email addresses are there you can feel free to contact them directly to ask your questions thank you so much yes I want to thank the pair of you for doing this it was absolutely wonderful and it sounds like people were really getting into it and asking a lot of questions so with that with that we are now at the end of this session and we're going to take a ten minute break and we will be back with you at the top of the hour at 3 o'clock Central Time to talk some more about programming thanks a lot for attending we'll be back in a few minutes