 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. Yes, we are a webinar. You can call us that. We will not be offended. We'll recover anything that may be of interest to librarians. The show is free and open to anyone to watch our live shows and to watch our recordings. We have our recordings all posted on our website. We do the show live on Wednesday mornings at 10 a.m. Central Time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We have almost to the end of our fifth year of doing Encompass Live. And recordings of all of our shows are available on our websites. You might go back there and watch them and listen to them there, along with any presentations that people have shared with us that they've used or any websites that they have shared in their show and their presentations. We have all of that linked from the archives pages as well. We do all sorts of things here. Presentations, interviews, any training sessions, demos, book reviews. Basically, anything related to libraries we are happy to have and want to have on our show to share with everyone. We have guest speakers that come in sometimes, and we have Nebraska Library Commission staff that do presentations. And that's what we have today. Sitting here with me, you can't see them because we don't have the camera set up for that at the moment. We have other purposes for that. We have Dave and Scott both from the Talking Book and Braille service here at the Library Commission, which is actually a national service. There's these Talking Book and Braille services all over the country. But they're going to talk about some new things coming from Talking Book and Braille. So I will just hand over to you guys to introduce yourself more fully and take your way. Thank you, Krista. You're welcome. Well, we want to use our time this morning as an update to Talking Book and Braille service to show you what's new, especially look at online resources. We've added some new pages to our home page and show you what's there. And also, you want to spend some time on VARD and with the VARD app so you can see what that's about. First of all, what you're seeing is our Nebraska Library Commission home page and Talking Book and Braille service has a fly-off that says Press. And on that Press page, we've added a couple of PSAs and two YouTube videos. Now, PSA1 is a public service announcement that came to us on audio cassette a number of years ago. We were able to digitize it and make it crisp again. And it's still app-proposed. So we've offered that. Encourage radio stations to play that here in Nebraska. PSA2 is one that we use a script from National Library Service but we recorded it. And we also think that's going to be appropriate for promoting Talking Books. So can we hear the PSA1 to begin with? Yes, let's start with PSA1. When I started losing my vision, one of the greatest losses to me was the ability to pick up and read a book. So I took advantage of the Talking Book program. It fills a need for information and recreation when you can no longer read a book from five years ago. It wasn't. Called the Nebraska Library Commission Talking Book and Braille Service at 1-800-742-7691. And PSA2 is the one that we recorded in our studios using a Library of Congress script. Reading is something you can enjoy no matter where you are, even if you can't hold a book, turn a page, or read regular print. Because just for you, there are Talking Books and National Service at the Library of Congress. I've followed recordings of best-sellers, classics, even the latest magazines. And you can get Talking Books and playback equipment by mail at no charge if you're eligible. For information, call the Nebraska Library Commission Talking Book and Braille Service at 1-800-742-7691. We have an email service. We sent out the PSA link to Nebraska's stations asking them to please consider playing these. We have a personal contact with one of the corporations that owns a number of stations in Nebraska. We have more prospects of having it played there. We don't have any feedback yet about how well they're being received. But I hope that they'll get some airtime. PSAs are competitive and a lot of nonprofits are trying to use them now, so it's hard to judge that. Yes, we ended up opting to do 30-second spots too rather than 60-second spots in the hopes that they'll be more likely to be played too. Just because I know a lot of the programmers at different radio stations want to try to get as much content like that into a program as possible. So if we have something relatively short, they're more likely to add it into a show. So I think so far so good. We've had some of the local stations like KZUM here in town has them in their playlist already. We're still working on some of the more commercial type stations. But it's a work in progress and they're relatively quick and easy to make, so it's a good promotional tool to continue to work on and develop. We plan to work on a couple more PSAs early next year that will deal with some of the new evolving technologies involved with talking books. One will probably focus more on the BARD website that we'll be demonstrating shortly and the possibility of downloading books. And then one will probably deal more specifically with mobile devices, the iPhone and iPad app and eventually the Android app. That's right. We could have done a 15-second PSA, which is the other category, but the third 30 seconds was the kind of compromise between not going too long and... And just reading our phone number. That's right. It was really tight. Exactly. We have two YouTube videos. The first one, the lower part of the screen, was designed as an outreach to students and to schools. And that was done by staff. We did have a commercial camera operator, a videographer work with us. So let's pay that one. Yes. I'll mention again to you if you want to see these, in case it's difficult to hear the audio as you're watching the webinar. If you just go to nlc.nebraska.gov-tbbs-press.aspx, you can access all these materials directly. And I would recommend with these videos, if you watch them, go ahead and click on the YouTube link on each one so that you can watch it larger as well. And just get to fly out from Talking Books and Braille services. That's right. Yes. Over on the left here on the main screen, if you go to Talking Books and Braille, press will be one of your options. And after the show is over and the recordings, we'll have all of these links also included in our show notes in the commission's delicious account. So I'll have links to those as well. So if you can't catch the whole URL there, we'll have them available afterwards and everyone will get sent that info. Great. Well, I will go ahead and open this whole screen. And this is the first day I say we finished this one right at the end of February this year. It used to be, if you had trouble reading, you might have to listen to a percent player like this. Talking Book and Braille service has digital books and magazines that you can listen to on digital players. Both the books and the players are known to qualifying individuals at no cost to the person for school. There are fiction and nonfiction books, with one reading class, English class, school papers, and cards. The digital player is about the size of an iPad. Choose what you'd like to read from online catalogs or bar. You can download them yourself or send it out first. Leaders and advisors can help you search for your favorite author, title, or subject, and answer questions. To register for free talking books, fill out the application form. You are eligible if it's hard to use regular print because of your visual or physical impairment or a reading disability. Have it signed by a resource teacher, media specialist, nurse, or doctor. For a reading disability, a medical doctor's signature is required. Schools can receive books and players too. A staff member completes a facility application form and lists who will be using the service. Talking Book and Braille service. Check it out. Chapter 1. In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone you've told me, just remember that all the people in this world have a problem. Okay, that was filmed in a high school media center here in Lincoln. Now, the other one that you're going to see is targeting seniors. That is senior citizens. Many of them might live in a retirement center or a care facility. But we chose not to film it in a facility. Instead, we chose to film it in someone's house. In fact, it was Scott's house. It's actually my house. It's his house, but it has a nice warm woodwork, very homey-looking. We thought it wouldn't appeal that way. The model is someone that we met at a CE event. He is a presenter. He provided service-free, but the videographer was forever in modest feet. As it turns out, the CE presenter is actually a patron of our service as well. He discloses that. This was finished. The final edit was done yesterday. Yesterday, so this is brand new. It was a long time in coming. There was a lot of work on these. Let's go ahead and play that one. The first one is called Talking Books Here Now. This one is called Talking Books Relax and Enjoy. You'll see we tried to create a relaxing atmosphere and show how using the service is both easy and it's a very enjoyable thing to do. Low stress, the new players are very simple to use compared to cassette. So here it is. My name is David and I use the Talking Book in Braille Service. It's a free library available in Nebraska. We can't use regular things because of this old or visual impairment. Well, come on inside to tell you all about it. The Talking Book in Braille Service affords audio books and magazines. The books are lightweight. Put them all on your hand. Westerns. Mysteries. Romance. Classics. Inspiration. And more. Find just the books you're looking for. Here's how the system works. You let them know what books and magazines are you would like. The books and magazines are listed online and they're large for the catalog to know too. You can call your readers and find them. They can help you search by author, title, or something. You can also email in your request, send an email, or submit a book and magazine request using the online catalog. You can put forward. You can also download books. The books and magazines are checked out and they're back and forth in the menu. The book which is already been done. The flyer makes the list of books. First, the power button. Slip in the book and you are set. The sound is clear even with the volume up high. And you're finished with the book. But look how easy the thing will be. You can set up in your own name. And the retirement center of each episode can be set up on your point. This free service. The application. In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me just remember that all the people in this world have a heavy advantage just like you. Okay Scott, let's just talk about Bard. Yeah, well yeah, let's go ahead and jump into Bard. We discussed it a little bit, probably a little bit more in that first video than the second because we were aiming that one at younger students. And of course there's a lot of competition out there for how to get audio books. And some of the patrons that we look for with younger audiences tend to also have organic dysfunction disorders, dyslexia and related situations in which they're basically dealing with a print disability where they want something that's cool. They don't want to be carrying around this big clunky cassette player kind of like to set up in that video. And so with Bard, I think it's one of those situations where it's a little bit more of a mainstream sort of feel where you can go to a website, find what you want, take some control of your own books without having to wait around for the mail to show up. And so to use Bard, you have to already be a patron of our service. You have to fill out those application forms like you saw in the video and be signed up conventionally first. At that point, you can also sign up for Bard in which you'll be given a login and password. You need to already have your own email and have some familiarity with how to use computers and download files, copy them onto flash drives and that sort of thing so that you can use them either with the player or as we'll see in a bit with the app as well. And so once you have a login, I'll go ahead and log myself in here. Oh, hey, even though it's early, I want to go ahead and click on that. There we go. So this is the login page. Let's see, I don't really want to remember my passwords. Let's see this. And from this main Bard page, first of all, you'll notice in the upper left corner, there's the great seal of the state of Nebraska. There's some IP recognition that goes on with Bard so that if you get to this website, for example, from Google by typing in NLS Bard, it will recognize the IP of the computer that's logging in and take you to the appropriate seal for the state or the regional library that is closest to your IP. So in this case, we're in Nebraska. So the great seal of Nebraska shows up there. And to use Bard, there's a couple ways to do it. Some folks like to browse to find new materials, and some people are searching for very specific things. If you're into browsing, right at the top here, you'll see two links, recently added books and magazines, and most popular books. Why don't we go ahead and go into recently added books and magazines. And at this point, it looks like there's 977 items in here. And there's also 123 Braille items we can go to. These would be Web Braille, and you would download them and use them with a refreshable Braille display. And basically, you can go in here, and from November 19th, they uploaded quite a few things just yesterday. So here's the newest edition of the nation. Readers digest in German. Sports Illustrated, People Magazine. Here's a book. Each of the books will have a small annotation and tell you about the reading time for the book, general subject issues. And to download these, it's really simple. All you do is pick something that you want. I'll go back to a magazine, because these are a little smaller here. And you just click on it. And it'll ask you, if you want to open it or save it, you'll want to save it. And you just click OK, and it downloads. I didn't bring a player up here today because we're going to be demonstrating the app in more detail. But if you use these, once you've downloaded them, what you would do is unzip the file. And copy it and paste it onto a flash drive or a blank cartridge that fits into the NLS player. You can put multiple books and magazines on one cartridge or flash drive. And then you just pop them into your machine and play them. But in this case, let's go ahead and go back and look at the find books function. In this case, you can search the collection by just putting any keyword you like in this first search the collection box. You can also search by author, name, title, or subject. These bring up drop-down menus. I personally don't find these as useful simply because there are a lot of books on art at this point. So, for instance, if you go into H's or author's last name, you'll get a pretty significant number of pages. So, yeah, we have 3,160 hits for authors. These last names begin with H. So this almost becomes kind of a browsing situation on its own here just because of the volume of authors that are involved. There is a foreign language collection that you can access and then a music collection as well. These materials are handled at the Library of Congress National Library Services office. They do have some things that they send out by mail as well in terms of music, and they're generally instructional materials as opposed to things to listen to, like how to play guitar, how to play accordion, cheat music for various different things, that sort of thing. And again, magazines are listed alphabetically by title, or if there's a particular magazine you're looking for, there's a nice drop-down menu that you can go to and look at all the back issues that they have too. Art's been around for a couple years now, and there are quite a few things on here. So, for example, let's go to National Geographic. If we go ahead and go into National Geographic, you'll see that we have 12 issues that are currently available. They're up to date with the November issue already, and you can go back all the way to, let's say, December of last year. And then there are even older issues if you're looking for a back issue. You can go back a little further, 74, so this will probably take you back several years. So, there's a lot of material. If there was a particular article you were looking for that someone told you about, you could go back and find that magazine. How far back you can go depends on the publication. Some magazines were prepared and put on the bar before others, and so back issues for some go back several years, and some may go back even four or five or six years. Let's go back to the main page here. There is a list of, you can do a wish list, and let me go ahead and click on that right now. If you happen to be at your desktop computer and you're interested in some books that you might want to listen to later, this wish list works very nicely with the new barred app for the iPhone and iPad. If you see things in a wish list that you want to add, I've added a couple things here just so that you can see them. As you're browsing, you can add things to your wish list, and that facilitates downloading them more easily with the app. So, in this case, I added this story of the Dust Bowl to my wish list so that we can look at it later here. But let's go back to here on the main page. And again, if you want to search for author title or subject, in a specific way, you can just put the author directly in here. Do you guys have a particular author you want to look at today? Let's see, it looks like Dave has a list here too. Yeah, let's do best for your Aldrich. I just think of Nebraska author. Yes, we'll go ahead and put in Aldrich. Okay, so there's 12 books by just searching on the word Aldrich. One of the title, eight in the author, three in the annotation. So starting with the title, it looks like that one was not what we wanted, but here's a bunch that we want. A Lanternator Hand, probably the most famous, classic by best for your Aldrich. A Lightbird Flying, Journey into Christmas, Miss Bishop, Song of Years, Spring Came on Forever, and Lieutenant's Latee. So there's actually quite a few. I think those are all the big, best for your Aldrich hips, really. And I think you're going to find many of those are given on bargain digital, but they're on cassette in other places, and cassette is fading away so quickly. Yeah, we should mention cassette is rather dramatically faded away. Yes, it's not gone, yeah. They started fading them out years ago, right? It's been an ongoing process. That's the guiding it now, so that's right. Yeah, with the digital books have been out for, what, a little over three years now? Yeah, coming up on the floor. And in the meantime, they continue to make the sets for about a year overlap in the middle, and then discontinued new cassettes and focused everything on digital. At the same time, NLS was already having their contractors produce the books in a digital ready format, even before the books were actually available to the public digitally. So they've had archives that went back probably a decade. Yeah, they've been preparing this for a while. Yeah, behind the scenes. Yeah, and in terms of book numbers, these book numbers may not mean much to some folks out there. Typically, these are chronological. NLS issues a five-digit book number as the book is in production. And so, for example, lantern in her hand here, 24820, that's a pretty old book. That number dates back to the early to mid-80s, I think. So in cases like this, what has happened is NLS kept really nice archives of their tapes as they were being recorded, so they have real-to-real masters of a lot of these books, and they converted them to digital as well. Some of them sound better than others, but most of them actually sound surprisingly good. They did a great job of maintaining those materials so that they could be transferred into different formats in the future. And so we have some contemporary books. All the new books were basically born digital as it were in the last decade or so, even though we were circulating them on cassette for a good chunk of that time, they were being produced. The masters in digital. Exactly. So those books all sound pristine. And most of these older books, again, sound pretty good too. Whitebird Flying, 435 numbers are early 90s. And those are really nice recordings, too. But it's pretty impressive. They have books dating all the way back into the 70s that they've been able to convert to the digital format. Nice. And bringing the cassette books into digital is an ongoing process. Yes. It's going to be ongoing for quite a while. Yep. So I guess those are the main things about how Bard works from a functional perspective. And again, as a setup to talking about this app, you need to have some familiarity with Bard and using computers in general to take that next step to using the app. Theoretically, I suppose, you could do most of your work with the app. But again, it's one of those issues where there's a certain presumption that you've already had a lot of training with computers and using digital objects before you would jump to using an app. Simply because we definitely like to help people out if they're having some issues with downloading, but past a certain point, we're not really in a position to train someone how to use an iPhone or an iPad from a foundational perspective. We can help them with a few little tips and tricks. But the actual functionality of the device is something they should already have some familiarity with before they would want to go ahead and download and use it. And the same applies for Bard too. We definitely will help people out if they're having certain problems with their computer. But there's only so much we can do over the phone in terms of tech support if we can't find the files on their computer. We'll help them out as much as we can, but sometimes it's a situation of suggesting that a computer class might be in order or something of that nature. So the app itself, here's a page on the iTunes website, the preview page kind of showing the app. Theoretically, anyone could download this app because the iTunes Store is available to anyone. It is a free app, anyone could download it, but of course you have to be a patron of the National Library Services before you can actually use the app. So it'd be pointless. Exactly. You wouldn't be able to log in because that login and password would be issued to you through Bard, and you need that login and password to initialize this app. Right now, the app is only available for iOS devices, the iPhone, the iPad, and the iPod Touch. We can all use the app. They are working on a droid version of the app, and there's been some delay. They have to start over with the design of it. Apparently it's considerably different in terms of architecture when you're coding it. And so the latest that we've heard is they're hoping to have it out sometime maybe middle to late 2014. So it's going to be a while, but there will be a droid version eventually as well. And the look and feel of this app, we've been amazingly pleased with it. It's really quite cool. Let's look at these screenshots for just a moment, too. We'll actually look at the device in action here in a second, but you probably saw the close-up in one of those videos of our player, and you'll notice that this first screen cap that's roughly in the center of your screen looks very much like the physical player that we send out to people as well. So there's a certain look and feel that's automatically built into these that it's very easy to make the adjustment from using the physical machine to the app. And again, you would need to have an iTunes account already in order to download it and your own ILS device to use. We do warn people to, in terms of downloading, you may want to use Wi-Fi rather than save your phone service for downloading in terms of bandwidth, because if you were to download a whole bunch of books, you might end up having to pay extra for your bandwidth. So that's one thing to keep in mind as a user of the device. Currently, there are 45 reigns. It looks like it's got four and a half stars out of five. Here's some customer reviews from iTunes. The app is everything it was promised to be. The sound quality is excellent. The controls are identical to the physical machine. The bar app has vastly exceeded my expectations. So far, it's really been quite well received. I know Dave just demonstrated it a little bit at the NFB State Convention. Do you want to mention a little bit about that? Yeah, I've been out maybe two or three weeks, and I was scheduled to make a presentation to the National Federation of the Blind at the State Convention in North Black. And that was fine, and they wanted me to come a day early because there's an exhibit at this hall, and they would provide a table of no cost if I would just be there to respond to questions and meet people. So I went a day early, I brought along an additional player, and I brought along the iPad that was loaded with the app and ready to go for demo. There wasn't a lot of traffic because there were programs and sessions, but I had a sample, and I talked to some of the blind consumers who were career age, and maybe somewhat older, and they were pleased to know about the app. They really wanted to ask questions about the digital player. They weren't into iOS themselves personally. I talked to some college-age consumers. They loved the app, and some of them knew about it. Some of them had it already. One young lady is an avid iOS user, but didn't have the app and didn't know about it. But I watched her, and she was able to use the voiceover commands, which is a built-in accessibility feature for blind people, and she had no problem making it work for her. One young guy was a lot of fun. He said, I really want this app, and I'm loyal to my Android. I'm going to hold out for that. And I told him, okay, I hope within eight months or so, I hope he did it. But there is a feeling about my Android is important, my iOS is important. This is a generation that grew up with these things. Yes. Part of the delay has to do with the way the voiceover feature works in iOS. It's really built into the system from the ground up, whereas the way it works on Android devices is different, and so architecturally, they were having some problems making sure that the device would be fully accessible, and they don't really want to release anything until it is 100% fully accessible. And they gave us heads up. They said this is a more difficult piece of engineering, so it would be a bit longer. And it's going to come. But I agree too. I've used an iPhone for several years and an iPad for about a year, and gosh, they really did a great job designing the app so that it's quite intuitive to be using iOS apps. One of the things about designing things like this is you could take a lot of different approaches, but you want to find something that's a healthy balance between duplicating the functionality of our physical machines and behaving in a way that's fairly predictable for someone who's already used a lot of different types of apps so that the learning curve isn't steep at all. And really, it is quite bug and play. If you've already used an iOS device, well, as you'll see here in a moment with this demonstration, and it doesn't really take very long at all to get fully functional with the app. I guess maybe it's time to go ahead and start the demonstration here too. Switch over. I'll get the iPad turned on here and link it up. Perfect. Okay, so we're going to switch to... There you go. You're all good to go. Okay, is this all on the screen? Perfect. Okay. I'll go ahead and keep the camera face here. But the app itself, you do have to log in the very first time that you use the app. After you've done that, you stay logged in as you open it subsequent times. Of course, if you have to make a password change or something like that on Bard, you will have to log in again at that point. But really, there's just the one time, so it's really quite easy to do. From there, there are four buttons at the bottom of the screen, settings and now reading. Let's start with the now reading just for fun because that's the screen that looks very much like our physical player. It really does work very much like the physical player. I'll just jump back to the beginning. Alright, so from here, the button functionality is basically playing stop is the green button in the center. I'll go ahead and hit that and we'll listen for just a second here. Illustrated by Lane Smith. Text, Copyright, John Cheska, 1993. All rights reserved. Read by Ray Hagen. This book was originally created for audio cassette playback. Any announcements concerning cassettes do not apply to this recording. This version contains markers allowing direct access to major portions of the book. Library of Congress annotation. Sam, Joe and Fred. We don't need to listen to a whole book right now but you can rewind and fast forward in small increments with the rewind button to the left of play stop and fast forward button to the right of play stop. You can skip over the large portions with the buttons just above that. This is basically depending on what you've selected in the center button right now or on front matter. We can use phrase jump. Bookmark. There's a bookmark button up here that says mark. You can add your own bookmarks. Let's say you're reading a book along with a book club. You can mark some pertinent sections that you want to return to to analyze the book and you can skip back and forth using that bookmark selection. Jump, front matter. At this point we can skip one to chapter one just by skipping to chapters. Two. Chapter two there, etc. Another really cool thing I think with the iPad and iPhone is there is a new way that you can access different sections of the book by jumping into this main navigation. Navigation menu. This is something you can't do with the physical player but the physical player is basically a linear device. You're skipping back and forth left and right through the audio. In this case you can actually jump ahead by selecting the different chapter markers that are already in the book. These will be situational and it will depend on the way that the book is marked up. Fiction books, we don't have nearly as many marks as a nonfiction book. Nonfiction books might actually have many layers that are nested in here. Let's say it's a cookbook. You may have main sections like your soups and your breads and so forth and then individual recipes within that and then ingredient lists within that. You can find all those things in these navigation windows and just go directly to them which I think is kind of neat. There's nothing you can't do with the physical player so this actually might be an even better way to use the books in some circumstances. For pleasure reading of course if you are just reading a fiction book you probably don't want to jump ahead that much so it's maybe not as useful in some cases but depending on your reading habits magazines again I think are an area where you might want to skip. For example we record Nebraska Farmer here and if you are someone who is more of a rancher than a farmer you may want to skip over the sections about growing corn and then go straight to beef producer which is something you can do. It's kind of neat how those work but let's go ahead and go to the bookshelf section. In the bookshelf you're going to find things that you've already downloaded to your mobile device. We have audio books, audio magazines and then Braille books and magazines. There's a help file as well. That help file actually takes you to the internet and it's a PDF file that NLS can update as time goes on so if they make some feature changes or fix bugs or that sort of thing that file will be continually updated so the help will always be current. In the case of audio books I don't have any Braille devices on here because we don't have a refreshable Braille display for demonstration purposes but if I click on audio books on this particular device we've downloaded three books at the moment. We have a Louis Lamour book down the Long Hills Kitty in the Summer by Judy Belton and that John Triska book that we just had up. The other cool thing is the device will remember what are you wearing so if you're kind of grazing a book in a magazine at the same time and you switch back and forth between them the device will remember where you last were in that material and take you back to the same spot when you bring it back up. So if we go into the Louis Lamour looks like I was pretty close to the beginning of it in Chapter 2 last time this was up but if I hit play I wouldn't jump right anywhere it was. It says in that commendation page. Looks like it's reading a bit of a bibliography at that point of Mr. Lamour but if we go back to bookshelf let's go back to magazines. Here we have a September issue Diabetes Forecast and a September People Magazine and again it will just remember where you were in these. Let me show that navigation section. Navigation menu. This navigation menu even has the tags for the names of things so if you're really worried about Can Bethany bounce back? Can Bethany bounce back? With a new talk show and a fresh start the reality star opens up about men, marriage, and life as a single mom. There you go. So you can kind of jump around. Navigation menu. Let's go ahead and go back to the second selection at the bottom over here which is get books. This basically takes you to a mobile version of the BARB website. If we want to go to those recently added titles this is very similar to the screen we just saw using a desktop computer except that now we're reliant on the Wi-Fi in this room so it's taking a moment to grab it. It is looking. This isn't so much a function of the app being slow it's a function of one. Exactly. While that's loading too I can show you since we have a camera here. I brought my phone up here as well just to kind of show you how it looks on a phone. I'll just hold this here. Very similar. Just a little bit smaller. As you can see it works just fine. That's to the beginning of the book. Glossary pronunciation guide. Dushiki. A brightly colored, loose-fitting grommet. Yeah. So that's basically what it looks like on that. Now we've put a cassette piece on my iPhone. You're a retro guy. Just to remember where we came from. Yes. Well you saved for an awfully long time. Well it's really taking a while to get to that. Maybe I'll use my phone for a minute while that's working because I can actually I'll just use my Wi-Fi or use the phone network here. If I go to get books. Yeah. Yeah. While the Wi-Fi we'll raise the Wi-Fi here. I'm already on the basic section here. If we go to recently added books. Gosh. Slow down. There it is. So this is very similar to what we saw on the desktop computer. To see the annotations though you have to click on the little blue buttons over here. And these will take you into the more detailed annotations. If you like what you see in the annotation you simply hit download and it will download it to your device and open it. It'll beep once the download has completed and jump right into it and it will show up in the list of bookshelf things that have been downloaded just like so. There's a settings page. Well let's see we'll go back to the iPad because it's a little larger here. On the settings page you can change the overall speed and tone of reading. The verbosity makes reference to how much the app will tell you about what page that you're on. You can reduce the verbosity by using the app for a while and you know where you're at. It also enhances what command you're touching with the control button. For people who have some vision, there's some different changes you can make in terms of contrast and font sizes. If you want to use it as a visual device and then your overall account settings you can go into your bar account from here and make changes as well. And then again I was kind of hoping that would work but it looks like it's basically the Wi-Fi is moving slow. Do you have anything you wanted to add at that point Dave? I think that's basically the overall functionality of the device. We can talk a little bit about voice over next I suppose. Yeah we could do that and it might respond. Yeah let's go ahead and jump into voice over for a moment. Again some folks who have some usable vision or are using our services with a condition such as dyslexia may use the device very much as we've just demonstrated. Others will be using the voice over feature that's built into iOS devices. And to access that I'm going to get on the iPad and go into the settings. This is something that if you were using the device with voice over all the time you would just leave it on. You can go into accessibility and the first selection here will be voice over. If I turn this on I'll set it up I guess for a moment because voice over will start speaking a lot so it's kind of difficult to demonstrate in the sense that it's going to say a lot of things basically. But let's go ahead and turn it on now and you can hear what it does when you do that. Voice over on. It changes the functionality of the devices a little bit. If you're used to using iOS devices and for instance scrolling through pages simply by swiping to the left and right it works slightly differently. And there is a voice over practice section that you can go to where it will describe what you're doing. Let's go ahead and put it on. So for instance normally to open an app you just press the app once and it opens. In this case a single press will highlight something and then you double tap to actually open it. So let's double tap on voice over practice. Voice over practice. Heading. You have to go very quickly. So if you're learning this for the first time or you're helping someone out with an iOS device using voice over, voice over practice is a great place to go just to try things. It'll tell you what happens with each type of finger gesture that you're making. Practice voice over gestures, commands and typing in this area. Select the done button in the top right corner and double tap to exit. So for example with voice over turned on to go from page to page on the front thing you use a three finger swipe like so. Three finger single tap. Speed page number almost being displayed. Three finger flick left. Scroll right one page. So there's a little description it'll tell you both visually as well as in audio what each finger gesture does. Move to previous item. Double tap. Activate the selected item. Like so. So this is something that you can play with again to kind of get familiar with it. You can turn it on and use the device for a while and then just go and turn it off again too. It doesn't take terribly long to get used to. I've turned it on periodically kind of testing these apps. It feels weird for the first five or ten minutes but you get used to it very quickly and again if it's something you do all the time it just becomes completely second nature and quite intuitive. So to get out of these screens you select done and then double tap it and then we'll go to set voice over. And you just double tap to turn voice over off. So that's basically how it works. You can also change the speaking rate in here, things like that. Yeah I was going to ask about that. She's talking very very fast. Which I know a lot of people with visual they're very used to that. Yeah these kinds of descriptions the faster they can get through them and still discern the text typically is better just because those voice over works very very well but the voice itself is kind of annoying I guess. It's always there. Exactly. So that's basically how the app itself works. Did we have any questions or anything? We did have a few other resources we could talk about as well. Anybody does have any questions or you want to see anything specifically demoed let us know use the questions section of your GoToWebinar interface to type in any questions, comments or anything you have and we'll do that. Nothing is coming while you're doing it though. No it was just my imagination. Back to the home page. Let's go ahead and play out for Cavalogs we'll show you some other online Cavalogs. Sure. There you go. Cool. Alright. Let's get back to our web page. So here's the main Nebraska Library Commission web page. That's right. On the left column at the bottom you'll see Talking Books and Braille and if you hover over that with your mouse you'll see a bunch of play out menus. Let's try Cavalogs and a few men are still there. So under collections I'm going down to Cavalogs. And the first one would be well let's do our own O-Pack. Our computer team worked with reader and visor staff and we created an O-Pack that would show not just you to Cavalog but the materials that we actually have in our collection that might be and just online ordering through the O-Pack that way. Yeah this has been a really cool thing that happened in the last year really. We're very very excited about this because the circulation software that we use is called Reads. We get it free from the Library of Congress and it works very well but one thing that it lacks is an integrated O-Pack. And so this has just been really phenomenal to have our own O-Pack mix in. So you can choose all fields off your title and let me see I think I chose a couple of authors to try. Oh yes. Let's go with Joanne Fluke F-L-U-K-E and then Joanne is J-O-A-N-N-E she likes these mysteries full of recipes and we under format we can limit format let's try just digital because we're pushing digital and we don't offer the cassettes as we used to and 25 displays ought to be enough but what do you think? Let's see what that does. Here we go. There they are. If you click on each one you'll tell you the annotation. Yes. Murders and muffins. What a scrumptious. All right and it's DB55213 it's popular because probably have only one or so copies in there outright. But if you check the box there's a box no there isn't. Yes there is. Yeah there should be a box percent. I don't know if it gets the screen resolution here. If you do that then you come down to request selected items and it leads you to the you can check all of them or any of them. Oh yeah the box the display is having a kind of strange of the box that we have right there. It is. It just shows up. We kind of crunch the screen put it away in our way. Believe us it's there. I'll go ahead and click on that one and that one sounds delicious and you need to know who you are a bit you borrow that is it would be the name but city phone number and a note would be something like I need this for a local book discussion group send it right away so we could expedite it around so it could become a request and not something that could expedite it. Or you could just tell us that you like us. Anything you want to say? I need a recipe maybe that's it. So there's that one. Yes if you end up having problems with the site too the phone number is listed there as well. A couple of links to send e-mail to your reader advisor. That was one and one was on the beginning of that. There it is. For the bottom left opening page. That's right. Oh you know we should mention magazines here too. We added a section to make it really easy to get magazines. If you subscribe to a magazine it will be very much like a print subscription they'll be sent to you on a regular basis to come available. You mentioned how many issues per year occur that way too. And it's really easy to use. You just click on the one that you want and you'll get signed up for it. So you can go in and read about it decide if you like it and at the bottom of this page there'll be another we'll skip down. We have a lot of magazines. You can go to our e-mail phone number. So you put in your info here and click on send worker and you'll be automatically signed up to receive those. Yeah, these work out very well. A lot of these are recorded in our own studios we do have a few things for example like this last entry hearing or dog is recorded at the Massachusetts regional library and those are things that they send us and we put on to digital cartridges here to send out to you. About half maybe are our studio products maybe half are brought in. Yeah I think that's about right. It's about as close to it. Now the magazine catalogs also has an audio file that's online. So you can click that and you can speak to it. It's your voice guys. It is. I think I recorded the most recent update of that. Let's see. So we have the opac. Yeah we can go down there. Talking about topics is click on talking about topics. That's a very popular periodic of the Library of Congress. It comes out six times a year. It lists the brand new talking books that we know of because the auto forms come in and the phone calls come in. But it's HD and now they're plain text. The reason they do plain text is it's got some screen readers have a plain text that needs to. That's right. Yeah. So it's broken down already for you if you're looking for children's books you can jump directly to those as well as foreign language books around in Spanish. And then fiction and nonfiction tends to be obviously the biggest divides that our patrons tend to focus on one area more than another. So that's the initial division. And it takes you right into the newest books here. All we need is this BB71772 that's all we need to know. Yeah. So that's a very easy way for people to compile a list of books that they're interested in getting in the future. Some people send us very long lists and the way we handle that is say they get five books at a time or ten books at a time whatever their preference settings are as they return books to us in the mail the next day a mail card is generated for more books that are on their list and we just continue to go through their list until it's exhausted and then they send another list. It's just like your Netflix queue. It is very much like yeah. You can set up a list and then they automatically keep sending you things. Yeah. And with the app and stuff now it's even kind of like using Netflix you know using a live streaming service as well as getting some use in the mail service for sure. The Nebraska Books and Digital is simply a listing of books that we're born digital in our studios or that we've converted from the December election mostly. Some are bought in from other sources. It's not a built in order form to this one. They need to give us the EB numbers through a phone call or an email but it's not built in the way to do that. Yeah. This is growing. This is the list of stuff that's happening in my desk actually so it continues to grow so as quickly as we can anyway. Obviously all the new books immediately are digital and then other books specifically when we get requests we try to move those into digital as quickly as possible but just in general we try to convert whatever we can as time allows. We do have a question. Two questions sort of. Pam Baumfalk who's at our Hastings Public Library talking about the recorder, the players themselves. Our library is ever going to get replacement digital players for our local patrons like we have had for cassette recorders and related to those should we be sending the existing cassette machines back to you guys ones they may still have. Yes, send the RC players, the cassette players back to us. Yes, let us know you want a couple of the digital players. What we're finding is the digital players have better longevity than the cassette ones did which is big the same turnover and to begin with we weren't going to do this but now we have enough digital players on hand it's not going to be a service issue so we can get maybe one of the basic machines, one of the advanced into your hands for SWAP and also for local cameras if you'd like. So yes, definitely. Obviously the digital players have less moving, these parts that you repair or anything than the cassette players did. We're finding out what the chance to go wrong is probably predictable is that the batteries don't hold the charges long as they used to when they were brand new. So the machines that we're having out for maybe two or three years are having a charged cycle of maybe like 12 hours instead of 20. Which is hilarious that we think about as a problem. Because the cassette players 12 hours was like Moses parting the waters for a cassette player because again those moving parts the motors really ate up battery power rapidly. Kansas, thank you. That's the only question that's come in so far. Does anybody have any other questions about it? Please let us know. At the bottom of this page would be a couple of some catalogs highlighting our Nebraska Braille collection. We do have a Braille Brassin collection mostly, well it would be for children and young adults and the books are organized in broad categories. The board books would be the earliest Braille leaders preschool through maybe kindergarten grades one or two and beyond that grade one Braille means it's non-contracted Braille it's letter for letter grade two Braille means it's constructed which is how you learn Braille fairly early on when the one cell might stand for several letters or even for a whole word it's how they can get Braille. Anyway, we also mounted the tactile maps and raised illustrations from Library of Congress. It's somewhat dated but it can be useful that it's still there. Yeah, it's interesting that most of the hear about and talk about the talking books section the audio books and everything but I do know downstairs there's that whole section in the front on our first floor here with all the Braille books and the decorations for the kids and stuff so it's always you know makes us look like a real public library so there's a huge section down there like nobody ever really talks as much about these. Yeah, for a little Braille is it Utah Braille? Yeah, we do have some Braille that Utah will send to patrons here but that Web Braille thing too which was another function of art is really a fantastic way to go. There are these small refreshable Braille displays you can choose a variety of them in terms of specifications and how many cells are available on a device at a time but that's a great way to read those to much more compact because Braille books tend to get rather large so it's a great way to just have a little thing you can carry in your pocket and sort of re-brail. Okay, well no new questions have come in. If you guys are I think we covered the basics. I want to say thank you, Krista. Thank you, Michael. It took a lot of camera work, labeling. Moving things around. Thank you, Scott. You guys did great. This was awesome. We had gotten a demo of this here at the Library Commission and one of our staff meetings a month or two ago. And definitely wanted to get this out there for everyone to see what was coming and what is out there now available. The iOS is out and Android coming next year. Coming soon, hopefully. I know this. A lot of people do, as you were saying, someone said you were saying I'm waiting for my Android to come. I'm not going to do that. All right, looks like nothing has come in. So thank you very much. Thank you everyone for attending this morning. I'm just going to hop over to our Encompass Live. So that will wrap up for today. No, we aren't. The session was recorded so it will be available sometime as soon as it's done processing. Everyone who attended, you'll be notified when the recording is available. So if you missed anything or you want to watch it again or share it with any colleagues who weren't able to be here today, we'll be sharing that information out on our website. All of our recordings, this is our Encompass Live webpage. All of our archive recordings end up down here on our archive and Encompass Live sessions. And as I said, this is where we've got almost five years' worth of our sessions are all here with the recordings, links, presentations, anything that's available. So that will wrap it up for today's show. I hope you'll join us next week when it is the end of the month so it is our monthly Tech Talk with Michael Sowers, the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. And he is doing a session on Excel at Re-Ranging Your Library. Chris Ripple, who's from the, from Kansas, the Central Kansas Library System did this presentation at the ARSL Conference, Association of World and Small Libraries Conference. That was here in Omaha. He needs to rearrange the setup of your library. So he's going to be on with us to show how he did that and share it. So sign up for that. And if you are a Facebook user, we are also on Facebook. So if you do want to do that, like us there, we announce when new sessions are coming up. I remind people when a new one is starting, when our recordings are available. Where's the recording one? So you'll keep up on what's going on in a couple of slides here on our Facebook page as well. Other than that, that will wrap it up for today. Thank you very much. And we will see you next week on In Couple Slides.