 Welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Christa Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online webinar series. We broadcast live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. And if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's okay. We do record the show every week and post that to our website. And I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can access those recordings and see them. We cover a variety of things here on Encompass Live. We serve all libraries in the state and the Nebraska Library Commission, as you guys know. And so we have topics for schools, academic, public, correctional facilities, all across the board. And we do a mixture of things here on the show, book reviews, interviews, demos of services and products, mini training sessions, just anything that we think may be of use to our interest to libraries out there. We do have Nebraska Library Commission staff that do presentations for us for things that are Nebraska or commission related. And we bring in guest speakers sometimes. And today, well, I guess it's kind of a mixture, I would say. Today's topic is the 2018 Public Library Accreditation Process. This is for public libraries here in Nebraska. In addition to being the host of Encompass Live, I am also the director of library development here at the Nebraska Library Commission and that puts me in charge of the accreditation program. Joining me this morning on the line is two of our regional library system directors to help chime in with any comments or advice or anything they wanna say throughout the show. So we're remotely joining us. We have Scott Childers, who is our Southeast Library System Director. Hi, Scott. Hello. And Denise Harders is here as well, who is from our Central Plains Library System. Good morning. Good morning, Denise. We do have two other regional systems. There's four of them in the state, three rivers up in the northeast section of the state and then western out, well, west. Those directors are not available to join us this morning for various reasons, but that's okay. We're good. The library system directors are, they do participate and help out with this library accreditation process, public library accreditation process a lot. So they are a good resource and that's what we have on the line with us this morning. So today and this morning, we're gonna take some time to talk about the upcoming public library accreditation process. Public library accreditation is an annual process here at the, through the Nebraska Library Commission for obviously our public libraries in the state. It is a program where we have to give them the resources to be accredited and to, you know, show that they're doing, you know, reaching certain milestones and reaching certain benchmarks at their libraries. I, for today's show, we're going to be using the website, our Nebraska Library Commission website to go through the accreditation pages and all the information we have on there. There's not an actual presentation or slides that goes along with today's show. So we're just gonna be doing things off of there. So on our website here, we have, this is the not a library commission's homepage, NLC.nebraska.gov and on our pages, we have these flyout menus here where you can access all sorts of different information about the library commission. And the second one right here off the top is for accreditation and certification that they are grouped together because they are all related. I'm gonna just bump down here to our library accreditation section to start with, but we'll be looking a lot of these different things here this morning. So public library accreditation, why would you, you know, what is accreditation and why would you even want to be accredited? As you can see here on the page, we do talk about that it does establish minimum standards for library service in the state. Libraries can compare themselves to their standards that we set or other libraries out there. You can use this information to help promote to you or stakeholders that we've reached this level of accreditation. We've actually been, you know, analyzed, I'm not sure if that's the right word, but we have looked at what we do at our library and shown that we are meeting certain things related compared to other libraries that are related similar to us. There are also some things that you can get. Why would you, you know, the advantages of being accredited here in the state? In Nebraska, if you are accredited, you're eligible for state aid to public libraries. So we're talking money. There's a formula each year that's done. And if you do apply for and are accredited for each year, for a year, for a particular year, you can receive state aid monies from us. And that money amount will vary each year. We, you are also eligible to apply for grants that we offer through the Nebraska Library Commission. We do have a grants page here as well, some grant information. We offer certain grants through the commission, continuing education grants, library improvement grants, youth grants for excellence, all of those, you do need to be accredited by us to apply for and receive those grants. So money, again. Also, they're outside of the Library Commission. Some organizations have started working towards, also use these accreditation standards to as one of their criteria. Here in Nebraska, the Creutz-Bennett Donor Advised Grants. This is a grant program through the Nebraska Community Foundation. And these are specifically grants for libraries in order to apply for those grants, which you also do need to be accredited. Those are monies you can get to do construction in your buildings, provide programs, monies you might need to do different programs. Those are for very small libraries. Your population serve needs to be 3,000 or less. So the Creutz-Bennett grants. Also, there are grants through the Department of Education, or the Community Development Block Grants through the Department of Agriculture, sorry. And USDA Community Facilities Grants. There's a couple other ones that also they have decided to use our accreditation standards as reasons for that as well. So there's a lot of different things you can apply for if you do get your accreditation through the Library Commission. There is some work that does have to go into being accredited. It is a ongoing process of keeping up with what you're doing throughout the year. It is, however, a three-year process. Every three years you are up for re-accreditation. So this year everyone who's up now, the last time you guys did it was three years ago for most libraries. And you are notified that you are up for accreditation when it comes to this time of year. The process starts July 1st. On July 1st, which is this Sunday coming up is when the application form, which I'm gonna show you will go live. So you'll be able to access that on July 1st. I will send an email to all libraries who are up for re-accreditation this year. There are 58 right down here. Yes, 58 libraries who are up for re-accreditation this year. In addition, for libraries who've never applied before or their accreditation has lapsed, they are also invited to join in as well. And they are sent an email as well saying, hey, you are also invited. In order to be invited, if you have not done accreditation, you do need to have completed the Public Library Survey. And it mentions that right here for the preceding year, as well as a supplemental survey that the Library Commission has for extra questions. So there's an annual Public Library Survey that libraries submit to us here at the Library Commission. And if you have done that, then you are eligible to be invited to apply to be accredited if you have never been accredited before. So there's an application form online that you submit and that opens in July 1st, as I said, it's due by October 1st. So we have a few months where you can work on this form, work on whatever your information you need. Once I have all the application forms, I then will look through them and evaluate them. And by the end of the year, December 31st, you would have an answer back of at the very latest if you're accredited or not. There are actually two items that you need to submit to be accredited. First one is the application form. There is also a community needs response plan. This was previously called the strategic plan. We renamed it last year as we were going through the training to better describe exactly what it is. It is a plan about libraries where you are looking into a community to see what's going on in there and then using that information to plan your upcoming programs, services, what you're gonna be doing over the next few years. So by October 1st, you need to have submitted the application form online that I'm gonna take you through a demo of here today and this strategic community needs response plan that you submit to me as an actual document. Either email it to me, fax it, mail it, whichever works for you. We'll go through some of the information about that as well. In addition to having submitted the public library survey and doing that community's response plan, there are some minimum qualifications you have to meet to be accredited. And we have those qualifications right here. There's a link here to, and I'm gonna open up a new tab to do it over here, of what basically you need to have before you can even start the process, even if you have done your survey and you have done a plan. These are some of the basic things that all libraries need to have if they even wanna get into the accreditation process. First thing here is being legally established via state statutes. We have state statutes that describe that, explain what it means to be legally established library in the state, comply with all library laws in Nebraska, rules and anything local, three local laws that have been put together at your library or in your town or in your community related to how the library runs. You have to comply with those. You do need to have a board, a library board, either administrative governing type board or advisory either one that follows also Nebraska's laws. There's their specific laws related to running of Nebraska public libraries. In addition to that following of the open meetings law, we have information about that as well. The other things that I had mentioned earlier that had to do with this that is on our website, board being certified by the library commission and director being certified by the library commission. And I'll explain those in a second too, both your library board and your director. You receive local funding from a city village township county, any of those wherever your funding comes from. As I mentioned earlier, you have submitted both the main public library survey and the supplemental survey that we asked for here at the library commission. You have staff present during all scheduled hours the library is open, paid staff being running the library. Now, a little caveat to this, there are signs when you can't don't have staff available if all of your people are going to a meeting or attending a session or attending conference here at the Nebraska library social conference or something, you can have volunteers that come in on the fly to do things like that. But as far as like a regular schedule, you do need to have paid staff for most as a regularly scheduled people. The director has an email address, which is used and checked because that is how we will contact you. It'll be emailing you about your accreditation. You don't charge anyone for your basic services that you provide, circulating your materials, using your computers, using the internet, using any items that you have, and your research services, all of those things you cannot charge for your basic services. Now, sometimes you will have services that are, like we're doing a special program and you have to pay a fee for the materials to basket weaving program and you need to pay for the materials for that. That's okay, but this is talking about the basic typical services that libraries offer. Don't charge for access to the internet as well. And you do any report that is resubmitted locally and that we can take a look at if we want to. So these are the 12 basic criteria that you have to have in order to apply as well. So those are some of the basic, the heart of the accreditation program there. There are three different levels of accreditation. This was something new. We had a new version of accreditation. It started up in 2013. Gold, silver and bronze is our three levels and gold is the highest level, 250, and of course, silver and bronze. And this was done during the original one was done, I believe it was potentially either during an Olympics time was going on when they were working on this. And so it was actually, if I've heard the story correctly, it was put out as kind of a joke, I suppose. It's like, what would we call the levels? And it's stuck and we like it, bronze, silver and gold. It does make sense. It's a good fun way to have the levels, I think. The accreditation levels are based on a point system. This is for different things that you do at your library, you can earn points towards them. And the more points you have, the higher level that you will be at. Bronze is 175 points, silver, 200 and gold, 250. And now this is a system that was, as I said, that we did some changes to the guidelines that were done and were enacted in 2013. And before that, the way the program worked, you had to, it was an all or nothing type program where you had to meet all of these criteria to get the lowest level of accreditation. And then here's the next batch of things, everything you have to do to read the next level and then the next batch to do the next one. That wasn't as good a system as it could be. So they came up with this new idea of doing that, having points assigned to each thing that a library could do. Lots of libraries do different third services, do different things and are stronger in one area than in another area. And we wanted the accreditation program to lend itself to that. So some libraries might not be doing so well here, so they don't earn these points, but they can make it up over here in this other area. Makes it much more flexible, much more based on what libraries are individually doing in each of their locations because they have different priorities, different things that their community wants compared to the one down the road. And you just can't do across the board that everybody gets evaluated and looked at in the same exact same way. Has a much more flexible system and it helps a lot more libraries to become accredited or to become accredited at higher levels, I think. And a lot of the information in here is also very community based. Our community's response plan that I'll talk about and some of the different questions that you answer in the application form are also about what you're doing out there in your community. All right, so that's some of the basics of what accreditation is. What I'm going to talk about now before I go into the form, and I just got a question, do you have anything to add? What is it, go into the certifications next. I don't have anything to add at this point. All right, so we did mention in the 12 minimum qualifications that there was two other certifications that feed into accreditation. And that's why these three things here are together in this fly out menu on our website. In order for your library to be accredited, both your board and your library director have to be certified. And for the board, we'll talk about that one here at the top here. We have a lot of information here on how your board, what needs to be done, what they need to be certified and resources that they can use. There is a library board manual, which is a really great online guide about being a board that we recommend here. There is, you can look up your library's board status and application form here, but go to the basics here. Library boards, both for library boards and for library directors has to do with doing continuing education, earning continuing education credits towards your certification. This is attending workshops, watching webinars, attending webinars, going to conference, things like that. For public library boards, your board as a whole has to earn 20 hours of continuing education credits in a three-year period. All of these things go in a three-year period, which is nice. Public library board certification, the director's certification and the library accreditation. Now, these three-year periods, however, may not match up to be expiring at the same time. It depends on when you first got your board started doing their certification. When your library director may have first started their certification process, may not be the same time as when your library's accreditation process goes. So you're gonna have to follow the dates for all of these to make sure that they, you know, when each one is expiring. As long as your board and your director is currently certified at the time that your accreditation comes due, you're all good. You know, it doesn't have to be all, the dates don't have to all line up. So if your director's certification doesn't expire till, expires in 2019, but your library is due for reaccreditation this year in 2018, that's fine. You don't have to have all of your credits done. The same thing with your board. If your board's certification is due up for renewal in 2019, but your library is due in 2018 and you've only done 10 of your hours so far, that's okay, 10 of the 20 you're supposed to have, that's okay, because you're still working towards this three year period of your board's certification. The 20 hours for the board, and this is something that I think some of the boards are not aware of or haven't caught on due, it's 20 hours in total collectively, which means the whole board has to do 20 hours, not each person. So if you have five people on your library board and all five of you sit and watch a one hour webinar, like today's for example, about accreditation, that is five hours of CE credit that you've earned for sitting together all five people and at once watching this webinar. So not too hard to reach your 20 hours in a three year period I was thinking as a library board. We also have a lot of resources here. You can check on your board status. There is a website here where you can see if the board is currently certified when the expiration date is, what library system they're part of. And if you click on the actual library's name, you'll get the specific information about that board. So here for Ainsworth, which they are actually up for accreditation this year, theirs is here showing what their library board has done, that they are currently accredited because they don't, their certifications not due until September of this year. So they've got seven done, they've got until September to get their 13 more and then they will be good to go for their, feeding this, having this feed into their library accreditation. We have a lot of resources here. Oh, there's also a form here to submit continuing education activity to us here at the library commission. There's a form where you can put in the activity and the number of hours, all in one form here you can put in something that they've attended and then list all the different members that have attended that thing and how many hours it is for that particular program, webinar, whatever it is that they attended. So we have a form here. Yes, I do wanna leave. When you attend something like this that we at the library commission are presenting ourselves, we actually track the attendance for you. So I'll be submitting that you attended this, but when it's something that we don't run, you need to make sure you submit it. Also, you can check your board status here and see if we've received something new about it that you've done and if it's not on there, send us a form. We have lots of resources here about ways that boards can earn their continuing education credits. As I said here, attending conferences, lectures, workshops, webinars, whether in person or recorded, all of these different ways that you can do it. We have specific coursework here that we've paid for for the state of Nebraska for all libraries to have access to the United for Libraries, American Library Association's United for Libraries trustee academy courses. These are specifically webinars and online resources for library boards. So there's a lot of different courses here information about being a board, working with a library director, standing up for like intellectual freedom, all of these different things that you can take. And there's a lot of these little short ones too that you can watch. All of these are things that you can do to earn a continuing education credits to go towards your board's certification. Christa. Yes. This is Denise. Hi. And library boards can request that their system directors come and address a particular topic. Like I went and talked about the Open Meetings Act at a library board meeting. And that was continuing education for all those board members. Exactly. Yes, something that, and that's a great idea to have. There is something that, there is these online things that a lot of people do, but some people learn better, their style of learning as in-person. And yeah, dude, if there's something you're like, if they're concerned about or didn't know how that particular thing ran like Open Meetings Act, or if you have new members on your board, that'll be a good time to have one of the library, the system directors Denise or Scott. Eric Jones is our system director for the Three Rivers Library System. Any of them coming in to help you, get new people on board, up to speed, say that with their being on a library board. Christa, this is Scott. And one thing that has sort of recently changed with board certification is, and this is with some new understanding of things. Long-term board members who may have been part of the school system or something used to also try to claim some of the training they did at school services as board education. And recently, it looks like that has not been always accepted. It kind of depends heavily on the topic. So- True, exactly. Yeah, what it does need to do is, and some things may carry over from schools to public libraries. That's true with some topics. But it does have to be something that would be related to or help you do your job as a public library board member. So if you attend, just because attending a class doesn't necessarily mean it counts towards this because if it has nothing to do with being a public library board member, it's not gonna feed into your certification here, correct. But if you're not sure, if it's something on the, what you submitted to us and Holly Duggan, our continue education coordinator and Linda Babcock, our administrative assistant for our department, we'll look at what you submit and decide if it is something that does meet the criteria or not. But the whole point of it is to be, for this to continue education you're doing for this purpose is to become a better, doing better at your job of being a public library board member. There's lots of other C, continue education, training that you might be doing, but if it doesn't have anything to do with being a public library board, then it's not gonna be accepted for this, correct. The other certification that you also need to have is your public library, your library director also needs to be certified. This, there's a little more to this as being certified as the director. The director has to have 45 hours of continuing education credit also over a three-year period, though, so they do have, and of course this makes sense, they need to have more education. You do need to submit an application to be participating in the certification program too. We do not just track everything all of our librarians do and assume that it's going towards this. Not all public librarians are interested in being certified or wanting to, and that's fine. So you do have to actually submit an application to be participating in the public librarian certification program first. And once you do that, then from that point on, we will be tracking your continuing education and what you do. There are different levels of certification for library directors, and this is related to whether you have received education already or if you have not, and you're going to be using our coursework here to get your certifications. So if you have either a degree in library science or any kind of degree, you can, that can also be used as part of your certification. If you have received a degree in library science areas, in any way, you can see here that you just let us know that you've done that and you will be certified at that level to start with, and then you just have to continually do continuing education credits. If you have not gotten a degree in library science, if you have no degree or if you have something, a degree in some other area, then you would need to take, as you can see here, our basic skills courses. This is a set of courses that are about the basics, obviously from the name of being a library director, running a library, and you would take those over the three year period to get all of your credits towards being certified. So you can see here, we've got a lot of information on our page about that that you can look into. Well, if you do have a degree, you get your certificate, you're good, and then for, you do still have to do more continuing education credits to renew your certificate. Even if you have a degree, you still have to do more education, keep up with things, take workshops, take training. You can take the basic skills classes, you can attend workshops, webinars, conferences, all the different things that you might want to do. If you don't, then you do have to do the basic skills requirement. If you don't already have a degree in something in library science, then you'd have to do the basic skills and take all the basic skills courses that are required. There's some basic ones and elective ones, and you can look at all those courses there. We run them throughout the whole year. So in a three-year period, you should be able to attend all the different works, all the different basic skills courses that are required to keep up that. Just like I said with the boards, if you are working towards your certification and haven't completed it, that still counts towards the library's accreditation. So don't worry if you got a brand new library director and they just submitted the application to start participating in the program to be certified, and then your accreditation comes up but they haven't finished it, that's okay. You're in the program and you're working towards your certification that will count. We will keep an eye on it though and make sure that your director does continue taking courses and working towards completing that certification. If they do not, we will notice and then that would be a reason why you could have your library's accreditation removed if they didn't complete doing that. Same thing with the board. So we do track all of this to keep track of it. There's a lot of stuff I can talk about at library certification but you've got all the information on here. You've got links to what kind of things you can earn credits for. There is a CE record review where you can log in and check your personal records. This would be something you'd have to log in with them so I don't have one I can show you here but you can check yourself online and see what has been submitted for you. Well, how many credits you have, how many credits you need. You can log in right here to see that yourself and keep track of how you're doing as a library director. Now this is as far as accreditation for your library is concerned, the director has to be certified but additional staff at your library can also participate in the public library certification program as well. And if they completed, you can earn more points towards your accreditation by having more staff that are also certified as well. So that's optional for them if they want to. It's a great program to keep up on things especially going through the basic skills classes about the basics of how to run a library. All right, Gironys, anything else you wanna add about the certifications? I don't have anything else. Okay. No, I'm good. All right, so just important things are make sure you keep your board up to speed on doing their CE. That is something that we've discovered is sometimes a struggle for some libraries is their board doing those things. But you've got a lot of resources here and for the librarians, make sure you actually sign up for the program, submit the application, say you want to participate it and then start keeping up on your credits there. We do, as I said, keep track of this. As I said, Linda Babcock, she will reach out to you or administrative assistant and if you know you're coming up to a renewal deadline, we'll reach out to you and remind you that did you know your accreditation, your certification is coming due, you're going to expire in like the one that we looked at was in September for that board and you need this many credits. So please just letting you know that this is something you need and what I wanna be working towards. So we do keep an eye on that and try and nudge you to make sure you don't fall behind. So those are two kind of outside of the accreditation program, things that feed into it. And then you've got all those reports submitted, you meet those 12 minimum requirements and then you have your community's response plan. I'm gonna look at that briefly here first to show you what that's all about. Now, all of our libraries that are currently in the accreditation program and are being re-accredited this year would have done one of these when it was previously called the strategic plan the last time that they had to do their accreditation three years ago. So anyone who has done, who is being re-accredited in 2018 you should have a copy of your previous plan. It would be called the strategic plan because that used to be called. And you can use that to build on to create your new updated community needs response plan. The name of the plan has changed not a lot of the, none of the actual content of the plan has changed. We've just changed it because there was a lot of confusion over calling it a strategic plan. Strategic plans are something that organizations or municipalities or cities or libraries may have. And that's great. The strategic plan that was created for this purpose for accreditation is not as we went through it and we're using it over the years realize it's not really a your traditional strategic plan as you think of it. And Scott actually came up with the idea of it's actually about community needs community needs assessment and response. And that's what we're really focusing on this plan. Not your like a five year strategic plan of everything the library will do. It's just looking at your community. So we decided that he came up with this new moniker for it. Community needs response plan. And it really does explain much better exactly what we're looking for. We want you to look at your community see what's going on out there and find some things that the library can do to respond to that. This may be something completely separate from if your city or your library does have a strategic plan that they work from for all library or processes. But this is just something specific that we have for accreditation purposes. And like I said, you should have a previous one that you can base on your new one on. If you're not sure where that is previous director didn't keep track of it misplaced it. You're not sure where yours is. We have copies of them all here and I can get you a copy of yours. So just let me know if you need that. Then we're going to go just quickly through some of these about what you do need to do and having a computer needs response plan. And we have a lot of resources on our page about this mission statement, a community profile. We look at the demographics of your community, looking at your community's needs. What is going on in the community that's doing like focus groups and surveys and things. And then analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. You're the depending on your point of view. Love it or hate it. Swat analysis, strengths and weaknesses of the library and opportunities and threats outside the library. Then you analyze these things, come up with some goals, basis information you've created, you've collected and submit that plan of what you're going to do to me. I did do we did do training earlier this year in person and online about accreditation and more digging deeper into community needs response plans. And there's a recording of that on our website that you can look at along with slides and workshop materials. So take a look at that to learn more about it. We have examples here of other library's plans. Some of these are older ones. Some are the new ones that they submitted that were actually now the new community needs response plans. So you can take a look at these and see some examples. These plans can range from five pages long to 30 pages long. There's not a set format. So you're going to do whatever works for you. And then we have these worksheets and how to guides and help guides that you can help you figure out what you need to do for each of these sections. Planning, looking at your community profile, running surveys. So use all of these resources, all of these worksheets to put together your plan. This is something that you would submit to me along with the application that we're going to look at in a second here. And I will then evaluate it and look at it and let you know if anything needs to be changed on it. This is also something that you really, really depend, can depend on your system directors, Denise, Scott, Eric to help you write these as well. If you have a draft version of this and you want one of them to look at it for you, that's great. Have them do it. If you need them to come and help, you know, come meet with you as Denise said about other things, they can come and meet with you and talk to you and your board. And whoever is your team you've put together for this to help you put together your updated plan. Do you guys have any other tips or idea, things to say about those? Early is better than later. Yes, it does take some work, definitely. So some of you, I know some people have already started on this. I've actually already received a couple of plans before even accreditation officially opens up, which is, as I said, on Sunday. So that's great. I've got some plans to look at. And there is a back and forth of this. We used to submit a draft or a updated version of your previous one. And you're not sure if it's perfect. It doesn't have to be perfect. That's fine. I will look at it and give you feedback. And then you can resubmit it or just update the sections you need to work with Scott or Denise on certain things. And that's fine. There's always a back and forth into the top whatever the final version is. You want to say something, Scott? Yeah, I was gonna say, be careful not to just throw stuff in just to pad the page count. You don't need a certain amount of pages in your plan and get these things. And you don't need to put in extras. Don't put that extra work on yourself. I've seen a lot of a few plans that just throw in a bunch of random stuff from like the Chamber of Commerce that didn't need to be in a plan and actually made the plan harder to follow and figure out what you were trying to say. Yeah, I can see that. And that's the thing, yeah. Like I was saying, there is strategic plans or planning that your community might be doing. This may be something different and that's okay. And this is not gonna be a plan of everything the library is doing. It's just gonna be here's some things related to looking at our community. And as you look through some of the resources we have here, you'll get that idea. We've got a lot of guides and like I said, that recording is definitely really helpful for people as well. Some of you may have already attended when we did do the actual impersonal workshops earlier this year, which is great. This recording here will help you out as well. It's about a two-hour-ish recording that you can watch in bits and pieces if you need to. And then the workshop materials can help a lot with that. Stronger recommend taking a look at those. So, all right. We've talked about the basics of it, why you do it, how it works, community response planning. So now the other thing in addition to the plan is the actual application form. And the accreditation application itself, and this is where you tell us specific things about your library. The reason that we have you, a requirement is that you've actually done the public library survey and the supplemental survey is some of those questions automatically feed into your application form to give us some of the statistics we need to know about your library. You're already reporting these things to us in the survey. So, we don't wanna make you have to report them again on this application form. So, our computer team here, Vern Bias, our head computer person here, and Sam Shaw, who's our data coordinator here at the library commission who you may recognize. He's your public library survey guy. They put together and make sure to all of these statistics automatically feed into your application form for accreditation first to start you off with, here's all the basics you've already told us. But there's other things you do do at your library that we wanna know about as well. So, we've got those extra questions that you would then have to answer. Now, application itself is organized into five categories, governance and planning, resources, services, cooperation and collaboration and communications. We've broken them out in those five very broad areas and there's a lot of specific questions for each of them. Some of the questions as well are, you are compared to peer libraries, libraries that are similar in size to your library. We use the legal service area of your library and other libraries in the state to decide who's the same size as you and then certain guidelines and questions we compare you to those libraries so you can see how you're doing in relation to other libraries in the towns of your same size. Now, some of these peers, hopefully most of these peers are Nebraska libraries but for some of our communities, there's not enough similar size communities in Nebraska. So, we have actually pulled in data from Iowa this year and I believe that's the only one we've done this year is brought in some Iowa numbers. Previously, we've had to pull from other states around us. So, for some of you, you may see libraries that are your peers that are both Nebraska libraries and Iowa libraries. Just so you have, we have a good, can do the math and the algorithm can actually make, you know, mean something. We had too few of them that wouldn't mean anything you would be really compared. We do have a preview application on the website that you can look at ahead of time before you even go into your library's live application in case you wanna see what it looks like first. And this just shows you what the application looks like and then all the questions. This isn't live, you can't actually click on anything. It's just so you can see ahead of time what it will be and what questions you might want to be prepared to answer. So, the application itself, once it goes live on July 1st, you'll, it'll go live July 1st on Sunday and then I'll send an email out to you also officially inviting everyone to apply. You can, you then click on the accreditation application link that is given to you. You can see right now it says it will begin July 1st or right now it's not there to be used. And the first thing you have to do is click all of these 12 criteria before you can even get into the form. It won't let you even start until you click all 12. And then notice once you hit the last one, poof, it pops up with that you can now apply for accreditation. And then it will ask you for a user ID and password. This is the Bibliostat username and password. It's the same one that you've used that you actually used when you logged into Bibliostat to submit your public library survey. Now I already logged into one over here as a demo. So this is Norfolk's Public Library who is up for accreditation this year. So this is their application at the moment. And I'm just gonna quickly go through the basics of what's here in the application. Right off the bat, we have basic instructions about it. And you can see it does tell you that things that are automatically carried through from the public library survey data is automatically marked with you with either a green check or red X depending. And if you do or don't meet that guidelines, those guidelines, if we scroll down here, we can see the first one of this is us when we check that off. Here are the very last ones here. And this is good for theirs. They have an active library friends group. No, but they do have a library foundation. Yes, so these are already pre-checked. This is not anything you can uncheck or do anything with. This is actually Norfolk's live form right now. We're using as a demo. And it does tell you that this is based on information that you supplied in the supplemental survey. So those just automatically checked for you. So to start with, all libraries have all of those things pre-filled for them. And all the other questions you just, you then have to tell us all these other things that we know everything else you do beyond was in the public library survey. We do have a link here for those questions that are related to being compared to your peers. So you can see who your peer libraries are. And here is Norfolk's. They've got some, they did have a mixture of, mostly Iowa and the Bratwyn, Nebraska library. So for them, they did, we didn't have to reach outside of the state to get some peers for them to be compared to. You'll notice here, as I've been scrolling up and down the page, this little box here has been floating along here. This will keep track of your points, how many points you've earned. So you can see where you're going, how you're doing. As you check on something, so I'm just gonna click here that they've actually got their plan. You can see it goes from 82 to 92 when I checked that they do have an up-to-date community needs response plan submitted to us at the commission. And you can see here, it tells you how many points that's worth, right after it, 10 points. So I uncheck it, let's back down to 82, check it, 92. So as you're going through the form, you'll see, and it's great, this floats along here. Our computer team did a great job with this application form, I think. And you can see track as you're going along how your points are. Krista. Yes, Denise. One question we get a lot right here on this part of the form is, I have submitted my plan but I have not heard that it's approved. Should I check this or not? Yes, and I just, this week, we just updated the application form to account for that because, yes, that was a big problem last year. I had a lot of people, because what this used to actually say was, has a plan approved by the library commission. Well, the way the process works, it isn't necessarily gonna be approved yet when you do this application form. You may have submitted your plan, then you go to do this, and I'm still looking at your plan. You and I may be going back and forth on working on updates to it. You may be going back and forth with one of our system directors on updates to it. And it was, the other wording was confusing because we just need something submitted by October 1st. So I had them change the wording to say, has an up-to-date written plan submitted to the library commission, not approved by, because that's what it used to say. So we've kind of, that's one tweak that we've changed in the application form that hopefully will help answer that confusion. The plan must have been written or revised in the last three years. And if it's not already approved, this is where it says here, submit it to me to actually do the approving of it. So you'll click this button, check this button box to say that, yes, I've submitted it. Then I'll still be evaluating your plan and everything you put here into the application before I then approve your actual accreditation. The written revised in the last three years is something important to note as well. If you did your last community needs response plan, previously called strategic plan, when you first were last up for accreditation three years ago, you're gonna need to do a new one updated, of course. However, if for some reason you updated it last year and sent it to me, it's currently okay. You don't have to make a change this year just because you're up for accreditation has to be something from that's at less than the three years old is all that means. So most people do it on the same schedule as accreditation, but I have a sense a few here and there where they were either ahead or delayed and so it kind of got off the schedule. So hopefully this will help that Denise, the changing of the wording of that question. So as you're going through your application here, you'll see there's all the different things that you can check. I'm not gonna go through every single one of these because it's a long form to do, but you can check here all the different policies you might have at your library and you can see as you check each one of these, the buttons, the total amounts goes up over at the right there. There are some places where you can enter some information here. For example, on this one, you can type in if there's other policies that we hadn't listed here as suggested ones, list what it is and then check in the box. There is also throughout the whole form you'll notice there's these question marks. If you click in here, a pop-up comes up that does have help information and this when you click on it after a certain question, it goes to the help about that question, but this is actually the entire help page for the entire application. So you can scroll up and down through it and see all the different information we have put in here to help you answer the question. Sometimes it explains more about what the question means. Sometimes it gives you links to other things that can help you answer the question. So it's gonna vary from question to question, what kind of information we've included there to try and help you. So I highly recommend checking that if you're wondering what I'm supposed to do with this particular question at this particular stage. Now going down to our resources, this is where we have some more of our peer comparisons. So when there's something that is a peer comparison, this is also one that's automatically filled by us based on looking at the libraries who are in your peer group, whether they're Nebraska libraries or the ones we've had to bring in from Iowa. And what we do here is we put in what is your number, whatever the statistic is we're looking at, the number we're looking at, the peer average and the peer median. Now you can, in order to get the green check mark for any of these peer comparison type questions, you have to either be better than, your number has to be higher than either the average or the median, not both. So we give you both ways of being able to get that in, get those points for that one. So it just depends on which one you're, you might not be more than one but you are more than the other, then you get the check for that one. Then you can see here, and so we've got all the numbers that are just automatically put in here. And they're doing pretty good as compared to their peers, looks good. So we're gonna check thing and see, check more numbers here and they keep going up on the box on the right there. So this is all information where we are here, the resources, so income facilities. This is where we also bring in here under staff about the education level of the library director. This is the one that they need to be at a certain certification level, depending on the local service area of their library. So you would look at the certification levels for library directors, what your population is, and see if you meet that. This is another one that we actually tweak the wording on because we had a lot of questions about this. I'm not sure if you remember Scott and Denise, people are wanting to know, they didn't understand that it just was the minimum certification level. You could be higher than this but this is the minimum you'd have to be as a library director. And this is what I was talking about earlier. Your staff can also go through the certification program and you can earn more points towards your accreditation if you have other staff members that are also certified. And these are all things that are, you've already submitted this information in your public library survey. So you don't have to tell us again here, if you can see these are already just checked for the library. Then we have information about the collection itself, certain things here carry over, certain things we don't know because we just don't ask them on the survey. So you have to tell us, does the collection reflect your mission goals of the library? Do you use online websites to provide information? Certain things. And now here's one finally, I hadn't seen this, that they did not meet the, more did not go over the peer average or median for their collection size per capita. So that's pretty close, it's really close. But something that they could work on and get five more points if they wanted to. So you can see here, even if it's already checked, it's not something that you can change yourself. Now, then we have services, what kind of services you provide, you can see things here. So when you start off with this application form, key is you see certain things are automatically checked for you and that's great, but you do have to go into the form and check other boxes so that you can tell us all the other things you're doing. There's, with just doing your public library survey information, you're not gonna reach any sort of accreditation level. You're gonna have to go in here and tell us other things that you do in order to get those numbers up. So I'm just randomly checking these things, I don't know if Norfolk does this, these things are not, just so you can see all the different things that you can add. And when you're done, you've got your total points at the bottom here, the information for your director who's usually the one who's submitting this automatically here and then you can either, if you're done completely with this application as far as you're concerned, all your questions, you've answered everything, you submit it, otherwise you can save and resume later. So if you're not sure about some of the answers, if you need to check some numbers to find out what you're doing, you can save and then it will save all of the check marks you've already done, the ones that you've added and when you log in the next time, it'll pick up and have all of those already ready for you and then you can add more. Now I'm not gonna submit Norfolk's now cause like I said, the process isn't open yet and I'm just doing this for demonstration purposes. I'm gonna scroll back up to the top here. So any other questions? Yes, Denise. This is Denise. A lot of times libraries get to the end and they're not really at the level that they would like and I would suggest they look at the communications area because there are a lot of things that can be done there in a fairly short order like a public bulletin board. That's not a hard thing to do and it gives you a few more points. Putting up your posting your mission statement on your webpage. If you don't already have that, it's a good thing to do and heck, it's worth four points. Yeah. So I think that communications area offers a number of points that could be, if you're not checking pretty much each one of those be sure and look at it because it's something that could help with the points that you need. Absolutely, yeah. And they're very easy. Like I said, easy things to initiate and do. And some of these things also are, we're pretty, I don't know if Lenion on, open on like reports regularly, usually monthly to the village board. It doesn't have to be monthly. So I've had some people say this, well, we don't do it every month. We only, they only call us up to the board every three months or something. And I'm like, whatever fits your libraries in your communities is fine. We're not gonna tell you you have to report monthly because that's not up to us. It's up to you and your community to decide how often you'll report. So some of these things, you know, think about them and ask if you're not sure does this count or not check the question, check the help guides here. Or if that doesn't help, call me, call Denise, Scott, Eric, any regular assistant directors and ask, does this count, does this count? And we'll help you out with it. Also, what will happen is once this is submitted to me, I'm gonna take what you've submitted, we've done the final submission and your community needs response plan and look through them together. And I'm gonna compare because I've actually had this happen too, which maybe just you missed it where something is mentioned in the plan, the community needs response plan and then for whatever reason, the corresponding question was not checked off in the survey. So I will reach out to you and say, hey, did you forget this or is there something I should know about why this says it in the plan but doesn't have it in here? So that's something that I will go back for if you want and you might get more points then when you realize you haven't done it. Also for some of these public survey, public library survey questions that are automatically fed into here. This is information from last year's survey. These are submitted the year before. That's when we get the information from. And that's what that we have to use. Situations may change, have changed from when you did your public library survey to the time when you're doing your accreditation. I mean, this accreditation, you haven't till October to submit this and your survey was done last year, whenever you did it. If some situation has changed and your statistics are actually different now and you think that this red check, red X should be a green check mark, contact us and we can look at that and change that as well from behind the scenes. We do have the power, because this is our system to go into your survey. And if, for example, you have actually done more, your attendance in this case per capita has increased because you really pushed for it. And it is now more than the average or median. You can let us know, we can update your numbers and then you can become a green check and you get that five points. We have done that for libraries on specific things. You just need to provide us with the info about that. So there is that delay. It's just the way it works of when the survey is submitted, when all of that is compiled and available to us to use, then putting it into here, situations can change and that's okay. That's acceptable. Just let us know. So you might get more points for that as well and bump yourself either up to minimum is 175. But if you're really just almost at 200, let us know and we'll figure it out. And you say, but I did this, let us know. So any questions, comments, thoughts about the form? Now, as I said, I wasn't gonna show every single question here, just showing you how it works and what's in there that the basis of what you need to know, you can look at the preview form and see all the questions that you want to right now. And it's just gonna be on Sunday when you'd be able to get into your own library form. Any questions, type them into the questions section out there, let me know what you wanna know about the process. We haven't got any questions yet, but I'd like to answer any. Or Scott or Denise, if there's anything that you think we should be mentioning or any other questions that you have about the process this year? Well, just reiterate that this does not have to be a process that you, the director are flying solo with. Oh no. Krista has mentioned, call your system directors, call Krista, there's lots of people who want to help you get through this process and want to help you succeed. I know sometimes when people have these type of things, sometimes it feels kind of like a, this is so much for one person to do, but there's lots of people who could help. And even outside of your board or libraries I support where the person who is really working by the community needs response plan wasn't a board member, wasn't the director, but someone who was interested in helping and has strength to that. So look outside the usual people in your community and you might find people who can help you with, especially the plan requirement. But yeah, to reiterate what Krista said earlier, call your system directors, call Krista, no one's gonna get through this. Yeah, and also, as you just briefly mentioned there too, on your own side, don't, as the library director, from your side, go it alone, talk to your staff, talk to your board, they can help you with some of the answers to some of these things to figure out what you're doing. When you're talking about the community needs response plan, that, let's see, I can get back to you. There's surveys to be done, there's looking at the community, that's something that you can use other people to get this information. You don't have to do it all on your own. We've had some directors, I know, have just done it all by themselves and just didn't let their staff know that it was happening and got very bound down with it and it was very daunting. You don't have to, all of these things were right in this plan, all of this information that we have, have other people help you gather it, have other people help you do these worksheets and maybe sign someone to collect all the community profile information, to sign someone else to do some focus groups, get other people to help you out with it. You don't have to go it alone with any of this. Something else that I didn't show here that I wanted to hear under, as the board certification, library and certification, you can see your status. You also see that for your library as well. So what is your current accreditation status here? So if you're not sure where you're at or when you expire, we've got that here. It's defaults to being arranged by city, but then you can see, so here is Ainsworth, they're due up this year and they're at gold level at the moment. And this is the one, if you click on the library's name, it doesn't tell you anything about their accreditation, just links to that library's particular websites. The board one links to specifics about the board's certification. There's something else you will notice here. I'll mention it briefly, provisional. This is something that was done the last round of libraries that were accredited in the previous version, but there was still something they needed to fix and tweak. We're gradually phasing that out. There's not gonna be the, well, we'll let you have your, we're accredited you, but we're gonna, you need to still finish this thing. It's either gonna mean you do it or you don't. In this case, it was more confusing than helpful to have that as a feature there. So don't worry about that. As I said, the form goes live on Sunday. So you can start filling that out. You can do your community's response plan anytime you want to send it to me. Both the plan and the form are due to be submitted to us by October 1st. The application form needs to be done. The plan can still be in a work-in-progress state at that point, but we have to have something between October 1st and December 31st. There will be back and forth between me and you and potentially your system directors if they're gonna help you out with some of this. If there is anything that does need to be worked on and then by December 31st, that's when we will, I will notify everyone of whether you've, at the very latest, if you've been re-accredited or not. It is actually an ongoing process. As soon as I have a form and a plan from you, I will look at it and start doing it. So from whenever you submit things, this'll be throughout the whole summer and fall, I will gradually be letting people know if they've accredited or not. But December 31st is the absolute deadline for having all of these things done. That will also be the new renewal deadline for accreditation. Previously, it was September 30th, but this whole due in October, but we're still working on it. A couple of months got confusing as well. So gradually everyone's renewal date for library accreditation will be, you are accredited through December 31st because if you submit things by October 1st, people were also confused that, well, my accreditation expired on September 30th though, but you're not gonna let me know until December 31st. Does that mean I'm not accredited for a couple of months? That was another confusing thing. No, that doesn't mean that. So we're gonna be gradually, everyone will be renewing at the end of the year. And whatever year you come up for renewal, that's when we've got that little time there, a little kind of transitional time to see if you're re-accredited or not. All right, so we're a little after 11 o'clock, but that's okay. We started a little after 10 at the beginning as well. Anybody have any last-minute desperate questions you need to ask of me or Scott or Denise before we do wrap up for today? Type it into your question section. If you have a microphone, let me know. We can unmute you. While we're waiting for that, any last words of wisdom from you, Denise or Scott? Decide that you have one. No, yeah, I think I'm already sad or you already sad or Denise is already sad. Yeah, just start early to repeat what Denise said if you've got the option. Yeah, Denise. And don't hesitate to call. Absolutely, yes. We're here to help, yeah. All right, I think we'll wrap it up then for today. That was a quick overview of what's going on with accreditation this year. Do look for the email that'll be coming to you Sunday or next week about being open, but the process being started starting up and good luck with your accreditation for the upcoming year. All right, that will wrap it up for this week's Encompass Live. The show has been, is being recorded as we speak and will be available at some point later this afternoon as long as everything cooperates with me. Encompass Live, I'm gonna show you our website here right now. We do have under education and training on our library commission website is Encompass Live webcast. And this is where we have our upcoming shows and right underneath them, right underneath our upcoming sessions is our archives. So this is where today's archive will be. Click there, it brings the most recent one is at the top of the page. This is where today's will be. We'll have a link to the recording. We'll link out to all the accreditation pages and you'll have access to that. Everyone who attended live today and who registered for today's show will get an email from me letting you know that it's available. Also, we posted out to our Twitter, Facebook, mailing lists, all the usual places. While we're here, I'll show you to our archives. We do have a search feature in our archives now. This year, 2018 is the 10th year of Encompass Live. So we have a lot of archives. So we've got a search feature now that you can search through all of our shows or just most recent 12 months if you want to just find recent information. So you can search here on any topic you want to. It'll search for the topic of the show, the title of the show, the description, the names of the people who presented anything you want to and see if there's something in our archives. Now, do keep in mind this is 10 years worth of archives. You'll see everything has a date here. And if we scroll down, it even has when it's get the older ones the year as well. So you will find information in our archives that is old, expired, outdated potentially. But we are librarians, so we archive and keep things for historical purposes. So this will always, always be here, but just keep an eye and note what date it is of something that you're looking at to make sure that you know that all of this information is from eight years ago. So that's why I can't find the, it doesn't seem correct. But we will always keep these all here. So that is for our archives. This is our upcoming shows. We also are on Facebook and come inside of the Facebook page. So I've got over here where we post updates. Here's a reminder logging in about today's show, posts about when our recordings are available, previous shows we've done. So if you are a big Facebook user, please do give us a like over on Facebook and you'll be notified there of when we are doing new things on the show. So that's for today. So I hope you join us next week and I wanna make a point here to let you guys know next week's show is collection development made easier with Ingram. And this is one that actually Denise was the initiated putting having this on. This is something that libraries have been asking her a lot about is how do I know what to buy? I have no clue what to do for collection development in my library. And Kevin Davenport who was from Ingram Library Services has helped libraries do that. And he's got some great services that they offer and some tips and tricks on how to do that. And definitely sign up for next week's show. Note next week because of the fourth of July holiday, fourth of July happens to fall on a Wednesday this year. We are closed, of course, for the holiday. So it is actually being held on Tuesday, not Wednesday, July 3rd is Tuesday. So keep that in mind. This will be Tuesday next week, not Wednesday, because we won't be here. And I hopefully with all the notices and reading care, people will remember that. However, if you do it confused and don't remember, we record everything. So you'll be able to watch recording later. So do sign up for that one and any of our other upcoming shows that we have here. Other than that, thank you very much for attending and we'll see you next time on End of This Live. Bye-bye.