 But on my side here. All right, so welcome to the next session on Big Talk from Small Libraries 2018. Now at our 10 AM central time session is Lindsay Lowry. Good morning, Lindsay. Hi. She is from LaGrange, Georgia, the Lewis Library at LaGrange College. Am I pronouncing that correctly? Yes. I wasn't sure. And she is their electronic resources librarian there. And her presentation is, and I should, I don't know, I apologize on your behalf, that pizza looks really good, even though it's just a picture. I'm sorry, we do not have any coffee or treats for you this morning on our remote online session. Hopefully you may have some with you for your own booth. But if you feed them, they still might not come piloting a successful library open house at a small liberal arts college. So I'll just hand it over to you, Lindsay, to let us know how you pulled this off, maybe. OK, thank you so much for having me. I enjoyed the previous presentation too, and especially all the talk about white noise machines. That was so interesting. And it's coming from a small library. I can relate to so many things, the other libraries. When you do conferences, it's kind of nice to hear that everybody sort of has the same problems that you do. Small libraries meaning not just small in collection and people use to provide, but the size of the building too. Small space, lots of noise. Yeah, I predict Tim and Dave are going to have a lot of people contacting them about that. After them. Yeah. All right, so as you said, my title is Electronic Resources Library, and I work at Lewis Library at La Grange College. We're at La Grange, Georgia. And before I jump into this project of getting an open house going at our small college, I wanted to tell you a little bit about the city and the college. We are about one hour south of Atlanta. I mean, we're a small liberal arts institution. Our FTE currently is 997, so just under 1,000. We are also the oldest private institution of higher education in Georgia. We were founded in 1831. Our enrollment usually sits about 1,000 students. That includes both graduate and undergraduate students. But the majority of them, maybe around the 600 range, are undergraduate, traditional, and residential. So we do have a lot of residential students that live on campus. We admit about 260 to 300 freshmen every year. In the library itself, we have four full-time librarians. Each who has their own area of expertise. And we have six full and part-time staff, including circulation manager, library assistance, circulation assistance, cataloging assistance, et cetera. We have one graduate assistant. We're very fortunate to have a graduate assistant who helps us out. And we have about 18 work-study students. And the majority of those work at our circulation desk. And a handful of them work for me up at our technology help desk on the third floor. I say on a good day because they sort of come and go as they please sometimes, as you probably know, if you work with work-study students. But we have a pretty decently sized staff. And it doesn't feel like it all the time, but we staff pretty well. We are in a relatively larger building than we used to be. I say relatively, we were a lot larger building than we used to be. The building we're in was built in 2009. And we're about 45,000 square feet with three floors. And it's beautiful. And the students love it. And compared to what we came from before 2009, it's just a joy, the actual spaces. Prior to 2009, we were in another sort of 1960s era building. Believe that it was about half the size of this building. So we've literally doubled in size. And when we built this building, wanted to add group study rooms because the old building didn't have space for group study rooms. So we have now seven group study rooms. And we have a couple of individual group rooms or individual study rooms. We have five large event spaces seating anywhere from five people to 50 people. A lot of times those double the study rooms as well when they're not in use. And we now have a 24 hour study space that students can access with their badge after the library closes. And there's a cafe that serves Starbucks coffee. We also are sort of the main place on campus for printing, scanning, and computer access. There are computers on every floor. The main floor has a bank of computers, eight PCs, I believe. Nope, six PCs and two Mac computers. Right next to our circulation desk, which are the most heavily used. And then every floor has sort of little nooks and crannies with computers in it. A lot of our study rooms have computers as well. We have the Weepa printing system. Some of you may be familiar with that. We have two of those in the library, one accessible through the 24 hour study space. One is on the main floor. And the one that's on the main floor is the most heavily used on campus. It's constantly running. It seems like printing, printing, printing. We also just in the past two and three years implemented tech checkout options. We check out laptops, iPads, and phone chargers. We just added an external CD drive because a lot of our laptops now are coming without those CD drives. So that was requested by some students. And we're open to circulating even more technology as well. This is just what we have currently. And we started out with just about five laptops and demand has driven us to get more. So we have a lot of really great amenities. And this is some photos of the library here, including the outside of library on the right and a couple of our spaces in the bottom left hand corner with all the people in it. That's our corn auditorium. It holds about 50 people. It's used very heavily. We have large events in there, film screenings. You can see the big projector at the front of the room. And it's one of our most popular rooms. And then that we have a board style seminar room and you see our media lounge, which is a movie viewing space for a small amount of people. And so we're proud of our space here. We really like our space. And just like any other library in recent years tried to reclaim a little bit of it for more study space and less books that aren't being used. But overall, we're enjoying our space and it's getting used pretty well. We have a really great collection as well. But as with any other small library, you probably also can relate to our circulation numbers as far as print books just continue to go down. We also noticed in the past couple of years or so that students were not, I mean, they were using the library but not really using the library as using the resources that we have just sort of coming in and using it as a space. The previous presenters, I love the idea of making it seem like a learning commons. That's really what we are. There's not a heavily used student center on campus. We have a student center but the students don't really use it. It's one floor of another building and you've got fun stuff like pool tables and stuff like down there but they don't, there's more commonly people in here than there are in that space. And so it's more of a learning commons as the years go on. We noticed over time as well that students would come and be a junior or a sophomore and not really know, A, that we had a bottom floor where all the books were, or B, that you could check out a book and you could go find it yourself. So we were thinking, how did you make it to being a sophomore or a junior and not ever have gone to the bottom floor of this library? And so that coupled with, the fact that we want students to come in here if they're not already, we want students to be checking out books. We want students to enjoy the space. Really is what drove our idea to have an open house to begin with. We really wanted to think about the different ways that we could get them in here. So we started to brainstorm. How do we get students aware of what we have to offer them? How do we get them in the building and how do we sort of start the process of implementing our information literacy goals? Information literacy is something that we have been working heavily on for the past couple of years. We want all of our incoming freshmen to have some information literacy instruction in at least one of their courses. And we really are doing pretty well, I think, but we are not reaching 100% of the freshmen like we really want to. So we started brainstorming about how we could get them in here, how we can make them feel more comfortable. This is sort of an intimidating library to someone who just came from high school where the library may not be used that much. It's three stories, you know, it's huge. There's lots of staff, it's sort of, I think for some of them kind of scary to come into something like this, not knowing where to begin. So we thought about a number of ways to draw them into the library. We tried, we have done scavenger hunt, discovery hunt kind of things. We gave some required assignments in the first year class. We have held special events. We had, we thought about moving nights. And then I put some funny stuff on here. Can we do a song and dance or have a dog and pony show? What should we do to get them in the library as an outreach project? And so we came up with the idea of a library open house. And to explain when we wanted to hold this library open house, we have every year in the fall when we had met our new freshmen, the student engagement office has a week called first week. And other students in other campuses, they call it the week of welcome or just the first week that the school starts back in the fall for the freshmen. And it is a schedule that is jam packed with things for those freshmen to do, some of them optional, some of them mandatory. And so we thought we could hone in on that first week and have this library open house and sort of make it a mandatory thing for our freshmen to come to. So we started with this idea. I did lots of research, I read lots of articles and then we had to get together as a staff and say, all right, how are we gonna pull this off? But the first question as you imagine is on everyone's mind is how much is it going to cost us? As a small library, we have an equally small budget. And so we were kind of limited on how much we could spend. I did research on universities such as Texas A&M who have lots and lots and lots of money compared to us and they can do all kinds of big, awesome things. And hire people even to come and help things like that. But we just, we weren't gonna be able to afford to do that. So that was the first question on everyone's mind. How much is it going to cost us to do something like this? And what else should we provide? Should we provide food? Should we do prizes? Are we gonna spend money on marketing? How much, I mean, are we gonna give away shirts? What are we gonna spend on this? I think my final idea was to try and keep it around about $500. And I'm gonna get in a moment to about where we landed on that. But that was sort of my goal is to keep it at about $500. So we also, when we set forth planning this decided that we needed to set goals for what kind of outcomes we wanted to see from doing something like this library open house. So we thought that we wanted definitely to help new students become comfortable and familiar with the library because they seemed kind of intimidated by it. And even they would come in, like I said, a sophomore and juniors wondering how to check out a book. We wanna promote our library resources such as our laptop checkout, our room reservation system and the fact that we house the writing center and we house the tutoring center. And we just wanted to let them know that this is available to them. And finally, we wanted to sort of use it as a way to support our information literacy practice with our freshmen students. So we weren't 100% reaching them and in their classes. And while we're sort of working to resolve that we at the same time kind of wanna get their feet wet if we can do nothing else. If we could sort of make them come to something like a library and house, we could kind of get their feet wet into information literacy. And so these are our sort of three main goals in what to expect as the outcome for something like this. So in creating these goals and knowing about how much we wanted to spend, we decided we were going to create stations around the library for this open house. So we have three floors and we have seven stations. The electronic resources station that you see in the right hand column we only did the first year and I will talk about that in a second. But we created stations around the library where each of these would help inform the students more about something that we wanted them to know to help reach our goals. So at each station there was going to be a task that the student must complete. And I'll show you what each of those are in a minute. And when they completed that task they would bring a, it was like a card with little squares on it and every station that they went to the gas sticker. And when their card was full they would come back to the welcome table and turn it in for a prize. So these are the ones that we came up with and I'm going to get a little more in detail here about each of these. So the welcome table is at the front of the library on the main floor. Our second floor is our main floor that's where the main entrance is. And it was the place that you would pick up and drop off your card, receive instructions and also get your freebie or your prize. And we put it right in the center right in front of the doors and so people would see it when they came in and had balloons, tried to make it as exciting as we could. And then our technical and public services librarian Laura who you see right there she and I sat at the welcome table this year or 2017 as it were and helped all the students get their card and know what they needed to do. So we have, you can see in the bottom of the picture two of our work study students who were passing out prizes and freebies and things like that. So it took four people at this welcome and prize table to sort of keep it running because it was almost a constant flow of students coming to that. Next to us on the main floor was the circulation station and our circulation manager there April got the portable smart board that we have next to the circulation desk. And she was showing each of the students how to reserve a study room, how to renew your books online and how to find the library catalog. And they just had to in order to receive their sticker listen to her speak for just a minute she had a little handout to give them if they wanted and then she would give them a sticker after they heard about how to reserve a room and how to look at the library homepage. To the right in the green shirt that's another one of our work study students who was helping April out there with handing out the handouts. On the third floor, we had the technology petting zoo which is run by our graduate assistant most years and we laid out all of our circulating technology and let the students come and see what it was that we have. And we also had the graduate assistant and the work study student explain the process for checking out technology and what the technology check out agreement states and what was expected of them and what each of these items could be used for. And a lot of them were kind of surprised to see what we had. We also tried in our first year a two-question survey in which we asked the students what else they would like to see checked out, be able to be checked out at the library technology-wise. Once they were able to come to this and hear about what was able to be checked out technology, they received a sticker for this station. The catalog and stack station is on the bottom floor. Most of our collection is on the bottom floor so this was a good place for them. The task here was to draw a call number from the bowl, the fish bowl you see there and go find the book that the call number corresponded to. And then they would bring the book back and show one of the librarians and they would give them a sticker for grabbing that book. Now we changed this up from year to year. The first year what we were doing is hiding a slip inside of each book. So the student would find the book, grab the slip out of it and then bring the slip back to the catalog and stack station. But it turned out to be just a little too much work for us and we were afraid that it just wasn't gonna work out as well the next year. So we decided to go with just show us the book and then you'll get the sticker. And this is one of my favorite stations and they find it really fun because we have compact shelving on the bottom floor which is if you're not familiar you have like a crank and you get to crank the shelves to the right or to the left and when they see that for the first time they're always just really fascinated. So they appreciate this station. Also on the bottom floor is the super archives and special collection station. This is our college archives here and our archivist Pat and our work space student Alex who you see there usually run that station and they created a I think three to five question worksheet and they put out a number of artifacts that were really interesting and they had the students go and look at each artifact and answer some questions on the worksheet in order to earn their sticker there. This is also a very popular station. The students often don't know that we have an archives and especially the ones who are history majors or who are interested are always really sort of blown away. Again, we're the oldest private institution private college in Georgia. So we have a pretty sense of collection there. So there's a lot of really cool stuff to look at. We also provided on the main floor a photo booth and we got some props from the theater department and we let them dress up and put on crazy hats and masks and stuff and take pictures. And then we posted them on our Facebook and this was a really big hit and we used our library assistant Lisa as our photographer for this because she is sort of our best champion. She's got the personality like, hey, come on over here, it'll be fun. So we thought she would be good on that station and she did great. And we got a lot of really good pictures for our Facebook. So, and then it helps us kind of keep up with who came to and to see that they were having fun. And this is an optional station. They did not have to go to the photo booth. They could just skip that if they wanted to. So you don't get a sticker for this one. It's just something fun to add. I didn't cover the electronic resources station in a slide but the previous, the first year that we did this we had an electronic resources station where we had four computers set up and we had our electronic resources librarian at the time give a short presentation on eBooks. And the first year we had much less attendance when we did the second year and knowing that the second year we were gonna have higher attendance we decided to scrap it because we just wouldn't have been able to keep up with moving people in and out of that room to get on a computer and get off the computer and listen and things like that. So we just we just scrapped it the second year and decided not to do it. So the fun part about Open House is that we had prizes and we had freebies and giveaways. So the first year we did it in 2016 our grand prize was a Jawbone Bluetooth speaker and we also had a puzzle prize which we put a puzzle up on our digital signage and the winner of that puzzle prize got a front row seat to see of a hypnotist and let me explain that for a second student engagement every year during first week invites a hypnotist to come and do a show at the school and they I've never gone to see it but they tell me that they have to they line up the students to get in and you have to be there a long time before it starts in order to get a seat and they have to cut it off because of fire code. So and students will just like line up apparently hours beforehand in order to get into the room and they've just packed the room as full as they can without violating the fire code. So, excuse me. So we partner with student engagement and student engagement marked off six seats at the front of the room at the hypnotist and if they want we had six winners of the puzzle prize and if they won that they got a front row seat to the hypnotist and they did not have to wait in line they could go straight in and sit in the front and apparently sitting in the front is very desirable because then you might get chosen to go up on the stage. I haven't seen it in person but I hear it's a hoot so Monday I'll have to go watch it. You're going to see the first one. If you like that kind of thing some people prefer to sit in the back. Yeah, yeah, probably more of a back row person for something like that too but I would love to see the students reaction. Apparently it's really funny. We also gave- Someone actually just commented that their college had a hypnotist at one of their orientation events too. It was very popular and this was back, well, they say a million years ago in the late 80s. So it's an ongoing, yes, some people love it. Apparently so, yeah, yeah. So we also had freebies. We had t-shirts, we gave away Chick-fil-A free breakfast cards and we have a Panther Cafe and they gave us some free drink coupons to give away. The Chick-fil-A free breakfast cards, we have two Chick-fil-As in town and if you know anything about Georgia you know that we're crazy about Chick-fil-A here and so one of our library assistants went to the Chick-fil-A down the road and told them what we were doing and asked if we could have some freebies to give away and they gave us a stack of free breakfast cards and we didn't even give them all away, we had so many but it was like free Chick-fil-A biscuit, free egg white grill, you know, we were just, we had, I think they gave us like 60 of them. It was a lot. And then we had about 10 free drinks at the Panther Cafe and I think if I remember correctly we had about 50 t-shirts and the t-shirts were specifically for the library open house and I'm gonna show you those in just a second but I wanted to say that after 2016 we decided to not have a grand prize or a puzzle prize or anything in that nature we decided instead to just give away a freebie for actually finishing the open house. So what we did in 2017 was first come first serve if you finished your card you got to turn it in and grab one of these items. So we had t-shirts, tote bags, we had two Google Cardboards, New York Times travel mug and we had some door hangers and we ordered t-shirts again but the rest of the items here we didn't even have to spend too much money on. So the tote bags we sort of already had in the library and they're just LaGrange College tote bags. The two Google Cardboards and the New York Times travel mug were from we had just subscribed to the New York Times at the library so we had been sent some freebies and so we gave away both of those to promote our New York Times access now. And then I had some door hangers made on Vista Print that just said, book it on studying and had Lewis Library at the bottom and we just gave those away first come first serve the t-shirts and the tote bags and the t-shirts I'm just gonna go out of this for a second and show you. This was our t-shirt from 2016. That was right when that Pokemon Go thing started really big and so we tried to make it sort of a Pokemon themed in a way and then in 2017 we had a student design us our t-shirt and we have a stuffed owl who's our mascot named Luna. I assume that the owl on the previous one was that must be something related to you. Yes, yes, we have a library mascot and her name is Luna. She's a stuffed owl. She sits on the on the recirculation desk and one of our work study students designed our t-shirt. We actually held a t-shirt design contest and unfortunately he was the only one who submitted a design. So that's the one that we went with, but we like it. It was a pretty popular t-shirt and of course, since it was designed by a student all his friends and everybody wanted one. So it worked out really well for us but we have t-shirts from both years. We got about 50 for both years. I'm gonna go back to my slide here. So, oops, let's go through here. So in the end, how much did we actually spend? So we spent a different amount for both years. In 2016, we bought a banner to hang in the library, which we were able to reuse in 2017. We didn't date it, so we wanted to be able to reuse it. It was $93. We paid for refreshments the first year. We had cookies and lemonade. We bought a lot of cookies and a lot of lemonade and that was $200. And then we bought t-shirts and we were able to get student engagement to help us cover part of the cost of the t-shirt. So the cost would go down a little bit. And then our jawbone Bluetooth prize was $59.85. So we spent about $760 that first year. So the second year our director said, we're not gonna have to be able to spend the same amount so we need to cut it down if we need to. Well, we're able to reuse the banner and we decided to forego refreshments because they didn't get eaten really. So we bought t-shirts again and we got $200 again from student engagement to help us out with the cost of the t-shirts. And I spent about $15 on door hangers. So last year we only spent about $500 which is right where I wanted to be and about where our director was happy with us spending as well. So we were in good shape financially wise in 2017. And we probably, if we bought less shirts or if we made the shirts a little simpler we could save a little money on that. But that was where most of our money went is to get the t-shirts. So once the open house was over, we'd spend the money, we got them in here and we did the best that we could. We looked at the results of what happened when the open house was finished. And I'm gonna go through it as sort of the good, the bad and the ugly, but in a different order. So the bad, our staffing was pretty insufficient. We did it, but it was not beautiful. We tried to staff at least two people at every station but because of staffing hours, people having to leave at certain times couldn't come until certain times. It kind of left a, okay, are we gonna have somebody at the station? Are we not? We relied very heavily on our work study students. Our technology pettings, it was staffed by our graduate assistant and our work study student. And without the two of them, we wouldn't have been able to have that station. So we relied really heavily on the work study students. And if we didn't have them, we would be in trouble. We also ran out of prizes. And at the end, when we were out of prizes, the students who were coming in were upset that we were out of prizes. And my response really is sort of you snooze you lose, but we kind of wish that we would have been able to have something to give everyone, but we ran out. The first year that we did it, we had it on a Sunday. And of course, no one is a huge fan of working on a Sunday, but we changed it for the next year. So we weren't working on a Sunday. And we also, the first year, spread it out over two days. And we did that because of the schedule. We had to get squeezed in the first year to two days where they were having some mandatory testing for freshmen. And so we wanted to spread it out over two days to allow everyone to come. And that turned out not to work out so well because of what I'm about to tell you. So the first year that we did this, we got with the cornerstone, which cornerstone is our first year seminar course. We got with those professors, we got with student engagement and we said, we want this to be a mandatory thing that students have to come to. And everybody said, great, that's awesome, let's do it. So the vice president of student engagement and his team make a brochure every year that tells the students, this is the event, it is optional or it is mandatory, and here's a description. And they, at the beginning of first week, send a copy to the office of the provost. And the provost looks it over and approves and sends it back. And I got my hands on a copy of the... This is the first year that we did it, 2016. I got my hands on a copy of the brochure. And it said in the brochure that it was optional, but nobody called me to tell me that they had changed it to optional. So I started to make phone calls and say, well, I thought that we were gonna make this mandatory, but now this brochure says optional. And it turns out that our provost had decided that it was not something that he wanted to make mandatory. And the problem is that's fine, but the problem was that we were never told that that was the case. We thought that it was gonna be mandatory. And so we prepared to see 300 freshmen. And we actually, the first year only saw 65. And so that was a little bit of a disaster. So we sort of, the next year, made sure that we had our ducks in a row. And no hard feelings or anything. It was just a miscommunication. And if it came down from the provost office that we needed to make it optional, we were gonna be happy to do that. We just didn't find out until two days before it was about to happen. So it didn't work out so well for us in that regard. There was a bit of student resistance the second year to making it mandatory. They would come in and just sort of huff and puff about having to do it. And we tried to make it as fun as we could, but some of them were excited and some of them just were not into it at all. We also haven't had a problem both years with athlete participation because they schedule practices during the time that we had this scheduled. And they assured us that practices would be over before we were finished. And the students were to come straight from practice to the library open house to participate. And when they got there, they had been in practice for hours. They were all sweaty. They were just ready to go have their dinner and sit down and they were not happy about it. But most of them came nonetheless. Some of them thought that we were gonna be here a little bit later and so they didn't come. So we didn't get 100% but we got pretty close to 100% participation for our second year's open house. So we got probably about 240 students that second year. So that was better. And it still wasn't mandatory that year. It was. Yeah, last year it was mandatory. Yeah, we got it, we got it squared away. Sorry, I didn't clue that up, but yes, we talked to our Dean of Academic Affairs and we talked to Student Engagement again and we said, this is what happened last year. This year we knew a little more clarity on where you stand. So we were able to get it mandatory last year. And so we saw about 240 students. Which is why we decided not to do the Electronic Resources Station because with that many students we just think it wasn't gonna work. We only saw 65 the first year. It was easier to handle 65 of them but we decided to scrap that. But some of the good things that came about it were that they seemed to enjoy the experience. They seemed to be having fun. They would sometimes come back to the welcome table and be like, did you see the shelves down there? The shelves are so cool. And they would get excited that we had an archives. They got excited that we have a huge DVD collection. So, and not every single one of them but they were pretty excited to see what it was that we offered that they may not have done we had otherwise. We had really awesome support from the first year experience faculty. They were promoting it to their class. They were asking them how it went. They were making sure that they were there. It was wonderful to have their support. They supported us both years very well and we were really happy that they were able to do that. The best part about it is the students got familiar with the library layout. That was sort of one of our main goals. We wanted them to feel comfortable in the library and we wanted them to feel like they knew where they were going when they were looking for books or looking for a study room, et cetera. They remembered us as well. It seemed we're a very small campus. So, they, sometimes we feel like if they don't come in here very often they don't know who they are and they feel kind of who we are and they may feel kind of resistant to ask questions but we want them to feel comfortable with the library and so they will come and ask questions which I think we did pretty well in that regard. They became more curious about our services too. They would come and say I heard that I could check out a laptop, is that true? And things like that. So, that was a really good thing that came out of it is that I saw more students asking about things that I think they wouldn't have asked out otherwise. During the open house we had some easel paper up on a whiteboard where we asked some feedback questions and one of them was what was your favorite part of the open house? The number one winner was the photo booth. Of course, the fun part I guess they thought. The number two was the technology petting zoo. They really liked that. That was where they got informed of what we have available for checkout and what's available to them and they really liked that a lot to see that they were able to do that. And then they really appreciated the archives and special collections because I think they wouldn't have otherwise known that we have one if they hadn't had to go down there and see Miss Pat in the archives. Some honorable mentions for their favorite part of open house for the people staff. The moving shelves, as I said, everyone lives in moving shelves and more than one person said everything. So, we think that we got pretty good feedback here. We also asked them what type of technology would you like to see available for checkout? I actually, this was our first year that we asked this and not the second year, we didn't ask this the second year. I actually was surprised to see that they didn't tell us anything that we actually could get. Our number one request was a institutional Netflix subscription. Turns out they don't provide those and even if they did, I doubt we'd be able to afford it. And also drones, for some reason. They want to be able to check out a drone. We can't afford those, but maybe one day we'll be able to afford those, but those were the two biggest things. We also got some students who wanted to see certain phone charging cables available for checkout, which we already at the time in 2016 have the iPhone ones, but I don't know that we had Android cables at that time. But we do now. So, I wanna wrap this up by sort of giving some of my tips for trying something like this at your own library, whether you're public or private or academic or whatever type of library that you are. My first tip is don't try to do too much too fast. Don't try to bite off more than you can chew. I tend to think big when I think about planning things for the library and I'm very guilty of this. So I had to sort of rein myself in. And after the first year, I think we did try and do a little bit too much. And so we backed off the second year and it worked out really well. So that's my first tip. And that's personally for me, that's just sort of one of my flaws I guess is that I think big when I think about things like this, so I kind of go, I could go nuts if I wanted to. One of the biggest things that you, if you wanna do something like this on your campus is to involve key players on your campus and in your community. So don't forget that if you are at a college, especially there's a community around you who's willing to get involved with your students as well. So that's why we were able to go get the Chick-fil-A breakfast cars and tell them, you know, this came from Chick-fil-A on Commerce Avenue and then they would go back and give their business to Chick-fil-A. And we could not have done this without student engagement either. We had to have help from student engagement and they were great. And we had help with our first-year experience faculty. Again, we could not have done this ourselves. It was successful because we were involved with other people on the campus and in the community. The first year getting those hypnotist tickets, I think that that might have been the only thing that drove people into this library was winning those hypnotist tickets. They were just waiting like, who's gonna win them? So that was really great. So it's really important that you, you know, don't try and just do this with the library. You need to engage with other people and other community members to try and bring people in. So from like a public library standpoint, you definitely wanna get your community to be involved and look at local businesses to help, et cetera. And they usually, you know, you don't know until you ask, they're usually very willing. Chick-fil-A was very willing to help. So that was wonderful for us. Set very clear and attainable goals was sort of our, one of our biggest tips that we're gonna give. That way, you know, when you're finished, if you attain those goals or not, most of our goals, we realize that we attain sort of anecdotally. I don't have numbers really about anything other than who attended. It's not extremely measurable, to be honest, but if you set goals at the beginning about what you wanna accomplish, that's gonna help you figure out how you want to go about doing something like this at your own institution. And tip number four is give as much feedback out of them as you can. Every year we do a student survey in the spring that we send out to our courses. And it's just to help improve our library services. But that survey gets so bloated when we think about all the things that we wanna ask them. So at Open House, I decided, you know, I'm only reaching the freshmen here, but if I could just get a glimpse of some of the things that they want, then I will, you know, get more information out of them. Like the example of what kind of technology would you like to see for a checkout? That was extremely important to me. Even though my number one request was Netflix, that helped me know that maybe I'm doing pretty good as far as what it is that we have available for a check checkout. Maybe there's not really anything right now that we're gonna be able to do that's gonna help them. And we have some silly questions too, you know, such as like, what's your favorite book that you've read of all time and things like that? But if you can get feedback out of them, that's a good place to do it. And we just did it by taking some easel paper up on a whiteboard and giving them a marker. And they were able to write on the easel paper what it is that they, their answer to the question. And I kept the easel papers, I have in my office, I was just looking at them in order to put this together. So, and then the last tip is don't take it too seriously. I think the reason I say this is because, you know, we, one of our goals really was to sort of start the process of information literacy with our freshmen and, but I don't, I didn't wanna have too high of expectations. I didn't wanna make them sit down and say, okay, this is how you do a search. And this is the keywords that you wanna use. And this is how you put keywords together. And this is how you limit your search. And that's something that we tell them in class a lot when we're doing instruction, but I felt like I didn't want to get into anything like that for this. We wanna give the illusion that this is something fun, but also sort of slip some, you know, good information in there. And I think we accomplished that. So if you're taking, if you take it too seriously, well, we definitely want them to leave knowing how to open and save any book. That might be a little more, you know, more than they really wanna learn at that time. We thought of this as a get your feet wet exercise. I don't, I didn't wanna have, you know, have it be too academic. It's almost, I sort of would like to compare it to, like a parent who's trying to like slip cauliflower in your mashed potatoes, trying to get you to eat your vegetables, you know, under the disguise of we're having fun. You're also at the same time learning how to check out a book and how to find a book on the shelf, even though it's kind of given this illusion of, we're just here to have fun, kind of like party. So that's why I said don't take it too seriously. It's, for us, it was just a, let's kind of get their feet wet and get them in the library and then we won't go from there. That is part of the battle when you're doing library instruction. If you go to a class and teach them and they've never set foot in the library, it might not be as helpful if they've actually come to the library before. So that is the conclusion of my presentation. And I think I'm doing pretty well on time. Absolutely, yes, sure. All right. Okay, thanks you. Thanks, Lindsay. I was, so if anyone does have any questions, type them into the questions section of your go-to webinar interface. We have a few coming in now. Oh, the other coming in. But one thing that I was gonna comment on in the good, the bad, the ugly part, some of that bad seemed like being a victim of your own success, not having enough staff to handle everything, running out of prizes. True. Yes. Once they did show up. Yeah. All right, so some questions here about checking out technology. When you check out the technology, basically wanna know the specifics and how you run this program successfully. Can they use it only on site, limited checkout time? Is there a monetary deposit required? How do you run your program for checking out the technology? Okay, that's a very good question. So we had, we have expanded to 15 laptops, two iPads and about 15 phone chargers, which is just the cables, kind of like I have one right here. I'll like, you know, like an iPhone charger. We've expanded to that. So we started small and just to, because we didn't know what the call would be. We started with five laptops and then build it up to there. But the process is we have a laptop safe at our circulation desk and the students come and wanna check out a laptop. We have two types. We have one that's library use only and one that's 24 hour laptop and it can go out of the library. We set it up in our ILS to where you can check out tech items. I set that up. We use, we're a Cersei customer. We have Cersei workflows. So I set that up to where you could check it out. We put a barcode on all of our laptops on the back. Our cataloging assistant made the records for them. And if they are checking out a laptop for the first time that semester, this is a semesterly thing, then they have to sign a laptop checkout agreement. The laptop checkout agreement is one page and it basically says you break it, you buy it and you lose it, you buy it and then you also lose your privileges. There's no monetary deposit in order to do this and knock on wood, none have been lost yet. We've been doing it for about three years, none have been lost, some have been broken. Luckily our IT department who buys our laptops for us, well it comes out of our budget but they have an agreement with Dell. They also put in the laptop charge that we pay for each laptop accidental damage coverage. So I've sent two back to IT in the last couple of months because of cracks or chips in the keyboard or a hard drive that crashed or something like that. And it's just accidental damage. Each, I think each laptop can get repaired once per year or something like that, but back to the process. The students will sign that form once per semester. We have a notebook that we keep all the forms in and then they can take the laptop out for 24 hours. They can renew it one time unless there is a waiting list for laptops and we do have a waiting list every now and then especially at finals time. So at finals time, we suspend renewals, you can have it and then you have to bring it back. Students will come in tears sometimes and say my laptop crashed, I need this until I can get a new one and we will let them keep it a little while longer maybe than normal if nobody's waiting on one so we can be kind of lenient. Late fees are $5 per day. There is about a six hour grace period. So if you check it out on a Tuesday at two o'clock, 2 p.m. you can keep it until, I should also say it's not a true 24 hours either. No matter what time you check it out on Tuesday, it's due at 9 a.m. on Wednesday. So there's a six hour grace period on Wednesday though. So if you don't quite get it in right when we open on Wednesday, then that's all right. Well, you won't find you until after lunchtime. So the fine started after lunchtime that next day and you can renew it by just calling and saying I need to renew the laptop. The phone chargers are libraries only just because we want them back and we're afraid that if we check them out, they wouldn't come back. Out of the library, they probably wouldn't come back. iPads are 24 hour and I will say, I don't know if anyone else has an iPad checkout system but those are not nearly as popular as the laptops. Nobody really checks those out. Interesting, yeah. Everybody seems to think or everyone wants a tablet. Everything's about those. But when it comes to, and I kind of agree when it comes to having to actually do like work and type the whole typing, tablets are not gonna cut it for writing a paper and doing things like that. And also sometimes if you have any sort of online course management system or something that's can be a little depending, yeah. All right, great. So let's see what we have next. Also wants to know, that's a good logistics question. How did you go about choosing the sizes for the t-shirts that you ordered? Oh, interesting. So our bookstore manager, she orders t-shirts on campus for any department that wants them. So she is the one who liaises with the company who makes them for us and things like that. So she was able to help me out with that question a lot because I actually wasn't sure myself. We tended towards the, what we ended up with is we tended towards the larger sizes just because the larger sizes are usually more popular than the smaller ones. I actually once upon a time worked in retail and remembered that the size runs of closes that we get are usually like a bell curve, kind of that leans a little towards the higher sizes. So I kind of went with those numbers. And then anything that's 2X or 3X is like a dollar more or something. And so I only got like one or two of those. But we did get to where at some point we would be like, well, we only have larger extra large t-shirts left and the student could just take it or leave it. But one way that we sort of alleviated that was the second year that we had t-shirts, we had other choices too. So the student came and asked for a t-shirt and we didn't have their size. Then there was something else that they could choose and take with them. They may not have wanted it as much as a t-shirt. But our bookstore, who orders it, she was really helpful in saying, okay, this is kind of where you need it to be as far as sizes. Knows what kind of, what sizes people the students had been buying from them. And so, yeah. Cause she deals with student engagement when they were t-shirts or spiritual life or something. So she was my go-to person to figure that out. Yeah, okay. All right. You mentioned the students collected stickers for completing the different stations. How did that work? Were they used to meet a goal for prizes or something else? How did... So... What was that process? The card that we gave them when they got there had a spot on it for each station. Five spots, I believe. And each station had a different sticker. So the pack of stickers I got was like penguins, smiley faces, sports like ball, you know, footballs and baseballs and things like that. So each had a different one. And then, you know, like someone at the Kellogg and Stack Station would put their football sticker on there and then the next person would put their penguin sticker on there. And then when the card was full, that means that they had been to every station. They came to the prize table and we had a big, like I wrapped a big box with a hole in it and they would put them all in there. Now, we did that both years. The first year we just sort of went in with our hand and like picked a grand prize winner out and said, okay, this person won the Bluetooth speaker. The second year, the reason we collected them is to know who had been there because they have to put their name on it. Because it was mandatory. Yeah, it was mandatory. So they have to put their name on it. And so we made sure that we went through and sort of checked off everyone's name for who had been there to know who had come. It also helped us know how many people showed up too because we wouldn't have really known how many were actually there. So that was the process of getting the sticker and turning it in. And there were a couple of people who snuck their thing in there without one sticker or something like that. So that was the process. All right. Someone wants to know, on your ending tips here, somebody said they missed tip number three. Can you go back to what was the tip three about? Your goals. Yep. Obviously clear, attainable. Not too much, not more than you can handle. Right. Someone has a tip actually about the, regarding the Netflix account. Oh, very interesting. They get a lot of digital copies with their DVDs. I see that too when I just buy DVDs and sometimes it says you have all the different versions of it and they, because they own them now, the digital copies as well. So we linked them all to a Voodoo account and VUDU and added it to some Roku's for checkout. So it's like a little healthy step thing. So a Voodoo account, put the digital copies in there, put them on a Roku, check those out and then they can have the, rather than a DVD, a digital copy to plug into their computer. That's awesome. That's a nice workaround. Cause you do own that whole digital copy. Right. Yeah. And we do, I mean, we buy a lot of DVDs and usually, especially when they announce like Golden Globe winners and Oscar winners, we usually buy all those. And we have a number of Blu-rays. I don't know that we've ever bought one with a digital copy. So that is good to know. That's really interesting. Awesome. Where's the next question here? All right. Someone was talking about, oh, let's anyone think this presentation idea is solely for an academic or school library? I can certainly see public. This is someone's comment. Cut public libraries during a similar event near the start of the community school, start of the community school year or perhaps a special end of summer reading program party. It could be a family event to get the kids or the students at the local school and parents involved. So this is definitely something that you could expand out into anything, any type of library. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You just have, you know, we did it sort of like stations that the stations align with our goals. You know, this is what we want them to learn. And at a public library, you know, you're not really focused on, we want you to learn this. We're focused on, you know, marketing your resources. So if you come up with three stations for them to go to that are like, hey, these are our audiobooks. This is our overdrive, how you can check out eBooks online. And, you know, it's just different. It's just a different way to look at it. But yeah, it'll absolutely work for like a public library. And then we'll just do one last question because we're getting a little close to the time here. And I don't know if I may have missed this too. This person says, are you repeating this program again in 2018? Yes. And are there going to be any changes that from the last time? So we are, that's a good question because we do this in August or late August or so when school starts. And I usually start planning it at the end of the spring semester. So I haven't really started planning it thoroughly yet. However, we, I mentioned first week, which is our week of welcome. The first week of students are back on campus for the fall. We are starting a brand new curriculum this fall. And with that brand new curriculum is coming a revamp of the first week activities. And so we are sort of, I'm a little bit kind of concerned that maybe they won't let us do it again if they might say, no, there's no room in the schedule. So I've got to find that out. But if there's room in their schedule, if they'll let us have a time, then we're going to do it again. So as far as making changes to what we did last year, we're probably going to be along the same lines of similar to what we did last year as far as the stations, which stations we have. But we have to look at staffing as well. My graduate assistant is about to graduate. So I have to make sure I can replace her. We have to make sure that our work study students are going to be able to help us. We'll make sure that all our staff is going to be here. So it's not a yes, we're definitely going to do this. It's sort of a little bit like we have to make sure that everything, all the staff are going to align and then we're going to be able to do it again. But we want to do it again, yes. It has been a success in the past. So yeah. Yeah. I really can't see the student engagement telling us no. They were happy and excited about it and the first year of faculty was too. And so I can't see them telling us no. The only thing I foresee is them saying, we just don't know where we're going to put you. However, I will say, and not to take up too much time, but I will say that in some of the research that I've done, a lot of people who have put on, it's usually bigger libraries who put on something like this, say, don't do it during like the very first week of school. You should wait a little while. So we may end up doing that. Sure. Just that, okay. All right, great. Thank you. And that actually seems to be that was the last of the questions that were typed in. Great. Thank you very much, Lindsay. That was awesome. Thank you. Well, thank you for having me. Yeah. And for anyone that just came in, yes, we are recording today and both Lindsay's show and her slides when the recordings are ready, sometime next week, the week after, will be available to everyone.