 Hello, and welcome to the session, Going First, Learning from the Edge Pilot Libraries. I'm Brenda Hogue, and I'll be facilitating this session featuring two special guests. We have Dion Mack, Director of the El Paso Library System in Texas, and Marcia Johnson, who is Director of the Miami Public Library in Oklahoma with us today. Before we get started, let me tell you a little bit about the technology we're using for this session, ReadyTalk. So you should be hearing audio through your computer speakers or your headphones, and if that's not working, if the quality isn't what you want it to be, you can always phone in for audio too, and the number's on the screen, and we'll post it in chat too. And since people who are having audio issues probably didn't hear me say that, I'm also going to put this visual up there so people can let us know in the chat if they're having any trouble. Okay, in ReadyTalk, the way to communicate with us is using chat, and you can see that on the lower left. You can use that to ask questions, to share experiences, to let us know about tech difficulties. Any of those things, use the chat for that. We have two people assisting us in chat today, Sarah Washburn and Becky Wieg, and both from TechSoup are in chat and will be helping as things come up too. Later today, we're going to send out a follow-up email, and in that email it will have a link to the session recording. This is being recorded. It will also have the PowerPoint slides that we're using today, and then any websites that are discussed or shared during the session today will include links to those in that follow-up email too. So throughout the session we'll be sharing things using chat, and we encourage you to do that too if you have things that are relevant, and we'll capture all of that and include it in that follow-up message. So don't worry about trying to, if something gets past you or you don't catch a web address, it will be in that follow-up message. Today's session is brought to you by several groups. I work with TechSoup for Libraries, which is part of TechSoup, an organization that helps nonprofits and libraries use technology to serve their communities. And TechSoup is one of the organizations that is part of a coalition called the EDGE Initiative. And that's what today's session is about. So it's funded by the Gates Foundation and being led by the Urban Libraries Council. The EDGE Coalition has been developing benchmarks. These are our best practices to help public libraries look at where they're at with public technology services and then also make plans for improving. And there are 11 benchmarks in three categories. And you can see as you look at these categories on the slide that the benchmarks are not just about things like the number of computers, a library of a certain size should have, or the amount of bandwidth. Those things are in there, but the benchmarks are much broader. And they're the basis of the EDGE Assessment Tool. And pilot libraries have been testing the benchmarks in the assessment. And then now there are seven states that are termed soft launch states, and they're currently completing the assessment. And those seven states are listed there. In January of 2014, the online assessment tool is going to be available to public libraries nationally. If you're not in a soft launch state, you can still access the assessment workbook. So it's not the online tool. That will be available to everyone in January 2014, but you can access it online on the EDGE website, and we'll put the address for that in chat now, and then also we'll include it in that follow-up message too. And the online assessment tool that will be available in January is going to be very similar to that workbook. So even if you're not in a soft launch state, that gives you a chance to see what's included and to get started. So I'm curious to know how many of you are located in soft launch states and how many of you are new to learning about the EDGE. So we have a poll. This is going to show up on your screen, and you can check more than one of these. You can make multiple selections. So are you in a library that's a pilot library? Are you in one of those soft launch states and maybe already starting to use EDGE, or are you brand new to EDGE? We had about 200 people sign up for today's session, so that's great to see so much interest. I'll give you just another few seconds to finish weighing in in that poll, and then I'll share the results with you. Okay, so today we have a lot of people who are brand new to EDGE, and then quite a few also from soft launch states, and quite a few also already starting to use EDGE. So a diverse group, but the majority brand new to EDGE. So that's great. Okay, so as I said, there are pilot libraries that have been testing this for quite some time now, and that's who we're going to be hearing from today. Deon Mack and Marcia Johnson are both directors of EDGE pilot libraries. Deon is the director of the El Paso Library in Texas, so welcome Deon. Thank you. And Marcia Johnson is the director of the Miami Library in Oklahoma, so welcome Marcia. So they've been working with EDGE for quite a while, and this is the structure for today's session is this. Deon and Marcia will each talk about their library and community, and then they're going to talk about participation in the EDGE assessment and what was involved with that. They'll talk about the results of the assessment, response from stakeholders, and actions they've taken because of the assessment results, and then we're going to wrap up by having each of them share advice for others who are just getting started with or who have not yet started with the EDGE assessment. So that's our structure for today. We'll go back and forth between Deon and Marcia, but we'll always indicate on the slide if we're talking about El Paso or if we're talking about Miami, so those are the symbols or the logos that we'll use to indicate that. With that, let's go ahead and dive in and start hearing from the two of them. So the first thing we'll ask is for each of them just to describe their library and community, and we'll start with Deon talking about El Paso. Good afternoon. Thank you all for joining, and thank you for the opportunity to tell you a lot about EDGE and what we've been doing. It's been very exciting for us. I've been here in El Paso for about two and a half years now, and it has been an amazing time in terms of transforming our community with a lot of new technology through our broadband technology opportunity grant. We're in Texas, and everything is big in Texas, and we're always growing. Our population here in El Paso has grown by 15% in the last 10 years and continues to grow on average by 2.5% every year. So we are challenged in making sure that we stay current with technology and the spread of our population area here, which covers over 259 square miles. We serve a city of about 680,000. Our county area does not have a library system, so we really serve about 835,000 people. We're a young population with the average age of 32. We are 80% Hispanic here, 42% of households have children, and the per capita income is only at around $14,000. We have 12 locations located throughout El Paso. Our numbers continue to grow, and we have over 42% of our population who are active card holders. We are struggling a bit with educational attainment here. So anything that libraries can do to better position our community and help make sure that we can better our economic outlook is also very important to us, which is one of the really important reasons why we want to be able to measure the things that are going to be important in terms of technology as it relates to education. Only about 78% of the population here do not have a four-year college degree, so we're really looking to try to better that outlook for our community. We have around an $8.5 million budget, and that is like everybody else's budget. I won't say more than that, but we are doing the best we can with the dollars that we do have, and we've had some amazing results as a result of an $8.4 million grant that we receive from the federal government, the Broadband Technology Opportunity Grant, which is rolling down next month. So I'll tell you a little bit about that later in the presentation. Thank you. Thank you, and let's ask Marcia the same question. Can you tell us a little bit about your library and community? Okay, sure. Our population, we are a very small community of 13,704. The population is 17% American Indian, which is even more than the population within our state. It's a rather poor community. Our per capita income is only 17,000, which is less than the state per capita of 23,000. In terms of education, only 13% of the adults 25 and older have college degrees. We do have 13,126 total library card holders. Approximately 65% of those live in Miami and the remaining 35% live in the county or outside of the county. We are a municipal library, and so there's just one of us. Our budget, as I indicated there along with every other city budget, was cut by 10% this year, which was unusual in that since I've been here, which has been a little over 10 years, we've never had a budget cut like this before, but it was city-wide. We do have a lot of programs at our library and just a very active library use within our community. Okay, great. Thank you. These slides, again, as I mentioned earlier, we will be sending these out in the follow-up email, so if you want to take a closer look at these, you'll have an up-close look at these graphs too. So the next thing we wanted to talk about, again, both of these libraries have been actively involved with EDGE for quite some time now. So let's hear from each of them about participation in EDGE and what's been involved with that. Marcia, let's start with you for this one. Tell us about being a beta tester. Okay, we actually were the very first one to have the visit from Urban Libraries Council and ICMA after we did our testing. And for the assessment, a lot of the assessment I did along with our technology manager, the staff had some input, but this would just be one piece of advice that I would give to other libraries, particularly smaller libraries, and it is something definitely, when we do this again, that there will be more involvement from the beginning. But in terms of the results, all of the staff, and I read over the results and made lists of ideas for improvement. And the staff really enjoyed this. They enjoyed looking over what we were doing well and came up with lots of ideas that we could do for improvement. So it's definitely been a group effort. Marcia, we had a question about your stats. They were impressed with your population served and your number of card holders. And someone asked, are inactive accounts purged? Is that an easy answer? They are purged. Everyone, feel free to ask questions throughout. Just use the chat for that and we'll be marking those and answering them as they come up. So thank you. Alright, Dionne, how about you? What was involved with the beta testing in your library and community? For us, we also were first round and were fortunate enough, as I said, to be in the midst of a broadband technology opportunity grant. So I was asked to participate in this whole process. We were about one year into that grant and really going live with a lot of exciting things. And already beginning to think about sustainability and things we wanted to do in terms of being able to communicate the benefit of technology to our community and also have a case for support for continuity beyond the grant. And so we were able to pull a very diverse group of staff together. And I have to say for all of you who will be going next, you are so lucky because we did this in paper. And so it's not nearly as beautiful as the tools you will be using and that are live now for your use. And so we were paper based and so we pulled together a broad cross section of staff just to give you a sense of who we serve and how many people are actually here. We have 154 full-time staff members and we also had 42 staff members that are a height for BTOP as a part of our active team. My deputy director took lead in bringing forth the team who will be participating. We tried to make sure it was a broad cross section of people that really touched on all the things that we thought would be included in the benchmarks. As was mentioned earlier, it's not just about counting the number of computers and so it wasn't primarily focused on say our technology team, but we wanted to have our team specialist because we know we will be talking about digital creation and our literacy specialist because we will be talking about adult literacy and of course our marketing coordinator who is really our PIO and gets our messages out into the community. And so we wanted to have everyone sort of at the table talking about really evaluating each one of the questions in detail. The thing that was most interesting for me was it really was enlightening for us to really get a sense of how broad each one of the actual questions were and really gave you an opportunity to think deeply about each one of the things we could be doing in our community. I'm from New York. I previously had the Brooklyn Public Library. It's a city of 2.5 million people. And the approach there would be very different. It's an older city. You have a very diverse community, not growing like here in El Paso. So how do you sort of look at how you would be approaching these things and prioritizing these things for the future and having some balance. So it really was enlightening for all of us I think to sort of go through the process and then delightful in terms of some of the results. What I then did as a result of what we received the results is that I shared those with the entire staff. And of course what I discovered is not everybody cares. And so some of us are really excited. Oh, look what I got. What am I scoring? Either way everyone got the full deck and the full scoring with all the detailed questions. And we talked about how that would be a part of how we do business in the future. But everyone had an opportunity to sort of celebrate and sort of look at the benchmarks and really think about how the things I asked them to do on an LA basis, how it really fits within a big picture. So we really enjoyed being a part of the whole process and developing that from an internal perspective. And of course we had many stakeholders that we spoke to and we'll talk about that a little bit later as well. Okay, great. Well that's a good transition into talking about results. What were the results when you did the assessment for El Paso, Dionne? We scored 780 out of the possible 900 points. And I should say that was primarily as a result as I mentioned earlier that we had a broadband technology opportunity grant. It's $8.4 million. It came with 42 staff members who were just totally awesome. We established 89 computing centers. 1,400 computers were installed everywhere. We're rolling down that grant now and trained 133,000 people. And so a lot of the things that we were being measured against were things that were put underway because of that grant. And so one of the things that I wanted to make sure I cautioned against as we looked at our results and celebrated our results was it was really the result of all this additional money and expertise that allowed us to have this awesome score. And so how do we maintain that? The categories that we didn't score as well in were the organizational management. And we were able to sort of focus on some of those and really decide that we could easily improve our score to over 800 with just one change. Just to give you an example of how things were sort of structured. Like for us, we only got half of the possible scores for ensuring technology inclusion. Although we have excellent ADA equipment, we were not offering a class. And so we were actually able to go back and add 30 points as a result of that. So it was great to sort of see the benchmarks against other organizations and really look at what are the things that are going to be important for us. And what are the things that are going to be important for stakeholders in order for us to continue this? Because I think as many of us sort of know that the bandwidth issue is going to be something that is important for us in the future. And that was also one of our lowest scores as a result of this testing and things that we could talk about in the future. Okay, great. And Marcia, how were the results for Miami? Well, our scores were higher than the peer group. Our total score was 589. And our highest score was in community value. But for one thing, for us, we were still using our T1 line when this started. And because of a broadband grant that the Oklahoma Department of Library's got, we now have a much faster broadband and we have video conferencing equipment. Some of the things that we didn't have when we were actually doing the assessment. But what we looked at based on our scores were things that we could improve on in digital literacy and inclusion and in strategic planning based on community priorities and staff technology expertise which we'll talk about when we talk about the action steps. But we just picked something from each category to work on and try to improve. Okay. Next, let's talk about responses. Responses from stakeholders. Let's start with you on this one, Marcia. What were the responses from stakeholders in your community? The library board was very pleased with the results of the assessment. And the city manager is very interested in benchmarking in general. And I have a feeling that a lot of city managers will be interested in this because he then got involved in ICMA's benchmarking. But the fact is that it's very specific data that you can give. It's graphed. So they like this kind of data. And it helped in getting them involved later on in our long range plan because when I presented this to the city council I asked some of them to serve on a focus committee and they were willing to do that. Our library staff, as I said, when they first saw the benchmarks and saw that these weren't unreasonable things, these are just best practices and realized that we are already doing a lot of them but that there were things we could do better. Once they came up with ideas then their focus has been just on meeting our goals at this point. And in El Paso, how about there, Dionne, what were the responses from your stakeholders? El Paso is also a city agency. I do not have a library board. I report to a deputy city manager who reports to the city manager. So our stakeholder group really included elected officials, deputy city manager, our CFO, our IT directors, and folks like that. Folks from my perspective who have some control over the purse strings in terms of how we sort of move this forward and how I could help them to understand the importance of technology not in a narrow way in terms of number of terminals and number of hours that people have access to computers but broadly in terms of what we can do through technology in terms of bettering our community. I interviewed and had conversations with each one of those folks and what's also important to note is 65% of those folks are no longer in office or in place or with the city and so trying to find ways to keep this fresh in their minds is something that we're trying to do on an annual basis. I think everyone was really impressed with our results but I don't think it was surprising because we had already been talking a lot about the broadband technology opportunity grant and our successes in that we have 10 community partners as a result of our work with that grant. So we were getting a lot of press and people were very impressed with what we were able to do through that effort but it was a good opportunity to talk about the things that we could not do and can do well as a result of the city infrastructure which again is our broadband infrastructure here is sorely lacking. And so it was a way to sort of elevate that conversation from my perspective and keep that front of mind for many people. My city manager is actually a member of ICMA. We'll be presenting next month at their conference and so I'm very excited to present this in another forum and she is very excited about technology and very excited about the things that we need to move forward but I think all of us certainly realize that funding is always a challenge and from my perspective using the tools that through this process, so it's not only about this workbook that you see but I think the advocacy tools that we spent a lot of time developing are going to be equally important for people in terms of how we develop and continue the conversation. So we were very excited and I think that they were enlightened by some of the things that we were able to share with them. Again I said library staff, I think it's always great to find a way to help them to see and celebrate the work that we do. The thing that I think was important for us is as my staff were going through some of the tools there were some questions that people immediately say, oh we don't do that. It wasn't can we do that? Why don't we do that? Is it something we should be doing? Is the fear of that change that immediately leads you to an answer? And so it was an opportunity for us as a group to say is that our priority for us? What will we need to get there if it is a priority for us in the next three to five years? Or is it something that we should just say is not going to be a part of our core work? And so in so many ways this helped us to really think about who we are, what can we do as a city, what fits within our priorities in terms of our demographics. So it really was a rewarding process I think for all the stakeholders and staff that participated. Dion, your mention of advocacy tools has sparked a few questions in the chat. Can you talk a little bit about your advocacy tools? We were actually presented templates that allowed us to have this dialogue and conversation. So of course we got the pilot results and they are all formatted around specific areas. But we also used a slide deck that was almost pre-populated. We received information about national statistics that we could use to populate the slide deck to put it further into a national context for peers. We developed a one-pager leave-behind that allowed us to really summarize. I think one of the things I certainly learned as being a pilot was, I love data, I love information, not everybody does. So how do we condense the things that are going to be important to us for any audience within any brief period of time that we may have in front of someone who has an investment in our future and in this work? So we used all those tools, some of them most successfully and others, and certainly as in hindsight using those one-pagers and really finding ways to get those to more people would have been important. We spent I think a lot of time on the executive tools and how do we use those? As a pilot, our evaluation of the things that we did as a group with ICMA and ULC did for us was further interview folks after I had and got feedback from them on how they felt about those things. So what was missing, what did I miss in terms of a dialogue and conversation? And that was so, so valuable to me in terms of how we present information and what people are hearing when we present this information to them and what's missing. So I think those tools are online, I'm not sure. I'm going to just let somebody else talk about that part. But that was what we had in terms of our tools when we were presenting all of this. Maybe I'll jump back and ask Marcia about that. Did you use advocacy tools that were kind of built into EDGE and helping you share your results? Yes, and the one-page handout was just wonderful. The template was there and so it was just a simple matter of putting in the information for our library but it was very personalized too. So that's probably the main one that we used, the ones that were prepared, but then too the PowerPoint itself. When I presented to the city council before I even said anything and the first slide came up, and I think the council had already had a chance to look through those slides before I presented, but one of them commented how professional and how wonderful the slides looked. And again, that made it very easy to make a presentation because the information was already in a template form so that we could just put in our info. Okay, good. Well, lots of people are also now asking if those are available. So we're checking to see and make sure they're on the site. We'll take a look and see if that's a link we can share. Okay, so I think the next thing that we'll talk about is actions. So you got these results from the assessment and let's next talk about actions taken. And on this one we'll start with you, Dion. Have you talked about El Paso and action steps there? As I mentioned, we had actually done a survey of our community, and I just think it's really important when we look at all of our data and all the possibilities that we make sure that our strategies are actually meeting the needs of our community. So I've included here just a couple of the bullets that we learned when we did our technology survey of our students and why the basic digital literacy training and classes and the things that we do in that area are so important. As you can see, only 55% of the people who we surveyed, and as I said, we trained 133,000 people earn less than $10,000 a year. 42% of the respondents were Spanish speaking. Only all of our classes were offered bilingually. Only 33% reported not having a high school deployment. So we had a lot of people who had 9th grade and below. And so for us, looking at some of those statistics and looking at the data, we really realized that the more that we could do in terms of investing in basic literacy classes and making sure we could continue to offer those classes and we'd do three a week at every location the same time, year round, would only benefit our community even more than we had so far. It was amazing for us through the BTOP project to realize how many people we were serving with just basics. I think we take for granted that people have technology at home, that people are making investments in these areas. Only 34% of our population here, and I mentioned that we have over 800,000 people in the area, have broadband connectivity at home. So they so rely on us. And what we realize through the process is the majority of the people that we were training were learning how to use the mouse and keyboard from basics. And so we wanted to make sure that what we would be doing would be building on those basics and offering the full range of classes as we graduate those people and move them forward. So the basic digital literacy benchmarks were something that we decided that we were going to make sure we stayed focused on. And so as I said, the digital literacy help and training became one of our core areas and of course meeting employment needs because we take people up the full pyramid of training from the basics straight up to things that they would be using in the workforce. The things that we knew would be a challenge to us that Keith mentioned over and over again is our bandwidth. We have really amazing technology. And as Marsha mentioned earlier, she got an upgrade for her from T1s. And as you know, most of us have the equivalent of T1 technology or T1 bandwidth speed at our homes. So when you have that type of speed in a library with 90 people on Wi-Fi and 60 people sitting at computers, you are limited in so many ways in terms of how you can move your organization forward, particularly when everything is streaming through video, even in the training environment. And so we are really focusing on how we can push for a better broadband capacity with our community. The last priority we had of course was staff, technology, training, and expertise. I mentioned that we have a lot of staff people who were hired especially for this training. We were very fortunate to have some very talented people who were able to be very creative about our training and really be responsive to anything the community asked for, but I have 35 people who would no longer be with our organization after Friday. And so how do we make sure that my staff who are still here can continue that and make sure that, as I mentioned earlier, that we don't get shocked by the change of it or the fear of not being perfect doing it and not offer the things that we know our community needs. So those are really the things that we saw as our community priorities and things that we wanted to see continue as our action steps in our focus for the next few years. Thanks. Okay, Marcia, how about action steps in Miami? We divided into three categories, and the first one was digital literacy and inclusion, and some of the things that we did. We do offer computer classes several a month, and we do offer some one-on-one help, but what we changed was to start offering appointments to people who were beginners because when you have a beginning computer class, sometimes you have people on different levels and some of them need lots of one-on-one, and so we started offering one-on-one help just by appointment. And this has worked really well for those people. We also are going to offer a class for parents about Internet Safety for Children, and this we wrote into our recent long-range plan. In terms of access for digital inclusion, we recently just rearranged some furniture and technology to make everything easier. We've added an adjustable table for wheelchair access, and I've seen that used a lot just in the past week since we've moved it. Tables that had easy access to power strips because Wi-Fi users want to sit all over the library and then they can't find somewhere to plug their computer in, and so we rearranged so that it would be easier for them to have a table to sit at and a place to plug in. And then we also set a computer aside for job seekers, and it's close by the third desk, so there's somebody that can help them if they need help finding a specific resource. We are going to add some templates to it and some other helpful materials by it. We recently did that, but we've had a lot of people to use that just in the past week since we've got it set up, and we have them sign in when they use it, and we don't put any time limits on it like there are on our regular patron computers. So that was our first step. The next one is strategic planning based on community priorities, and back in May we had a community focus group, and we had 16 community leaders attend that represented various places in the city, and they made a long list of strengths and weaknesses that they saw in our community, and it was really very informative but it was also informative for them because some of them didn't know the things that we told them about the library and the things that we do, and I've been able to make some good connections with some people since then. But from that we created our long range plan, and the major recommendations that they made were to increase our marketing and increase our partnerships, and so within our plan under each item we've listed ways to market and ways that we will partner. So that's been a really helpful thing for us. And then the last action step, and Dion mentioned this also with staff technology expertise, in the original version of the benchmarks, and it's not in there anymore I don't think, but there was a benchmark saying that you would have an expert in each of four different areas, and I looked at that and I thought there's no way we'll ever have an expert, but I tried to think in terms of what we could do, but all through the benchmarks it was obvious that we needed more training in different ways, and we had had the requirement of each staff taking at least two technology related training sessions, be it a workshop or a webinar or something like that. But after we did Edge, and the library staff themselves said we really would like more training on this, and so we upped that requirement to at least six technology related training sessions. And it's like someone said, it's like trying to change a tire on a car while it's still moving. Keeping up with technology is really hard, but with the constant training we feel a little bit better prepared for the different things that we need to do to help our customers. We've written that into our job descriptions, it's written into our technology plan, and we're also currently considering different ways that we might measure and evaluate our technology expertise. Okay, this might be a good time to ask you a question that came up and talked about this a little bit about staff reaction. Someone had a good question, any resistance to Edge, to the process, to the results and the actions as a result of your assessment? Did you encounter any staff resistance? I don't recall there really being any resistance because there might have been some before they looked at the benchmarks, but once they looked at them and realized that some of this we're already doing, some of it we can do, and it's things that we should do, I feel like they were all pretty much on board with it. And Marcia, just to be sure that you mentioned six sessions that now after Edge library staff participated in at least six sessions, is that per year? Yes. Okay, that's what I thought. Okay, Dionne, can I ask you that same question? Did you encounter any staff resistance to the Edge process or to the assessment results and some of the actions taken? Any staff resistance there? No, I think having an honest dialogue with yourself about your staff's ability is really important too. One of the things that I did this year, although BTOP will be ending, is I've always planned to have a lead trainer or someone who would have the expertise of the Liberty's classes in-house and find expertise outside of the organization as needed to make sure we could subsidize this training. The majority of my staff, my librarians, and everyone else who works for me was not hired for this. And so I have some people who naturally have the disposition to be trainers with education backgrounds, but not everyone is cut out to do this type of training. And so with that in mind, from my perspective, I surveyed my team. We asked for people to volunteer to be trained to continue this, and we sort of are using those as our core people. But I don't think that it's realistic to just assume that you could assign anyone to these tasks and can be successful in doing that. So I think the staff understood that if we were going to identify anything within these plans that needed to be implemented, that we would take the time to look at our staffing, our capacity, and where we would need to really put our resources in terms of making this happen. And of course that means that I've cut other positions to make this happen. My staff and my budget have only declined. But through this process, we know that this is going to be important for our future. We know that this is important for our community. We know this is how we make a difference. And so I've gotten no resistance from staff in how we need to carve out to make these things happen for them. And so it's been really good, I think, in terms of the staff's acceptance of our success in these areas and that we have been very fortunate to see what outside trainers brought to the table in terms of expertise. And so I haven't received any resistance. I think if I told all my staff that I want you to go out and be trainers tomorrow and that even though it's not in your job description and not give them the support they need to be successful, of course I would have gotten a lot of resistance. And I would have gotten a lot of complaints from unhappy customers because it's just not realistic. Thanks, Dionne. Marcia, in Miami, were you getting the tech train? Was that happening internally too with other staff teaching it? Or did you go externally? How did you approach the staff training? Mostly externally. If any internal training I would do myself because I teach most of our computer classes. Some of them have taken classes from the State Library because they offer computer classes to us. Some of them have done like webinars and that sort of thing. Or they've attended other trainings and other places that have been offered. Because like Dionne said, I don't have any other staff. I've got like one other staff that does the one-on-one computer basics classes, but none of the rest of them would feel really comfortable with actually teaching a computer class. Their training is mostly so they can just help customers one-on-one as they come in and need help. And then one more question on this that was asked is any particular topics or what did you find that people needed training on? What types of tech training were most needed? Well, it could be a variety of things. For example, one of the trainings that was brought in for the staff was how to use OK Job Match from the State Department of Commerce. And that way when people come in wanting to look for a job, the staff is at least familiar enough with this website that they can get them started on it. Other training might be technology for, you know, we have people bring in iPads or all kinds of e-readers wanting help to know how to download books or how to use them for that purpose. So there's training on that. Software, a lot of people need help with Microsoft Word or Excel and so some staff training so that they can help someone who comes in and they're wanting to do a document on the computer and need a little bit of help with that, you know, training in that software is helpful also. Okay, great. This is a popular topic as it was last month when we did an Edge webinar as this topic of staff training. We did a webinar on this specifically, an Edge webinar that was all about staff training. I think it was last fall, Stephanie Zimmerman actually who's online was one of the presenters for that. And I'm going to post a link that can get you some of that information and I'll include that in the follow-up too. But great, thank you all for all of your questions and thank you Marcia and Dion. Well, the last thing we wanted to talk about and then we'll take more questions too is just advice. What advice do you have for others who are just getting started with this or will be getting started with it at the beginning of next year? Let's start with you Dion. What's your tips for others? I think one of the most important things that you go through your process and you go through the benchmarks is realize the limitations of your resources. I think we're talking to a mid-sized library and a small-sized library. I think we all have priorities that we've set for our communities or that communities have set for us. And while you may not be able to really tackle everything on the list, there's certainly some things I think are a priority for you and just take some time to really figure out what those are and apply your energy to making those things happen first. And for me, I wanted 900, so I was like, okay, we're going to do all of this and we're going to retake. I want a perfect score. Probably not going to happen. But I think making sure that we could feel good about the work we do in the areas that we are doing well, and if that's important for your community, take that and know that that's going to be something that you're going to continue to focus your efforts and energy on. And then one of the things that I think we learned was that there are things that we didn't even think about until we went through this whole process in terms of digital creation for kids and thinking about our spaces as being joint use or providing technology for public use that we were able to sort of implement at the tail end of the BTOP grant just by having that aha moment as we were going through this process. The other thing that I think is really important is I revisit these benchmarks all the time. So when I'm talking about technology and I'm talking about our role within our community, I make sure that it's a part of what I'm talking about and I talk about the things that are listed as a part of the benchmarks and have it as part of my regular presentations to council and community groups. And so they understand that when they are paying taxes and they are doing these things, this is where it's going. We are not the library we were a decade or two decades ago. We look at our budgets that are just about the same and you adjust them for inflation and consider that we invested even up to 20% of it in technology now which is a growing cost and expense. It means that our budgets and how we make those investments need to be very different. And so how do we help them to sort of understand that and keep that as a priority for our community in terms of all the things that we can do in terms of digital inclusion and e-government and all the other areas that are going to be important to people. The other thing that I've been doing is just reassessing and reevaluating. As I said earlier, just changing one thing, offering one class, changed our scores dramatically. So that was the nice thing to sort of look at and say, you know, we are making progress even though we are not doing all the things on the list. We are moving our organization forward even though it's not this big huge plan that we are checking things off on, but we are moving forward in ways that make a difference for us in capturing the things that we know are important in this area for our community. Thank you. And Marsha, what's the advice you would give? And you said that you would especially like to address the small libraries. Yes, and actually, Dionne pretty much said everything that I would say. Don't be overwhelmed if there's things that you can't address. Just focus on what you can do or what you can do and go forward from there. And in addition, she talked about reusing the material from Edge. And we do that also. We've used it in all of our planning documents. Our technology plan of course is obvious. You can use a lot of the things from Edge in your technology plan. We also used it in our long-range plan. One section of our long-range plan is all about digital inclusion. In addition to that, our city manager asked for all of the departments to come up with 10 goals. And within those goals, seven of them, I referred directly to the benchmarks and said meeting this goal will help us to meet the benchmark. And I named the benchmark and the number. I have found this just very useful in so much of what we do and in the presentations that I make. And it's just a very good tool to use in that way also. So I think it's a great tool for small libraries. And I would hope that no small library would be discouraged from doing this because it's very useful. Okay, great. We're at that point where we can take more questions. Feel free to share those in the chat. One question that I see that we haven't answered yet is the participant would like to hear from you on community partners and how they can help libraries as they're getting started with the Edge process. So maybe Deon, I'll start with you. Did community partners play a role or continue to play a role in this for you? Sure. I'll talk about one area in particular. It sort of helps you to understand how that was important for us. One of our partners for the BTOP, two of our partners for the BTOP project served communities with special needs. So their entire facilities were really built around how you address people with a variety of special needs and disabilities. So they really became not only a partner in BTOP in terms of we're providing training there, but they trained our staff to be able to provide training to various populations, how to use the special technology and equipment, and there was a variety of equipment there. And they were really the sole experts in this area for the city. So as a result of our work with them, I now have staff at a variety of locations that have this equipment. We've developed brochures. We've developed posters to let people know we have it. We have it on our website so people know we have it. We're the only place in the city with this equipment, but now we know that people know how to use it. And it was as a result of that partnership that we were able to really obtain those skills and skill sets for our staff. One of the things that I think is important with partners is that you don't have to do everything. When we talk about some of our health and wellness needs and those are some of the things that are going to be scored, we partner with our health department and we have sites that are within our WIC centers. So how do we use their expertise to come into our facilities to train? Or how do we bring our trainers out to their areas? And how do we partner to bring community together for some joint goals? And those types of things have been really, really important for us. Here I think, in El Paso, one of the things I've been most impressed about is people's willingness to work together together as a community. It's never about, well, it's my budget or your budget or who's going to get the glory. It's been about our educational organizations and schools and everyone sort of coming together around things that have been very important for us. So we've been able to get a lot done in terms of making sure the word is out there, in terms of making sure we're sharing our facilities to meet our community's needs because we really are a large city in terms of spread. And so partners have been really important for us in terms of that. And there's never, never enough marketing for public libraries. I mean, every day you have someone who comes in and says, I didn't know you offered that. I mean, I've been offering classes. I mean, we offered 370 classes a month and I had someone from the newspaper say, I didn't know you had those. I just wanted to scream. So partners are really important in helping us to get the word out about the things that we do offer so that if you're offering a class, you're getting the cost benefit of offering that class by having a full class in terms of participation and so our partners have been great in terms of letting their constituents know about our work. Those are great examples. Marcia, how about in Miami, partnerships? Were they an important part of this? Are there any advice to others thinking about partnerships and their role? Well, first I'm glad to hear Dion say that they have people come in their library that have never heard of the things that they do because sometimes it kind of takes you back because you think you've gotten the word out and you've gotten the word out. Just in terms of meeting the benchmarks, bringing in the Department of Commerce or Department of Libraries, someone from there to teach a class here has been very helpful. And I would say, and I know this probably isn't exactly addressing the question, but one of the things I noticed as I was filling out the benchmarks was how much our state library helped us to do as well as we did because they offer computer classes that have made it possible for me to come back then and teach those classes. They are the ones that wrote the BTOP grant that enabled us to have the faster broadband and the video conferencing equipment and some of the databases that we have are thanks to them. So some of what I feel like part of our success is just due to all of the support that we've received from the State Department of Libraries. Partnerships are something that we will be working a lot more on. We want to work more with our schools and we have done some things with our schools. I've done a few grants with one with the college and one with the public schools, but we are looking at doing some more of that and then maybe also branching into working with our employment agencies and all of this came about because of our long-range plan and because of EDGE. Marcia, you mentioned support from your state library and that's actually a question that came up too is what role did the state library player, what support did you get? Marcia is in Oklahoma. Maybe I'll have you talk about that one first. Well, that is the main thing and they did, I filled it out and any questions that I had, there were a few questions that I had that I asked them, but I would just say actually they set the stage for us to be successful by providing all that they do. And Dianne, how about in Texas? What kind of support from the state library there? Unfortunately, our state library the year before we began this process was effectively gutted. They lost 64% of their funding and so we really weren't able to rely on our state library for many of the things that I think they were able to provide in previous years. Let's see, this one might be a good one for you Marcia. It's a library director of a small rural library. I agree this is a great tool. However, it does feel like a one-size-fits-all. How can small libraries keep from being discouraged? Any advice there Marcia? My advice would be just to focus on a few of the things that you can do because nobody, not even the biggest libraries can do it all. But for a small library there are things in here that you can do. And if you just focus on that then it's going to lift you up no matter what. I wouldn't worry about how you compare with any other library. I would just say these are benchmarks and these are the ones that I could improve in and I'll just focus on those. Yeah, and there is also a category where we could say not applicable to our library that didn't really bring down our overall score. So I thought it sort of made it fair in terms of your scoring. So I thought it, although it feels like a lot of questions and a lot of areas that you are asking to sort of evaluate, there are ways to make sure that if it's not something that you see as a part of your core operation, depending on your structure it may be assigned to, if you're a library district it may be different. You can have, you know, it's not applicable to my library and have that be a valid response to you. So I would be less focused on the size of the library. I think it's been tailored in a way that sort of addresses some of those issues. Okay, and we've got two more questions here. One is, any negative feedback as you worked through the assessment? Any negative, and maybe I'll start with you, Deanna, on that one, any negative feedback for you? I think the only thing for us was always, as always, we were a pilot so it was a time crunch. It feels like I'm potentially in the budget cycle here. So it was trying to get our stakeholders together. I think in terms of just filling out the tool and sort of getting those things, some were really easy for us and how we communicate but sort of getting our elected officials and others in a room for a period of time that allowed them to really focus and understand the things that we were trying to communicate to them was somewhat of a challenge. And I think that was because we were a pilot. I mean we didn't have, we were developing as we were going in terms of our feedback was sort of crunched manually and although everything was sort of presented to us in a very professional way, we were sort of developing some of these one-pages and tools like days before we were presenting them. And so yeah, we had a little bit of anxiety and nervousness but we were, you know, first. So we didn't have to say we did worse than someone else. That was a good question. Last question, did you discover anything that surprised you by going through this process? And I'll throw that at either of you. Anything surprised you? Any surprising discoveries? I think for us it was just realizing how much we do that are part of the benchmarks already. You know, there wasn't anything in it that seemed totally out of reach for us. I don't know what I expected but as I read through it, and I think too it was that way for the staff because I'm not sure what they expected when they first read through them but that was the comment, well we're already doing this and we're doing this. They just seemed really pleased by that. That's great. Well we have reached the top of the hour. I want to thank you both so much for taking the time to share with us. And just for being pilots it sounds like there was a lot involved in giving a lot of feedback and helping make these really good. Your contact information will be sharing that in the follow-up materials we send out later today. So remember that's coming. You'll have the PowerPoint, the recording, and you can share that with others. We will be doing this again next month and we're going to focus on rural libraries. We're going to focus on 5,000 population and under next month. So I'm looking forward to that one a lot. And again, thank you all for your participation and for your great questions. And again, thank you so much, Dionne and Marcia. Thanks too to Becky and Sarah for the chat help. That was great too. Thanks everyone and we hope you'll sign up for next month's webinar and we'll talk to you again then. Thank you. Thank you.