 Looking good. There we go. Yep. All right. All right. Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live I am your host Krista Burns here at the Nebraska Library Commission Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event We're a webinar. We're a webcast We're an online show the terminology is up for debate to some people But whatever you want to call us we are here live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time If you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine We do record our shows every week and you can always go back to our website Which I will show you at the very end of today's show and see all the recordings from all our previous shows Both our live show on our recordings are both free all free and open to anyone to watch So many of the old things you want to watch you can go back there and see them all If you have any friends or colleagues you think might be interested in anything we're doing on here Let them know about us share have them come on come and watch the show with us or check it out for recordings General we usually do include with them afterwards if there are any slides or handouts or presentations involved We'll include that in the recording afterwards as well and any links and websites that anybody mentions We try and collect them all into our delicious account where we collect bookmarks together So that'll be available to you as well So try to get everything you can afterwards We do a mixture of things here on encompass live. We do interviews book reviews many training sessions demos Basically anything a library related we have it on the show. We're not very picky In that case anything related to libraries libraries are doing things that might be of interest or use to libraries We want to share with you We do have on Nebraska library commission staff that sometimes do presentations But we also bring in guest speakers as well and this morning with us on the show. We have one of our guest speakers And hopefully you can see her video there. Jessman West is with us this morning from Vermont. Hi Jess. How are you? Still yes, it is still morning for you only an hour off on the east coast from us And she's going to talk to us about this great program that Vermont's been doing and for two years now This is starting up their second year passport to Vermont library is a great little a program To get people visiting libraries in the state. So I'm just going to hand over to you Jessman to tell us all about it Sounds great. Thanks for showing up everyone Really happy to get to talk about this program because I'm actually really excited about it. Basically It's a sort of a summer program. We do it's not our summer reading program The loose idea is we as the librarians of Vermont love the libraries of Vermont and we would like to Kind of share our love of discovery and finding out all the different kinds of libraries that Vermont has as states go Vermont's got more libraries per capita than any other state in the country Which is kind of easy because we also have the second smallest population of any state in the country, but There's a lot of teeny libraries. We don't have any state consortiums We have a state library system, but we don't have any regional consortium. So each library is very I Know it sounds weird to say very unique, but each library is different and they're all very Sort of specific to their community in ways that are sort of cool and interesting and so we started this program The sort of beginning of last year launched it last summer and we're now in our second year so I'm really going to step through what the parts are of Having a program like this that we run statewide. I'm aware that for a lot of people the idea of a statewide program makes absolutely no sense because most states are big and It's just completely not workable But one of the great things about this kind of program is that it scales you can do it in your county You can do it in your region. You can do it in your who even knows There's all sorts of different ways to to do the program and people seem to like it And it's pretty flexible to do whatever you want So the web address there has the page that's got the links Krista will also send you the web address around but that's there right now You can see these slides in addition to links to all the things that I'm going to talk about that might not have Obvious web addresses so before I really start talking about our project I wanted to talk about some projects that were inspirational to us notably Vermont has a It's got a group called the 251 club of Vermont It's one of Vermont's largest nonprofit groups and it's essentially a group of people who like to visit the towns of Vermont there's 251 towns in Vermont and It's literally just a membership club. You pay five bucks or something and you try to visit all the states and Our towns and cities at cities is kind of a misnomer. We only have eight cities in the state But you go visit them and if you visit them all you Nothing you're a plus member and that's about it, but it's a way to sort of again We love the state. It's fun to go visit the club kind of you can do whatever you want You don't have to take a picture in every town, but you can you don't have to go to every town hall But you can you don't have to so it's a very nice kind of do what you want with the idea The club has a little bit of structure. They've got a meeting once a year and that's it And then Connecticut did a passport program a couple of years earlier I'm not sure if I actually have a link to this because I'm not sure if the program's up online anymore But it was a much more similar. Hey go visit libraries and get stamps and they had a really nice looking Looking passport and it was maybe in a specific county. I don't actually sort of remember But that's what got us thinking. Oh, hey, we can maybe do this in the state and when I say us it was basically me and a couple other people the Vermont library Association We formed an informal committee and probably four or five of us did the bulk of the work So I'll talk about kind of how we got started this breaks down into about five different sections And if you have questions feel free to do whatever Webinar hand-raising thing. I'm happy to stop and explain more about a thing or back up and talk about a thing So getting started we needed to figure out sort of how to put a thing together I was really hoping I could just find some design like hey print out this passport. It's a PDF It's available on the internet put your own name on it, but that turned out really not to be true There were a couple passport designs for like kid things pretty low low-key kind of cartoony wasn't exactly what we wanted to do so I took a Template that was not quite a passport template and really kind of worked it around Using pages which is software for the Mac and turned it into the sort of PDF I have now so anybody who wants that template now it is available From us I can even help you make one that says what you want But right now it was a lot of work the first year and then the second year I was all like ah, this is gonna be a lot of work again But it turns out changing the picture and changing two or three things to do the next year's one took almost no time at All so a lot of front-end work the first time and then after that really straightforward So what we did at the Vermont Library Association, I'll show you some pictures is We We printed out maybe a thousand of these and handed out starter Sets of passports the libraries, but we also made the PDF available on our website So that libraries that were big and were popular and really needed more of them could just print them out themselves No problem very easy each of them takes up You know one sheet of paper has kind of a half sheet thing So a passport would equal a half sheet of card stock and then a sheet of plain paper on the inside It would be cut in half I found a photo from wikimedia commons and there's this great website that I love called the noun project Which essentially just gives you lots and lots and lots of icons need an icon of a book Need an icon of a building need an icon of an arrow need an icon of whatever you can get it They're all free to use as long as you give credit So we have a website for this program where we give credit to the noun project and everyone else so if you decided to be a participating library, so Vermont has a hundred and eighty-three libraries and We wanted people to sign up and if you signed up a Participating library would get a little packet of passports to get started and this was probably the most important thing of the program We would give them templates for everything they would need here's a poster that announces the program Here's a press release that you can send to your local paper with some information on it Here's flyers that you can hang up in your library everything was designed it was designed to look kind of the same as the passports and We could just give them the libraries and like you know fill in your library name here So they didn't have to do any designing mostly all they had to do was sort of print stuff We took a bunch of photos of the process and we took some really nice photos of the passports and just put them in a Flickr set so that libraries who wanted color photos to put on websites or blogs or Instagram or Twitter or whatever Could have access to those we give tech support for people who had needed help Putting the thing on a flyer or understanding another thing We had web addresses that libraries could get their patrons on the passport There's a hey share your pictures at this web address and for librarians There was a page that gave them a lot more details That's where all the printable stuff was it would give them updates and information and our whole Vermont library Association website runs on WordPress so it was a pretty simple WordPress hack to make two pages that were Short web addresses that people could remember well actually the passport one is short the other one They're not quite as short but easy to get to their own look and feel not super complex And then the other big thing we did to make it kind of a statewide thing is People could get prices. We assembled little prize baskets and the way the program worked was starts June 1st and September 1st. There's two weeks of determining Who visited the most libraries from adult young adult and kid age groups and then one wild card winner And they get prize baskets that would have things in them books Ben and Jerry gift cards little little stuff that people from Vermont would appreciate and I'll talk a little bit more about that So you could visit any library and get a stamp But participating libraries you could go and get a passport if you were part of a participating library you could win We may relax that a little bit this year It doesn't actually really matter that much who's participating and who's not participating We don't do a ton of record keeping but it does give us a list of people that we email every kind of couple weeks Just to keep them apprised of what's going on and then we have a map of all the libraries that participate So people can sort of plan their trip So this is what the passport cover looks like. It's just a pretty straightforward template all of those icons The little circle the books the outline of the state. Those are all noun project Icons that we used this is what the back looks like. That's the Vermont Library Association logo And it's a very simple web address where people can learn more about the program The inside you can put your name on it you can put the name of your home library and Then I kind of got ahead of myself and got a little complicated with this and decided to make a list of All the towns in Vermont because you can copy that list from Wikipedia right pretty straightforward and then put the ones in bold who are participating Terrible idea never gonna do that again because in Vermont like probably a lot of other states We have some towns that have multiple libraries in them that maybe are slightly different or we have this town in Village thing. So like you might have a town Essex. They might have a village Essex Junction Essex and Essex Junction each have their own library But there's only the town Essex and at any rate there were some towns who were like you don't have us in bold or we're in bold or whatever So this was kind of a cool design feature never doing it again But it did look really awesome and then this is the inside which just had one of the libraries I believe it's in Huntington, Vermont and a really kind of a pretty backdrop and then little squares for Putting stamps in and we had originally thought. Oh, we'll just put the name of all the libraries No crazy not a good idea 183 libraries super complicated and we did get some feedback which is like well, it would have been really nice to know When the libraries were open because we do have a lot of libraries that maybe you're open 14 or 16 or 18 or 20 hours a week And so if you're really planning to go visit It can be actually a little complicated making this all work and figuring it out So we compromised and linked to the website from the state that has a giant Excel spreadsheet that has all the hours I do really wish there was a user-friendly way to get information about all the hours in a Handy, you know now I've got schemes, right that what I want to do is make an app So that people on their phones block don't really know but on the inside and we just have Kind of two pages so it's not it's not super big The people who really did visit the most libraries really filled these all up But a lot of times you get kind of multiple stamps for every square It's fine and then in the inside we include the Vermont library Association's logo again And then we have our Facebook web address and the Facebook web address was where users who were visiting libraries could Share photos and we weren't really sure if this was going to take off or be a thing But we figured out we'll try it because there's a lot of people on Vermont that use Facebook But the Facebook slash library overlap in Vermont is actually not that big like Vermont libraries have Facebook pages But they're not sort of hotbeds of activity. So we weren't really sure how this would go But it actually turned out to be super useful not only because people who visited libraries like to share their photos But because the libraries with Facebook pages then could Promote I mean we could cross promote with the different libraries So I think it's always kind of nice when professional organizations that use Facebook and sort of interact with each other And that actually turned out to be one of the things that happened with our Facebook page Libraries could promote content that we put on Facebook share it out or whatever and vice versa So we could share posts that libraries had made so around it being Neater than I even thought it would be which was cool and one of the things about handing out a press release is Lots of places that really want Content and interesting stories are actually super happy to share your information. So we wound up with posts on Vpr and a lot of them not that small newspapers in the state of Vermont, which was great The good news was we got good promotions and they like to share our photos and that kind of thing So having the photos available really helped the bad news was they in some cases printed our Press releases verbatim which I wasn't expecting so, you know, there was a little typo It turned it common the wrong place and one of my press releases and then I just got to see it perpetuate Among all these places that reprinted it. So we were really happy to get that PR and coverage, but it did really sort of drive home how important it was to really make sure the press release was Ready for prime time. So from an engagement perspective what we did while the program was actually running We had a bunch of social media sort of angles The Facebook group was its own Facebook group. So it wasn't just a thing the Vermont Library Association did on their Facebook group It was its own thing We had to kind of decide about that because VLA really does its own thing And we were a little bit afraid if people were just posting like passport passport passport stuff They actually weren't gonna pay attention to the other great things VLA does like summer reading and like some of the awards We do so we had our own branded Facebook group We did promote through all of VLA's channels and for us a lot of that is actually mailing list Stuff we have a couple statewide mailing lists and you know, we have a Twitter But it's not it doesn't have a big impact because a lot of our librarians are not really on Twitter We did have a hashtag and we did have some people using Instagram for this But not so many the big thing that we did to keep the librarians informed Which was also kind of a little bit of a um like a hub and spoke things someone would tell us like oh I have a really good idea like we had one my brand Who said you know the idea of traveling all over the state to go to libraries didn't really appeal to people in her rural Community that's way up in the Northeast Kingdom. So she was deciding to do a little local Contest that was just hey visit all the libraries in the county And I thought that was a really good idea And so she told me and then I could put it as one of the things in the sort of twice monthly mailing list that I send out To other people so that's a way for us to connect to people let them know how the program is going Kind of update them if anything new is happening Remind them of whatever the dates are that are coming up, etc. And for that we use Mailchimp, which I find Amazing just super simple mailing list management easy to make sort of graphically Attractive emails that people can look at that have links to a whole bunch of other stuff, etc etc cannot speak highly enough of using Mailchimp for this kind of stuff and Out of 183 libraries. I think last year we had 99 libraries participating and this year We've got more like 115 so for a mailing list It's not so many people you couldn't stick it in the BCC list of your email But it allows you to use a lot of pictures and graphics and everything else and then on the admin side administering this program and I'll talk a little bit more about that later We used all the Google stuff right we use Google spreadsheets to keep in track track of people We use Google Docs to share Information among the committee members we use Google Maps to get the locations of all of our Libraries and I'll I think I have a picture of that coming up and we use Google Forms to do some feedback and evaluation of the Program both during the program and after the program, which was super helpful So this is a look at what our passport to Vermont libraries Facebook page look like We don't have a whole bunch of metrics that we were really trying to hit with this But it was nice being able to see like how many people our posts are reaching How you know giving people a message box where they can talk to the program which we otherwise kind of didn't have you know We had hey Here's everyone on the committee and our email list But there wasn't a way to actually talk kind of to the program directly and our Facebook page did allow that This is a screenshot from the end of last season and then this is what our website looks like It's just the VLA website and we had this little checklist of you know What's happening? This is how we need to schedule it and I'll talk about schedules a little bit coming up But this is what librarians could read to figure out what they needed to know about the program And it was a different page than our patron facing page to help them sort of get jazzed about the program and I think that's important because administrating the program and Being a participant in the program really do have sort of two different sets of requirements if you scroll down on this page there's a link from on my page and You can see we have an FAQ and some other stuff to help answer people's questions And at the end of every MailChimp email that we send out we included this footer, which just restated Here's the Facebook. Here's the hashtag. Here's our Instagram. Here's that just so people would kind of get the idea Hey, you know there are interactive ways to sort of Do social media with this I felt like one of the side benefits of this program Is that librarians in Vermont who maybe didn't use social media very much and there's a lot of them and nothing wrong with that But I do feel like more and more of our patrons are starting to use social media So it was a concern if librarians were like I don't really know Why I would do that like if you're a librarian at a personal level Twitter may not solve a problem for you But it's important I think to understand the Twitter environment at least so that you can assess whether or not you need to use it So this would just keep you know Hey, we're just there is Instagram. There is Twitter VLA is on there You can interact with us and so at a point at which a librarian decides hey this solves a problem for me That information is just there in the footer very low risk very low You know you have to do this kind of because Vermont is a very tradition-based state and so Telling people the new thing is what they should be doing Doesn't go over that well and probably not true to be honest But letting people know these options are available to figure out at which point it solves a problem for them I think that's helpful So we tried a bunch of different maps Z maps which you can kind of see I guess it's on your left Z Z maps basically has a dot where all the Participating libraries are the arc GIS map is a map that was made by the state The state has some challenges. I think dealing with Sort of web-based stuff. They're not web natives. And so they don't always The choices they make don't always seem to necessarily make sense. So as much as the arc GIS thing Was a very accurate map which had all the you know latitudes and longitudes of all the libraries It actually wound up not being super useful for what our patrons Which was literally just looking at a picture with a road and figuring out Figuring out where how they could get from one library to the other and we actually switched from Z maps Which is the thing that layers on top of Google Maps to just using a Google map tool this year And it worked out really well But the mapping tools are great because people really like to see where things are people really like to understand how to get from point A to point B and Looking at a thing from the top down with this kind of blurry blue and purple thing didn't really solve that problem for the People who are using it and I talked earlier about prices We have a woman in Vermont who wrote a book in the 90s called where the books are Which literally was her and her husband going to every library in the state and writing a little blurb about the library It's adorable and the woman who wrote it Pat Belving is still around and alive and Was very happy when we contacted her to donate some copies of the books We got a couple other things donated You see sort of the the books for kids down in the corner lots of stickers And then we use some VLA money to actually purchase some gift cards and some Vermont country store gift cards You can use them to buy online or not this year We're trying to go for all donated Prizes and then we bundled them up in a Vermont library association tote bag And I'll show you sort of what that looks like when when delivered So this is Pat Belving. She's I believe in her 90s And we actually one of the other things we did was we went to her house and buried Vermont and interviewed her about the process and Shared out that interview on our mailing list. I mean ultimately it's linked to on our website But it was kind of a value-add bonus for participating libraries. So you could We spoke to her. I don't know if you can sort of read this on tiny screen But basically, you know, she got it published the local library gave her a book signing She sent out flyers to every library Lots of libraries bought it. She got her print run of a thousand completely sold out And she's got about five copies left now So we're really happy that we got a couple of those to give to people to share our love of libraries And maybe at some point we'll look at, you know, a Vermont humanities grant to sort of do the The the re-upping of that book which we all love like every librarian in Vermont is like, oh Pat Belving where the books are so cool So as far as timing goes What a lot of people ask is like, okay, what was the timeline for this? Like when did you have to get started? When did you have to really hit it? When did you have to and we're kind of lucky in Vermont at least in terms of this in that our Conferences in the mid-end of May So the whole plan hinged around getting the passports assembled so that we could hand out the starter packs at the conference so that we could minimize Postage which you know, if you're trying to run a program on almost zero dollars Stamps to mail stuff to a hundred libraries actually winds up costing something that looks like real money And so what we wound up doing like I said earlier We did a lot of the assembly ourselves and we really had one big work weekend Where all five of us got together at the Kimball library, which is my library in Randolph, Vermont We made the photocopies at the vocational school that I work at who donated the photocopying We purchased the paper and then we spent an entire weekend folding stapling Rubber banding folding stapling rubber banding corner cutting folding stapling and You know it was a lot of work, but it was like five hours one day And we got most of this done in sort of early May. So basically we start planning in March We start figuring out what the design is going to be like what the assembly is going to be like We start promoting it to librarians in mid-April. We try to get as many people as possible Signed up before the conference and last year for whatever reason we really wanted like if you're signed up before the conference You're in otherwise and then when we evaluated we were like, well, there's no real reason It doesn't matter people should be able to sign up at the conference You know We had a table at the conference just to hand these packets out and we did get a lot of people who asked us Oh, hey, tell me about the project. Oh, I'm really sort of interested in that. Oh, how does that work? So this year we actually signed people up at the conference as well And so as far as administering the program on our end What we would do is we would have everybody Type things into a Google Sheet This is sort of what it looks like on the back end with our winners our actual winner last year the adult winner visited 101 libraries, which if you're kind of doing the math at home is like more than half of the libraries in the state which is Crazy like that's more libraries that I've been to and We were just amazed but she just made it her summer project and she just kind of got in the car and made a plan and visited a couple Libraries every weekend or after work and had a great time our you know our YA winners visited like, you know, 20 or 30 kid Winners visited sort of less but basically each library would submit to us What their local winners were and some libraries would do regional like local? award ceremonies and some would not The woman who actually I believe won. I think if I'm right about this She was the winner at her local library as well as the statewide winner So, you know, there was a lot of prizes kind of coming her way But a lot of libraries would get out stickers or bookmarks or little fun stuff to people who were on the passport project But it was it was just sort of either Whatever you wanted to do which was good for smaller libraries who felt a little like well What do I need to do? Do I need to buy prizes? Do I need to really know you can do it? You can kind of do it however however you want to really and So this is like in a picture of one of the passports and you can kind of see that some libraries had stickers Some libraries had special stamps some libraries just use their library stamp. Some libraries would sign them My favorite thing about this was that libraries could get as into it as they wanted to and there was no pressure to be Or do the project in a special way. I think some libraries really benefit from like Very serious rule structure and very serious like this is how it works But we wanted to try and be as inclusive as possible and so removing as many barriers as possible You know, don't have a rubber stamp fine. Just use your date stamp and Sign it or don't sign it or whatever doesn't matter So this year we heard about libraries that were getting special rubber stamps for the thing Which we're kind of excited about and a whole bunch of other kind of stuff And we encourage people to share pictures of the insides of their passports And they all look different which was sort of neat and then we'd share them out on the Mailchip mailing list Which is what this is a screenshot of so here's just a couple pictures from The different the different people that put this on Facebook so Linda Childs is from One of the libraries so she shared this and then we shared this out on our page. This was actually our teen Winner so Bennington library celebrated her and then we could share it on our page these two adorable kids visited 28 libraries and Which libraries they liked and what they found and so this is you know, the Lanford Memorial Library Basically doing kind of a neat outreach job talking about hey Here's some something these kids enjoyed at the library. So you get to tell positive stories It's almost an excuse to tell positive stories about Going to visit the library and I should mention The Haskell library in Derby line, which is mentioned in this Actually is on the border of Vermont and Canada and has like literally on top of it And has a line that goes through the middle of the library And if you go in the front door of the library you can walk across the border in the Canada and go out the other side Of the library and being Canada. I mean obviously you're not supposed to just sneak in that way But you totally can and it's a really interesting library But it's way to heck up in Derby line and they don't get a lot of just sort of random people visiting And but it is one of Vermont's weird little treasures that you wouldn't know about and this gives people an excuse to kind of go Visit they have two phone numbers. They have a Canadian phone number or Vermont phone number I swear I put together this program just so I could tell more people about that weird library But everybody's got that weird library in the state, right? So Getting a chance to tell those stories is really fun. And then these were Kids there. Oh, there's a picture of the line. There's the kids They're in Canada. They step over the line. They're in Vermont. Pretty neat, right? So that's good. They don't need a real passport for that any more I mean, it's it's funny, right? A lot of the Vermont border towns They do have kind of serious border patrol But then you go kind of a half mile down the road and you can just walk across the border You're not really supposed to but there's a gradual attitude because What are they? I'll follow it. It's small enough town that they don't worry about it I'm sure it's that way across somewhere across the whole border and all of those states that border on Canada It's very rural sect areas. Yeah So At the end of that at the end of the program basically the program wraps up September 1st At the end of that program the libraries have two weeks. We again give them posters Put up posters to tell people if you want to be eligible for the statewide prize Bring your passport back and we'll count How many libraries you went to they get to keep their passports But they just have to sort of show them to us and then we just had a Google form for them the libraries to submit that information To us and we also had a wild card winner So anybody who participated was potentially eligible to win. We just did it a drawing basically So Hunter is the one who won at the local library and they gave him a gift certificate to Little store down the street. I like this page because you can see a whole bunch of people, you know liking it thumbs uping it It's a good picture of the library. It's just great outreach outreach outreach And this is Virgil who was last year's president of the Brant Library Association and last year He took our prize bags and actually delivered them to all of our winners. So there's our kid winner our adult winner Our and our young adult winner this year we decided instead of doing that We're gonna have a wrap-up Event that people can go to and we'll have slides and we'll show you know Have cider and donuts and we'll share stories and that kind of thing So we decided instead of spending money on postage or we use the money We saved on postage and we would spend it on donuts Which I think is a completely sensible decision and I'm happy that we got to make it plus people like to share Their library stories and so I'm looking forward to having it It's gonna be a central location in the state Hopefully most people can make it and it's in October. So it gives everybody a good amount of time To kind of wrap everything up and October in Vermont is amazing. So looking forward to that So the end of the first year. I felt like it basically went well. We were pretty happy with it We did make a couple changes Most of which I've mentioned to you, but I'll just kind of Summarize what they are if you can see in this picture. There's actually a different library We we changed the design on the inside. This is I believe the Fairhaven library, which is right on the border of New York It's one of the four Carnegie libraries in the state of Vermont Vermont has a lot of Carnegie looking libraries like small boxy with that kind of like front door and the two window kind of Things but actually very few Carnegie Carnegie libraries. So we have a little program special stamp in the library that is Pictured inside the passport. It's kind of like a secret Easter egg Part of the program. So we did a slightly different design other changes that we made Different color, but exactly the same. There's no date information on this So libraries that have their passports from last year can still use their passports this year We wanted everything to be as sustainable as possible and we like the design frankly and It's easier if you don't make a new design So the color indicates that it's a new one But the design is exactly the same the only differences on the back We actually got the printing donated this year, which was huge last year. We were just not We weren't thinking about it We were just so happy to sort of get things going in this year We decided to have a more concerted effort to see if we could get Sponsorship for this. So last year I did all the photocopies myself Do not recommend it a lot of work super irritating this year capital copy in La Peeler Basically made copies for us last year. We made a thousand this year capital copy made 1500 and for them from a donation perspective It's really good news They get their name on every single passport that we hand out to anybody Although one of the libraries was a little weird about being like hey, I copied the PDF from the website It says printed by capital copy, but I printed it. I was like, oh, right. That is weird Okay, so we took off the printed by capital copy Version on the one that's on the website. It was for them. It was no big deal and for us It basically saved us either, you know, six eight hours of work or You know, it would have been about four hundred dollars probably to print them all including the card stock and everything else So we're really excited that we found partnerships and we we have found, you know, we're the state library association People are actually kind of stoked to partner with us. We've spent so much time You know doing more with less and retrying our broken rubber bands that I think we don't think about the fact that it's Good for businesses to actually help us out with this. So very excited about capital copy Thank you capital copy and look for your remote. They're amazing And then a couple more changes that we made we're communicating even more We actually talked to some people at the conference this year who were surprised that We had a mailing list all last year They were on it, but who knows what happened, right? So this year we actually made more of an effort to tell people to expect the email We sent them personal emails from a different account to tell them to look for the mail Jimmy now because you know you've got gmail and it sticks something in a promotions tab or who knows what happens and a lot of Liberans weren't necessarily tech savvy enough to troubleshoot that and they just assumed we forgot about them So we've been trying to do more communication We did a new design no dated and last year we borrowed this amazing corner cutter Which you know it did the little smooth rounded corners, but it turns out the corner cutter that we borrowed Is kind of a weird expensive thing and we couldn't borrow it again this year and all the corner cutters We looked at and like you know the fabric and craft stores Weren't any good so we had to like give ourselves a pep talk and be like, okay if you don't cut corners on 1500 It sounds good to be like we didn't cut the corners, but we mostly didn't because we couldn't Our copying was donated and we made 50% more copies Which I think is going to be worthwhile we switched to Google Maps, which is a really good idea Vermont actually in between last year and this year got a courier system for ILLs Like I said, we don't have any consortia, but we do have a like an informal consortia the Green Mountain Library consortia who Sort of band together to do bulk buying of stuff like mango languages and Other things and they have an informal courier system now that kind of goes around the state So you can chip in to be part of the courier system and for most libraries that have an active ILL system Excuse me. They um a safe money over a postage and we're sorry post office But now you don't have library rates. So now we use a courier But what that meant was for people who couldn't come to the conference We could put their passports in the courier system that they already belong to and get stuff out to most of the libraries That way and then for libraries that were super teeny or didn't belong we did kind of a hub and spoke system where we'd send You've probably heard me say that more than once today where we'd send like a stack of 50 passports To libraries in the region that were near the other libraries and then they could go to a library That was probably no more than a half hour 40 minutes away if they needed to pick them up So we felt that worked really well and so our postage expenditures were basically zero, which we were happy about We're giving away more awards this year because why the heck not so we're actually gonna have a librarian award for the librarian Who visits the most libraries? And unfortunately, I am not eligible which is a bummer, but I made that rule So I guess it's fair and then like I said before we're gonna have the wrap-up celebration Which I think is gonna be really fun I mean it may just be like the committee and the five people who win and a lot of donuts, but more donuts for me, right? So this is the flyer that we handed out that includes sort of the timeline so that people could kind of see How the whole thing is gonna work? So when we hand out the passports they come with this one sheet, which is just here's how to do all the things We tell people there's a mailing list we provide all the materials It's an important thing to say over and over again a lot of our librarians Are just people who work really hard and are very tired and you say hey Here's a project and all they think is I Barely have time to do the stuff that I do now and so one of the things that's made this the most Effective is that all the members of the passport committee, which are me and Virgil and Joy and Amanda and Nancy and Sarah All of us take up a little bit of the slack Help answering questions help getting people signed up And so a little bit of work on our part really scales to help librarians who don't really have The ability to do a little more work right now because they're already doing so many other things and so that from my perspective is the most Useful thing about the entire project and so moving forward We've got a couple plans for sort of what we're going to do and an ongoing basis Joy who's on our passport committee actually also plays a viola Instrument for the Vermont Symphony Orchestra the Vermont Symphony Orchestra sounds fancy, but like everything else in Vermont It's not that fancy. And so they have a summer program Where and this is what they do every summer every summer at the Vermont Symphony Orchestra goes and plays concerts in Eight sort of regional locations. They have one program They do it in eight places and so people in like towns like Randolph where I live with 4,500 people Actually get to have a symphony concert coming to their town. It's amazing It's really great and they have a loosely passport themed. I Don't even know what it is But basically they're like oh your passport to music or whatever the heck it is, but it's just mostly a name Joy who plays instruments for them was like hey, we're doing this passport program For the library is like how would you guys feel if we work together and hand it out our passports at your event? VSO was like We love that idea. Why wouldn't we and so we did a redesign I don't think I have a picture of it here of Same passport, but instead of you know copy by capital copy on the back There's a little VSO logo and then when you open the passport the first place where you could put a stamp sort of you know Up over in the corner has a little gray VSO logo, and that's the Vermont Symphony Orchestra box I mean it's a little weird because it's not a library technically so But again, whatever like it's cool to be partnering with another statewide Organization who's just up for it and so we've partnered with the VSO Over time. We're looking towards sustainability. Maybe getting a grant. I mean the program really takes about a Couple hundred bucks really not much to run a statewide program But what we love is to have a plan for how to keep it going moving forward Like if we got every participating library to chip in five bucks say we would actually have enough money to run the program with a Surplus every year so we're thinking about you know ways of getting little donations or ways of getting Corporate donations so that we could be assured of having regular prizes. We also have librarians and libraries chip in prizes you know books from the book sale or Mugs things at your library that you just have a lot of but that might be neat for somebody who's not From your library, so we're thinking about having a year-long program And the other thing we would like to do and sort of this is part of this is Sharing out the program with libraries or regional library systems in other states and helping them if they're interested Do a program like this? I mean it doesn't even have to be a statewide program. It can just be something regional It can be time-limited. It can be who even knows right? There's all sorts of ways It's just the idea of there's a little list. Here's places you can visit Here's a way to keep track of your progress at the end of it. Hooray. You did it and just everybody feels slightly better about Just sort of the whole deal and you know people feel pretty good about libraries in general So this is just another way to sort of kick that ball down the field, which makes me happy So thanks for paying it forward. Yeah And so you can get touch with me if you're interested in Specific stuff if you want to I'm at Jasmine on Twitter the program web address is at the top there and this talk including every slide and Links to more information about some of the specific stuff is at the bottom So I'm really excited about this kind of program and I'd be happy to share information or whatever to Help other people either do it or just answer questions about how we do it. So thanks for your time Great. Thank you so much. Yes, man. That was Exactly what I was looking for. Yeah, I've heard about this program last year when you guys did it the first time I remember I saw it coming up on your I'm assuming for your Twitter Maybe And said this is to be something cool to keep an eye on and then I saw the thing saying you're doing it again This year and I was like, oh, well, obviously it was a success. Let's see what's going on with Does anybody have any questions if you do have any nobody typed in anything during a presentation But if you have any questions type them in your go-to webinar interface If you want to use your microphone, just let me know when I can say, you know, say and mute me I want to ask my question that way. I Think it was great, especially the part when you're talking about the scalability of this that it does not have to be This crazy statewide thing doing it just in a county or for places that in larger states, which is of Nebraska is very much like Vermont. We don't have Library systems or consortiums here of major size. We have small little things that do specific things But we're very similar in that each library is its own independent entity doing its own thing But that you could do it in a county or in just an area or something that that is this great that they could do that We have also that's really different from Nebraska is you guys at least I feel like you have kind of a strong state library system And our state library system has offered some really punishing budget cuts over the last five years So they barely get the summer reading program going and the summary program. It's amazing But you know, it comes with a lot of rules and a lot of stuff and you know, I think for some libraries It's just a little overwhelming and Just being able to do something at a statewide level I mean the state library enjoys this program But you know, they had a bunch of sort of ideas that they were into but also didn't want to fund You know, like you should give a copy to every passport to every legislator and we're like that's like 400 copies So they're good at idea generating but we just really wanted to kind of rubber hits the road Do the thing, you know not kind of spitball about how to optimize it as much as just get it done Get feedback and be very, you know open and present to Getting feedback from people like the big thing about the towns on the inside of the passports Didn't even occur to us and was a real problem for the people. It was a problem for so this year We got an opportunity to be like hey you spoke we listened We've changed it. I didn't include a picture, but the inside is just like a dirt road But it looks cool and And then no hurt feelings and everybody feels like they're part of it, which is what we care about Yes, it's a very grassroots types Program and the great that you can be flexible about that without having the you know You've got that committee that you said that's part you know people involved in my library association That are specific to that so something I was curious about too Is if that was something that came out of a particular section or or something of the group of the association? Or was it just the people that thought would be something cool to do? A combination of like so I've always had like a personal goal Like I visited all the 251 towns in the state Very excited and so now my new project is to visit 183 all the libraries and take a picture and I've been like 30 or 40 like not that many honestly And so I that's always been kind of in the back of my mind And I got a little bit somebody wrote it, you know a little news article about it And it was people were like I did I was like oh, I thought it was just me But then Virgil who was the I think incoming president of VLA at the time and also my neighbor so like we hang out Went to I think he went to Mila, which is the New England Library Association conference So all six states in New England have a conference That's a little bit more kind of big ideas and a little less just tiny conference like ours is and the Connecticut Library Association had a person showcasing that program You knew about my thing and literally was like hey, do you want to do this with me? And I did look up Connecticut did do it a second year this they're involved in doing one right now, too again Have a Facebook page as well that I added to our links. Yeah, I just decided But they were there pretty much the same schedule as you as yeah last year. I think was their first one and now they're Just wrapping up another one. Yeah, I can't remember exactly the time The big thing with us was just you know having an ad hoc committee, so it's not part of any committee The big thing is it's really mostly Publix One of the reasons we might want to do something that doesn't just happen during the summer is that most of the school Libraries except the ones that are school public hybrids are closed And so they can be a part of this and kids love this like it's super fun for kids So we might want to find a way to have either a thing just for school libraries or Have it year-round and just do it all year next year or something the big thing about all year though Then you're planning over the holiday time, which is the worst. Oh, yeah, we'll have to figure out how to how to get that done We do have a comment here Judy who's in Texas says a community here in Texas is doing a similar thing on a community scale They have people talk to local officials shop locally attend community meetings and events etc And then take the completed card to the library to be entered into a prize drawing So connecting the library to all the other organizations in the community The funniest for me is as I talked about this to friends of mine who aren't Library people they're like. Oh like the brewery tour I guess there's some local brewery who has a brewery passport and it's different from ours in that it has pre-printed like there's eight breweries or ten breweries or whatever the heck it is and It has pre a pre-printed passport and if you get a stamp at all eight ten twelve you can see how much beer I drink You get it then it again it comes into a prize drawing And so it's another way of doing a very similar thing, but it isn't really nice way Judy I think you make a really good point of saying You know we're all together so like you get a stamp from Whatever like the restaurant and the town hall and maybe the church and maybe the Library and maybe whatever and I think it really helps send that message Hey, we're all here. We're all part of the community and I think that has a useful I think that's useful to across to people Absolutely, yeah, and here in Nebraska our tourism department state tourism does a Nebraska passport they've been doing I think that looking at the site is in there through third year or it's going to any sort of tourist type things around this the state And they're doing it in conjunction with the national the 100th anniversary of the national park system this year And it is a statewide thing which can Nebraska is a very large space-wise state The population here is not huge. We got a lot of open spaces But they've also broken it up and this kind of relates what you're talking about doing a by-county or something to different Tours you can take so you can just focus on art or on flavors foods film So specific parts of it rather than trying to hit every single thing in there. So it's the same kind of idea I don't see anything related to libraries. I don't have to take a closer look at it Opportunity, right? We should get involved in that. Yeah So there's lots of ways you can get creative with this stuff with this whole concept. Absolutely Well, that's what I really like about it is you can kind of make it into whatever you want It can be super competitive. It can be super not competitive. I was really Happy to be involved and get to do something that was really well designed You know, I really like getting to use my design shops and putting those together because you know We're in kind of a tech shadow in Vermont So a lot of libraries don't have kind of a lot of web presence or they don't have a lot of You know online presence and so being able to give them tools and materials that really looked Nice and a website that really looked nice. I just felt like kind of helped everyone else be like, you know Hey, you really can design things that are easy to use and nice to look at and easy to understand and so that was the sort of gratifying part for me personally and Everybody got to kind of contribute Virgil got to drive all over the state delivering prize bags Where they felt like their steel was useful too, which was also just a really cool part of it Like as librarians, we felt like we had Unique individual skills that we could lend to it that made it made it good Mm-hmm and what you were saying about doing the design work and So that that and getting some of the libraries to realize that there is all this social media out there that they could Look at and investigate. It's doing this program is out teaching by example showing it look we put together this website It's simple. It's easy. It doesn't take a lot You don't have to be a graphic design artist to read be able to do this kind of thing So that may you know just show them you could do something else different You know something locally that you might want to There really wasn't a lot of Sort of negative stuff either so there was kind of a social media outreach Without I think what a lot of people's concerns are which is that I don't know people put pictures of butts on your Facebook page Like I don't know what people are concerned about but I think sometimes people are concerned about putting themselves out there and It it might just be opening themselves up for problems And this was a nice showcase of that not happening So kind of proving a negative in a useful way too. I think was Alleviating a lot of the fears and that maybe they'll You know, they're just out of proportion to the actual risk and so being able to Take that step and show that at least in this case it worked out. Okay. I mean, you know There's nothing political about this. So no Talk about it, but I think that helps people Get get their feet wet. Maybe if it's what they want or even know that, you know Me or Virgil or Nancy or Joy or Sarah or Amanda can be people they can talk to you about that kind of thing And I think that also is sort of helpful because we don't have regional Associations, you know, a lot of us don't know each other that well either and we hang out at on a mailing list and at the conference But in person, you know, I don't necessarily know what everybody's skills are so it's it's nice to get to know that as well Mm-hmm. Absolutely We do have one question here. I think we'll just take this one because we're a little after 11 o'clock Got a couple things here. Um, has anyone approached a local travel agencies suggest that it be a focus of Vermont visits? She said years ago travel agencies help promote a library friends group in their state Friends groups train robbery event on historic rails So though not necessarily tourism, but actual travel agencies Say that's a Vermont and do this That's a great idea. I mean when I think of travel agencies nowadays the bulk of the ones I think of are like, you know, AAA Like agencies that have less of a regional focus The 251 club was actually originally started by a guy who worked for Vermont Life Magazine and Vermont Life Magazine Started as a travel and tourism Sort of thing to encourage people to come to Vermont back when coming to Vermont was actually more difficult because we didn't have any highways and that kind of thing so I think yeah, we I Mean reaching out to the State Department of Tourism. Also, I think would be something that would be useful I'm really trying to think of like travel agents. Do I know travel agents? I should talk to travel agents because that would be Need a lot of people do Kind of wanted a thing, you know like an open-studio thing like they want to I want to visit Vermont because I've heard a lot about it And I know the leaves change, you know that kind of thing And that's all they know about us in the Northeast. I'm originally in from New York. I moved upstate New York. So I know But then they want to know well, what else can I do? What else do I do besides do that? And this is something well, here's an event here. So here's a suggestion. Yeah Yeah, and one thing we didn't really do this year, which I'd like to probably do next year is have a bunch of mini tours Like go see all four Carnegie libraries. Here's the list of all the libraries in all the counties that kind of thing Which I think would be you know fun for people locally like we do an October tour of libraries some regions do So you can actually go to like six libraries in a weekend and they're all doing a special thing You know cider and donuts or whatever. So you're already leaf peeping Why don't you stop by and see what these six libraries in this one county are all doing and it gives you kind of an excuse to Be out and about which I also think of what the 251 club does. Yeah, nice And someone here does have a comment that they said they'd love to replicate this in our 30 library public library system and maybe partner with local restaurants in the in the rural communities You know come to this library which is out somewhere and then what well here go over to our lunch place here And you'll have a great meal and she suggested even our mascot could even deliver the prizes And I asked they're the Winifox library system. So Winnie the Fox is their mascot And there's nothing like a mascot costume for Something seem like a like a fun big deal. I get the tension the news will come will take pictures of it. It'll be awesome All right, well, I think we'll wrap it up for a little after 11 a.m. Here central time So thank you very much Jessam and this is this is a great program I'm definitely interested in it and I'm hoping other people as you said You guys are willing to help other live other states of the libraries other Consortious whatever level you're at to get something like this going for yourself. So Reach out to them on the website there and see if you can get something going in other areas of the country Yeah, that'd be really fun. I'm happy to talk to anybody about any of this Great. All right. I'm gonna pull presenter control back to my screen here now There we go There it goes. All right, so Thank you very much. Yes, man. Thank you everyone for attending. This is The website for libraries that was out there The main site for the session for the program But here's where in our in our delicious account. We have them all collected here all the different links related to anything going on with that It will be included in our recordings So this has been recorded and it will be on our website, which is over here at Encompass live Luckily for us so far nothing has called itself Encompass live yet. So if you just google us, you'll find the website for it These are our upcoming shows the archive will be right over here This is the one from last week where we just set a recording and links, but I'm gonna have a link to Desmond's website that has everything and then links I have where all her slides are and links that I have in Our delicious account will be on there This afternoon, I'd say it's probably ready I will send an email email out to all of you let you know when it's available and ready to watch or share with anyone else That you think might be interested in this program So that'll wrap it up for today's show I hope you join us next week when our topic is our State of Nebraska is one book at one Nebraska Program this year the entire state well anyone who's interested in the state is reading going to be reading the meaning of names And the author of the book. We're so happy. She's gonna be with us here next week Karen Shoemaker will be here talking about the book I'll give you some ideas and things you can do with this program at your library anywhere. You are in the state so Definitely do join us for that and if you're from outside of Nebraska, you'll see how we handle our one book one state program here So definitely sign up and join us for that any of our other upcoming shows run here I've got a lot more in the works this schedule is always being added to so check back regularly And you'll see all my new July sessions coming in I've got one on here so far a lot more are To be added also if you are a big Facebook user and compass live is on Facebook pop over there and give us a like and You'll get notices about what's going on. I do a reminder every Wednesday about whatever that show Is ready to start? When our recordings are ready. I post on here as well. So if you keep track of things there Like and compass live over on Facebook and keep up with what you're doing here Other than that that wraps it up for today's show. Thank you very much for attending and we'll see you next time. Bye. Bye