 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. Yes, you can call us a webinar, we won't be offended. We do these shows live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time, and they are recorded, so if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. You can always go to our Encompass Live website and find all of our previous sessions recorded there. The show is free and open to anyone to watch. Sessions last about an hour, give or take, depending on what happens. We do all sorts of things here, presentations, interviews, training sessions, book reviews. Basically, if it's related to libraries, we'll put it on the show. Today we have with us some speakers who are joining us remotely from up north, up in La Vista. Our subject today is what you should be subjecting your teens to the nonfiction switch, and on the line today I have with me Lindsay Tomsu, who is the YA librarian at La Vista Public Library. Can you say hi, Lindsay? Hi. Hello. And Sarah Kreeber, who is actually a member of the La Vista Public Library's Teen Advisory Board. She is a member of the Teen Advisory Board. Sorry, how do you mute it there? I guess, Sarah, I think you should be, okay, unmuted again. It keeps remuting you. Try talking again, Sarah. Hello. There you are. Okay, yeah. A little technical weirdness going on. I'll try and keep an eye on that and keep you unmuted. So anyway, so we have Sarah and Lindsay on the line from the La Vista Public Library. And they're going to talk about some changes they've done with the teen section there. So I'll just hand it over to you guys to go ahead and take it away. Okay. Basically, the presentation that I'm showing you is the same presentation that we did at the NLA conference this past year in October. And as you can see from the title screen, I had two of my other teens, Haley and Kiana, also there with us. And we basically just, in November of 2011, had decided to change our teen nonfiction section from the due decimal classification to subject heading classification instead. And so it was a very involved project in everything that the teens had a huge involvement with. And so we thought that it might be something interesting to share with other libraries and such. And so that's what we did our presentation on. And since it actually had, it was held in La Vista last year, we scheduled our session for the last possible time slot so that my teens could actually come and present with me because we felt that such a huge change in the library, it would be interesting for session attendees to be able to actually talk to the teens as well because they're the patrons that it was affecting. So I'm just going to run through the slides that we had and everything. It'll give you a bit of a background of why we ended up doing it, how we ended up doing it, that kind of thing. And then at the end, if you'd like to open it up to questions and stuff, feel free to ask me. And Sarah too, you know, so we'll just get going here. Hopefully it works. Last time I did one of these. My PowerPoint was off. So let's see. There we go. Okay. It's working. Okay. So the background of the project basically, I started at the La Vista Public Library in 2009. And so after the summer reading program and everything, I sat down in October to do my first big weeding of the whole entire teen collection. And so I did it in 2009 and I did it in 2010 and everything. And it was in November 2010 that the actual teen advisory board was founded. And basically what I had been noticing, you know, for those two years that I was weeding was that the fiction collection was doing great. It was going out like crazy. But the nonfiction section was kind of floundering. So in like 2009, I noticed that there were a lot of like nonfiction books that were biographies about people that I didn't even know who the heck they were, weird political leaders. And I'm like, nobody's going to check this book out. So I tried, you know, on my own to, you know, find more interesting books that, you know, they'd want to check out that were nonfiction and just tried that for two years. And still it was just, mwah. And so when I first created the tab, one of the first things I'd ask them was, you know, what's your opinion about the nonfiction section? And most of them had one of two answers. They said, either we don't use it because if we need nonfiction books, that's the main priority of our school library since that's where we're doing most of our research. They have really good nonfiction collections and not so great fiction collections. So we come to the public library for our fun reading and we do all of our scholarly stuff at school. And then the other answer was the only thing that we use from the nonfiction is the graphic novels and manga. And yeah, half of them also didn't even know that we even had your graphic novels or manga because the unfortunate play scene of where the they fell in with Dewey was in like the back of the section on the floor. So not in the most prominent spots for them to be noticed. So after, you know, the tab had been around for a year and October 2011 came around again. I started doing my reading and everything. The fiction was looking great again and the nonfiction was just looking super bad. So since I've tried here for two years to try and get my teens to say what they wanted out of the section, I decided, you know, I can get up there and I can spout off numbers to them and everything and they're just going to get a glazed overlook, you know. So during the November 2011 tab meeting, I actually printed out the circulation statistics in big bold letters so that I could actually show them what was going on in the collection. And so I'm going to share those numbers with you real quick. So basically for the year from October 2010 to October 2011, the fiction collection, we ended up having nearly 2000 books that circulated more than 5000 times. So my teens were like, oh, that sounds really great, you know. And so I was like, it is. That's the good news of everything. Out of those books, more than half of them actually individually circulated. And we only had about 467 fiction books that didn't, you know. So those are pretty decent numbers, you know. Gives you a good idea of what could probably be weeded that year. And so basically, it ended up being meaning that 80% of the fiction collection had circulated that previous year. So they were super happy with that number. They were like, that's awesome. That means the fiction books are going, you know, that's great. So then I said, now on to the slightly sadder news. For that same exact year from October 10 to October 11, the nonfiction collection contained a little over 1900 books that only went out about 2000 times. Which looking at that, that doesn't seem too horrible. But when we get more in-depth into those numbers, only 805 of those books actually circulated. And more than 1000 of them were just sitting on the shelf gathering dust. And so that number really hit them hard. And they're like, that's a lot that aren't going out for some reason, you know. So basically of those 1900 books that we had, I looked into it a little bit further and discovered that of them about 1500 were what you could consider general nonfiction. And about 370 of them were graphic novels or manga series. So then I was like, I wonder, you know, how well the actual graphic novels are going out compared to just the general nonfiction research books. And so basically of those 371 graphic novels, 336 of them actually circulated, accounting for nearly 70% of the actual nonfiction's entire circulation total. So we're like, OK, clearly those are going out. So of the other books that were just general nonfiction ones, so about 1500 books, only a little over 450 of those actually circulated, which only accounted for about 700 of the percentage of the circulation total. So about just 30% of the actual total there. So the interesting thing was that out of those nearly 400 graphic novels, that part alone, that if you considered it its own little section in its entirety, like that had a circulation rate of nearly 90%. It was down near every single graphic novel pretty much went out. So we thought that was pretty interesting. So what it all came down to, essentially, yes. Lindsay, yeah, can I enter? Yeah, this is Chris. I just saw your Twitter that's popping up there is coming up on top of the screen there. You might want to log out of that or close it. I'm on Gordon's computer. I'm glad to do that. OK, well, it just keeps popping up on top of the slides there. So if you see it just you'll try and close it quickly. Yeah, so it's not just coming up in the thing. Yeah, OK, go on. Go ahead. OK, sorry about that. So basically, what all those numbers meant was that, like I said, our fiction collection had a circulation rate of 80%. The nonfiction collection for that year had only a good 42% of the collection actually circulating, which is less than half. And like I said, those thousand books that were just standing there gathering dust essentially. So I took these numbers to the tab and told them, this is what's going on. Do you have any more suggestions besides just, well, we don't use it. So we thought about different solutions and everything. And I had researched what other libraries throughout the United States had done. And so we thought a few possible solutions. First, we thought that we could just heavily read the collection, getting rid of all the dead books. But looking at that, it's like you're talking about more than a thousand books that seriously I kept the records from when we did in 2009, 2010. So you're talking a thousand books that hadn't circulated in years. So that would have taken a huge chunk of the collection away. We also thought that maybe we could just heavily read the section and try to find more high interest books and try to get those in there and maybe get people checking them out. We thought that we could end up making the teen section, which some libraries have done, and just making it only graphic novels and manga and moving all the other books that were still decent either to the children's nonfiction section if they were a younger audience or to the adult nonfiction collection. And then if anybody came in looking for nonfiction books, they would go to those two sections and the teen area wouldn't even have a nonfiction section. Or we could end up moving from Dewey to subject classification to try to make the section more browser bull because teens really like to more so browse for things than actually go to the catalog looking for something specifically. So what we ended up deciding was to do the subject classification. And so we went to my director and I showed her the same exact numbers essentially and said, yeah, this is what we talked about. This is what they think the solution should be. And she said to basically go ahead with it. And so that is what we did. So the Teen Advisory Board was very helpful in implementing this huge project and they ended up helping me hands on with a lot of things. So what we some of the things that they did was they went through my entire spreadsheet of all the books and everything and we looked at all the books and they helped me make determinations on getting rid of the ones that if still kept there would just keep gathering dust, you know, we actually met with one of our local vendors and he showed us his new catalogs and everything and we looked through those catalogs for new books that were coming out and the tab members made notations of, you know, I would be really interested in that series. Oh, I think another teen would be really interested in that. So they weren't just thinking about what they wanted. They were thinking about what other teens and their peers would want as well. We sat down and I'm very very in-depth with my weeding system and everything. And so back when I had started in 2009, I had actually kind of put the books in general subject classifications so that I would be able to go, OK, we've got this many books on anorexia. How old are they all? OK, maybe we should get rid of that one over this one and look for a new book, you know. So I kind of had had the whole collection already off into broader subjects and everything. So we used that to help actually create our classification system. So then once we had that figured out, we ended up categorizing the remaining books that were kept after the weeding process. My teens helped make the new signage for the area. They helped me read the old books. They have numerous times helped me shift the entire collection as our graphic novel area keeps growing and growing and we have to shift things around. The biggest thing that they were definitely most helpful with was a number of them came in over their Christmas break in 2011 and actually helped me physically change every single label on all the books that remained. And so we had a nice little conveyor belt system going with getting all those changed. And then of course, you know that they help out by obviously checking out books under the new system because they were very excited about it and they've helped with continued maintenance throughout the past year and a half or so since the system has been changed over. And like I said, that relates to shifting and all that kind of stuff. And so basically the new subject classifications, the first big thing that we wanted to do was since graphic novels and manga were going out like crazy was we wanted to move them to a more prominent spot. So instead of being way far down in the back on the bottom shelf, we decided that we were going to move them front and center to the beginning of the nonfiction area. We gave it a big huge sign that you can't miss. And so the category that we created for that in itself is the GNM, which stands for graphic novels and manga, obviously. To save space and to make the area a little more interesting when you actually look at it. Large series, we end up doing what is called pancaking, which I think I have a picture on the next slide. You can see like down here where the books, especially when you get like huge series like Naruto or One Piece where there's like 60 plus volumes, you know, instead of having them take up two entire shelves all by themselves, some of them will line up exactly like normal books or shelves. And then we'll put a few up on their side instead. So going up and down instead of side to side. And so that helps us kind of save some of the shelving room and everything. And so that's what our new part of our new manga section. You can see the big gigantic sign up there and everything. Advertising it. And since we've done that, that section has now encompassed like the whole entire shelf. So there's like two other shelves that you can't even see. It's just grown exponentially pretty much. And so it's right there because right around the corner here is where everybody walks to get to the actual teen section. So they're walking by it and they can now see, oh hey, graphic novels. And it catches their attention. And so the rest of our subject classifications for the more nonfiction books fell into essentially 25 different categories. And so this is how they are on the actual spine labels and how they are in the catalogue and everything. So you've got art, babysitting, cooking, crafts, et cetera, et cetera. So I'll end up emailing my PowerPoint to Krista after we're done and everything. So you don't have to worry about taking notes if you're interested. You know, you'll be able to access the slides later. So we ended up having those different categories going on. And then because science is such a huge category in itself, science was actually broken down in 210 subdivisions in itself. And science also takes up one whole section of the shelving units. And there's a big huge sign just like the graphic novels where it's like science. And then a smaller sign that says, you know, astronomy, botany, et cetera, et cetera. And so those are all divided up into their little categories to make it a little bit easier for the science. Let's see. So this is my attempt at trying to have a picture of the original teen nonfiction area. It's very hard with tiny aisles to get a decent picture. But basically that's all we have is one side and the other side for the nonfiction. And so then this kind of shows our new little signage. So you see, I've got a picture of the art and the cooking area. So they've got the little subject labels on the bottom of the shelves. The actual book labels themselves, you know, have the three letter call number and then whatever the specific, the more specific subject within that category. So like drugs, yeah, since a lot of, you need a lot of nonfiction information about drugs for research papers and stuff. The drugs category is DRU for drug, and then if it's going to be about marijuana, they're all going to be DRU, M-A-R. So if somebody comes in and they're like, I'm looking for the books on marijuana for a paper I'm doing, you know, they're all right there in the same exact spot, whatever we have pretty much. And so that's that's our signage there. The new organization, yes, we got a whole brand new teen nonfiction area. So beforehand we just kind of had the nonfiction shelved with the new fiction and it was kind of, you know, not as interesting. And we've gotten lots more new nonfiction books coming in since we've changed the system. So it ended up needing its own entire new area. So we've got the whole little new area there. And then that's an example of our science area. So it's just one whole entire shelving unit and you can see the tinier sign there that's got the different divisions and then you can see how they're all labeled against the shelf where the little sections start. And then basically the results of the project, the entire switch was pretty much completed within, from determining to do it in November 2011 we were done at the end of December. And like I said that was mainly in part to my teens helping with the entire process. And the things that we noticed right away was in just one month nearly 300 books had checked out from the nonfiction collection. So from the end of November, the end of December when we changed it over to the end of January, we noticed 300 just nonfiction books went out, which is basically the equivalent of nearly 50% of the previous year's entire total. So we were super excited about that because that was the most books that had ever gone out basically. And so then a year later when it was time to weed and 2012, I was looking forward to it. So I was going to get to see, okay, you know, did some of the old books that we kept, did they go out, how are the other books doing, you know. And so we ended up after the change having about 1400 books in our collection. And they ended up circulating 3,339 times. So already the smaller amount of books that we had after weeding had gone out a thousand plus more times than the entire collection had the previous year. So we were liking those numbers. And then of those 1,400 books, more than a thousand circulated, and only 475 did not. And that 475 actually included a hundred books that were too new to actually be considered as four books that were just gathering dust because we were starting to get in a lot more newer nonfiction. So 475 was definitely a better number than the thousand beforehand that were just getting there. So basically the entire total circulation of the teen nonfiction collection, for the year before it had been 40 percent. For the year after it had gone up to 70 percent. So we had increased the whole circulation by about 30 percent, which was a pretty, pretty decent number. And we still see the books going out like crazy today as well. So it'll be interesting once October comes around this year to see how much it increased again since doing it last year. So we're hoping to see it continue to rise. And there's some of my happy teens there, because that was the day after we basically unveiled the brand new selection. And you can see this is the first time that a lot of them had ever even checked out nonfiction books. And that's Sarah there in the pink, who's my co-presenter. And so they were super happy. You know, it was a funny little story Haley up there in the in the blue, called in the Foxtrot book. She's a very tomboyish girl. And when she actually got to see the new section with its new signage and all that stuff, and got to browse among it, she actually started tearing up a bit and got embarrassed because she was like, it's just so awesome. So we thought that was pretty cool, that we got to make Haley cry. And so basically that's just a little bit of how we ended up doing the whole entire change, you know, how the teens helped, you know, what the results were a year later with the increase in circulation. And so I guess we could open it up to questions now. If anybody has any questions. Sure, great. Thank you very much, Lindsay. And Sarah, you're very quiet, but I know you're there. You should be unmuted still. I did try and keep you unmuted. Yeah, I'm unmuted. Yeah. Great. No, thank you. Thanks very much. If anyone does have any questions or comments or anything, type them into, excuse me, please type them into the question section of your GoToWebinar interface and I will grab them here. That was, that was very cool. It's very liking how you're talking about how the teens are so involved in the library and the collection. I know some libraries have teen advisory boards and some do not. And in my experience too, it has been, excuse me, once you get them involved, they are all in. And even with the moving of the books and labeling, that's pretty awesome. Maybe you have some budding actual librarians there. Oh, yes, Sarah. Yeah. Yeah, you're thinking about, you might want to follow in Lindsay's footsteps. Yeah, librarian. Yeah, I'm thinking about it. Cool. We want more. Yes, more of you. She's actually interning with me this summer. Oh, great. I get to check out books. Cool. So as far as this, this is some questions, things I was thinking of as you're going to the session. Now, this is only, you only change the nonfiction part of the teen collection. The rest of the fiction is still. Yeah, the same. The fiction is still, you know, fiction author's last name. Okay. And the rest of the library is, how is the rest of the library? Is that still the normal way? Yeah, the teen area kind of has done a few odd little innovations along the way, like the very first thing that we did that was considered kind of drastic and shocking, which to my teens was like, no, it's logical and helpful was since there's so many teen series books coming out. Yeah, not everybody knows which order to read the Hunger Games in or Percy Jackson or something. So we actually put series dots on the books. And so that way you can go there. And we've got four different colors, because some authors write 50 trillion different series. And so that way you can go there and you can go, okay, here's number one, here's number two, here's number three. Because sometimes, you know, even when you open it up on the title page, you know, they don't always list the order that the books are supposed to be in. So, you know, fiction collection has all the series dotted. And then the nonfiction collection is done by subject categorization. The rest of the library is done its normal way traditionally. Great. So it's kind of interesting, then it's kind of you can use the teen section as like a test bed for these kind of changes to I suppose. I mean, the smaller subset of the full collection. And like I said, you guys have done some drastic change things that maybe if it works in a smaller set setting, it could then maybe be carried over into the larger library. That's definitely better to test that with, yeah, 1000 books compared to 100,000. Yes, I would definitely think so. Yes, making major changes like that. I do a question from the audience. Let's see here. Had you considered trying updating just this just updating the signage and doing more marketing to see if that improves six the circulation statistics of the nonfiction collection before actually reorganizing anything everything. We had tried that the previous two years, pretty much I tried for like a number of months on end for in the little we had a little area where we'd prominently display, you know, facing outwards, you know, some of the new books and everything. And I would try to come up with, you know, displays for certain nonfiction topics like, oh, look, you know, we've got books on cooking, you know, or we've got books on this and they just sat there still. Yeah. Yeah. We try we try doing things. I tried to promote them, you know, hand sell them to my teens. Well, yeah, I wonder if getting them, you know, at that point where the teen, did you have the teen advisory board back then or is this in recent innovate? Well, it started in November 2011. Okay. So you didn't have the board beforehand. You're just trying to know get it all going on your own. Okay. I think it does make a big difference once they become personally invested in it. And definitely I've seen I've seen, you know, occurrences where like last year for our summer reading program, they had their reading cards were like bingo sheets. And so you know, to try and encourage as well, you know, one of the spots was to read a nonfiction book. And so I'd seen numerous occasions where, you know, a team would go, they'd be looking, they'd find something interesting. And yeah, they'd read it for their little spot. And then, you know, they turn to their friend and be like, you have to do this one, check this one. Yeah, or if they notice like like Haley noticed that there's this really cool science series that's called Psi High, which is done very magazine oriented like. So there's lots of cool pictures and, you know, fun, fun information. And it's organized like a magazine. And you know, once she found those books, she was like, Oh, my God, these things are cool. But she started just plowing through all of them. Right. Yeah. Now, what about you, Sarah? I mean, how did you get involved in doing all of this at the library and get on that team board? No. Yeah. We got you. Yeah. Oh, you're back. OK, I first became involved in the library. What summer was that? Like two thousand two thousand eleven. Yeah. Yeah. And my friend in the picture mare. She first introduced me to it. And so I went with her and then I kept going back and I got really, really involved. And I decided to join tab and then I became like really involved with it because I loved it. Great. And now we're bringing you into the library world, too, with us. Yeah. Cool. So did you have any before you went into doing this, do you have any like specific goals, expected outcomes of it in the end that you were trying to reach or was it more of a let's just see what happens and hope it. You know, like what if it didn't work out? What if it wasn't a success? What would happen then? I don't think we really thought that far ahead. It was just, you know, this is, you know, we presented, you know, different options to the patrons and that's the one that they said, you know, this seems like the best fit for us. Let's try this one, you know, and hope for the best. Right. And then apparently the statistics are showing that what they picked. Yeah. Because that's the big thing that they were about was, you know, the fiction collection has such a great circulation rate, you know, we want to try and get attention to the nonfiction section too. And so that was, I think, their main goal was to try to get these books moving because they didn't want them to be just sit in there not getting used, you know, and they've they've been, you know, instrumental since then still, you know, suggesting books and everything because we've got, you know, some very interesting books that, you know, you might not see in a traditional nonfiction area. Like, for example, I mean, in our cooking area, we've got a Harry Potter cookbook, we've got a Doctor Who cookbook, you know, since we have a lot of Doctor Who fans, you know, in our film area, and we've got a lot of Doctor Who books that are about the show, you know, in the history of the show. We have a gaming and technology section where we actually put, you know, books that are while we have like, you know, technical books, like how to design websites, you know, like stuff. We also have fun things, too. Like, everybody's familiar with, you know, where's Waldo and stuff like that. And there's this crazy Japanese character called Moshi Moshi Kawaii, and she's basically a bean shaped bunny and she has three books that are oversized books that are basically where's Waldo, but with cute bean shaped bunnies instead. And so, you know, we just have, you know, kooky little things like that, you know, that are, you know, you wouldn't necessarily consider, hey, this is a nonfiction book, but it is, you know. So, so we don't just have it just being all stuff that you can only use for reports. We also tried to get interesting things in there that they wouldn't think about, you know, I mean, that constantly at the beginning of every school year, you know, we sit down and we say, OK, you know, what kind of things are you guys into now, you know, that you'd want nonfiction books about. And, you know, it took them a while to, you know, get past that research, research, research and get into it. Well, I like knitting. Maybe I would like a book on knitting or I like to build robots. Many people read, read nonfiction for entertainment. It is the autobiographies and things like that. They're not just read for I need to write a paper on this guy. Yeah. And so I think I think that they're finally, you know, actually learning, you know, that there are books out there that, you know, are considered nonfiction, but you can actually learn from and have fun with. Absolutely. Yeah. So I haven't seen any other new questions come in from the audience. If anyone does, please have a question. Please type it into the questions section of your go to webinar interface, and I will pass it on to Lindsay and Sarah to answer. So this is something you've done in the teen section. How is the rest of the I had mentioned you didn't that this might be something that could be like a test bed for the rest of the library. What about the rest of the staff and the rest of the library? What are they? How are they? What are their actions to what you guys have done over there in the teens? Well, our director, like I said, she was very behind it because she's all about, you know, forward thinking and everything. And so she was like, if this is what the patrons want, you know, let's go ahead and give it a shot and see if it works, you know, but like any other big change, whether it's putting dots on the spine of a sticker to help you identify the series reading order or changing from duty to subject or getting a self-checkout machine or getting a brand new circulation system, you know, in catalog, you know, you're always going to have pros and cons that you come across and people that are happy with it and people that aren't happy with it. And, you know, I can say from the staff reaction that it will never go past the teen section, not at our library. Okay. Yeah, it has been a, I guess, a controversial subject in the library world, if libraries at all. And some are going full force in switching. And some are not. I've done it and people are just raving about it. Yeah. But for others, they said, nope, that's not going to work here. We don't, yeah, we're not interested, not a problem. No. So, but every library can do what works for them. Exactly. The patrons pretty much. Exactly. You've done what we pretty much try and do all across the board in libraries is what do you find out what your patrons want, what they need and figure out how to get it to them. Don't necessarily, you know, and use your expertise, because you're the librarian who has the, you know, expertise to figure out how you can get that, get them what they need in the library world. So, looking back on everything that you do, it did. Is there anything you do differently maybe in the process? Anything that you learned that maybe you should have done something a better way or a different way or something new you thought of after it was all said and done? Or, Sarah, if you have any ideas about something, I'm sure Lindsay wouldn't mind you critiquing her. I don't know. I like how like the whole thing was set up. So, I can't really say anything because I don't really think we should have done anything differently. Maybe changed it sooner. That would have been my only thing. That's a thought? Yes, absolutely. Which kind of the books are you checking out, Sarah, which kind of topics and things are you getting from this section, the collection? Well, I go, I like graphic novels and stuff and manga, so I check out those. But then I just browse the shelves. I really do. I'll be like, oh, this looks like the other day I checked out like a zombie insect thing. I don't even know what it was. Oh, OK. It was good. It was good. I liked it. It was like insects becoming zombies. I don't know. Oh, I saw something online about that, too, that I don't want to get into it because it's kind of too disgusting for me. But parasitic symbiosis type stuff with bugs. Yeah. Wow. So there's a book about it. Okay. Yeah. I didn't read it while eating. So that was a good idea. I'm definitely sure that was a good idea. Yes. Cool. OK. So anybody out in the audience have any questions, comments? Type them into the question section. We'll pass them on. It looks like nobody seems to have anything except for the one that we got. Oh, wait. We do have something. Here's a question that just given. Yes. How did you go about narrowing your subject headings? Which ones to include and which ones not to include? Because I'm sure there's some topics that you decided. Not every single subject heading in the world is in there, I assume. Yeah. Well, as I kind of briefly mentioned, you know, when I first started at the library and first started to do the nonfiction weeding, you know, when I basically just went into our, you know, catalog system and pulled all the records for the nonfiction books and kind of broadly categorized to them, you know, so that I'd be able to kind of just sort the little spreadsheet to see, OK, you know, in the do area we have this many books about this. You have this many books about this to be able to see, you know, what was new, what was old, you know, something that we might not have enough books on, you know, something that we had too many books on, you know, that kind of thing. And so when we decided to do this object classification, you know, I had my spreadsheet over the past three years that, you know, already had the books kind of broadly categorized. And so we sat down and I looked and, you know, most of them fit into 25 basic categories. And so we have obviously, you know, some of them clearly make sense, you know, art, well, all art books, you know, drawing, painting, artists, all that kind of stuff would go under the art area. You know, like I said, science, since it was so big, you know, we broke it up into the sub categories for that. There's other ones, you know, that, you know, we combined a little bit, like we felt that all the books on, you know, personal health, you know, beauty things, you know, how to do your hair, you know, how to do your nails and, you know, fashion related things. Since those were kind of, you know, similar categories, we put all of those together in one area. And, you know, then there's other ones that, you know, because clearly, you know, I mean, we don't even have that much space. Like I said, it's just basically two long aisles, you know, so we can't go very beyond so many subjects. So there are some that are more broad, you know, and so we've got a pop culture section. So if it doesn't basically fit in the film, movie, hero type category, you know, we put it in the pop culture section. So that's where we've got things like the Guinness Book of World Records type books and stuff like that, you know, just general fun stuff about pop culture. And then, you know, we've got yo sections like, you know, trying to think here, like the relationship section. That's where anything related to relationships will go. So we've got the sexual relationships, the friendships, the dealing with parents, you know, all that interpersonal type relationship stuff goes under the relationship category. We've got a real life category. So that's where you can find the inspirational things like, you know, the chicken soup books, you know, other types of things in that category. So when it comes down to, you know, like I said, mainly space issues, you know, is why we stuck with those 25 basic areas. And then when we get a new book, we basically kind of sit down and we think, you know, where is it going to be checked out the most? Which I think, you know, when you do it in Dewey anyway, that's kind of where you kind of have that same train of thought, you know, which is the best category to actually put it under, you know. So so we think about that too, because like I think the Titanic is really popular among like my junior high kids and everything. And so like that, you kind of think first history, our history books do not go out very much. So we put the Titanic books that we have under popular culture, because that section gets browsed more than the history. And so it's all about just kind of thinking where where would a team find this the best and be more inclined to actually check it out? Yeah, where would their brain go when they were thinking about it? And you did also say earlier that now also to update it every year you ask the teams what they're interested in what new topics they might be. And that could also affect the subjects that might be if the if you need to add or change them up. Exactly. Yeah. OK, great. Suddenly we do have a bunch of questions coming in. OK, that's great. Have you had many this interesting many adult patrons coming to the teen nonfiction area looking for books on specific topics? How are the adults? I guess the other adult patrons responding to the new classification method if they're even going in there and seeing it? We do get we do get a lot of adults who use both the fiction and the nonfiction area. Since I'm not up at the desk very often, you know, I don't know too too much about you know what they're saying and everything. But I do know that I saw a bit of an increase in some of the more technical nonfiction stuff that some of the college students, since we share a building with Metro, started to grab in my college. Yeah, I do. I do have two fun examples. One lady had come in and she and it was right when we first started transferring everything over. So we didn't even have like the whole collection done yet. So half was the old way half was the new way and she had come in and she was looking for fashion books. And beforehand, we had had this really cool fashion series that was in like five different sections of the Dewey area. So they weren't anywhere remotely near each other. And so she came in and our one of our clerks who was like, well, they're changing everything around here. She's like, fashion sections right here. And like the lady took like one look at it and was like, ah, this is helpful. And she took every single book. I have to think she's just like, thank you for every single one. Oh my, I think the other awesome one. And one of my girls was actually actually there when she overheard the gentleman. He had come in and he was just like browsing and stuff. And once again, it was right when we were making the transition. We had signs up and everything kind of explaining you what the heck was going on. You know, like, why are there empty shelves here? What's going on? And and he stopped and he paused and he read the notes and everything. And then he was like, that makes so much leaping sense. And my girl was like, you just said an odd word. So I know that there's some adult patrons out there who like it. And I mean, whether or not anyone has gone as far as saying, yes, you should do this to the adult section. I know that there's been adults who have been like, why can't you put dots on our books? I need to know the order to read James Patterson. Yeah, really? That's true. To be, you know, remotely positive. People that I have talked with. Yeah. So I think I did kind of mention that someone did ask if the teen said any influence on the subject headings to include and I guess what you just described at the beginning, you just sat down and did it based on your statistics and information you had. And I did show it to them and ask them right everything before they kind of had, you know, some somewhat say in it, you know, Sarah, were you involved in that and picking the different subject headings and how they would be, how things would be arranged? Honestly, I don't remember. I do remember. She showed us them. And I remember that. And I have helped, like move the things on the shelves, like move the subjects to make more room. So I've done that. And all in all, we were all like she kept us like in the know, like we were never blindsided by it, except for like the first meeting when we're like, whoa, when did this happen? Books aren't going out. Other than that, we were all kept in the know. So it's all good. That's great. OK, glad to hear it. Someone wants to know if you could go over the call numbers once again, how they are arranged, the subject call numbers on top and what I think if you set a slide that showed that, I don't remember. I guess we can use this one. Yeah, so basically, how it ends up going is instead, it's kind of based on how we do our fiction books, because fiction is F for fiction and then the first three letters of the author's last name. So we kind of go the same way there. So everything but the science. Science is three headings. But so if it's a graphic novel, the first heading is the G and M for graphic novels and manga. And then the next heading to organize the books within its own category is the first three letters of the series title or, you know, a main character, obviously. So that way we can keep all Batman's together, all Superman's together, that kind of thing. So it's and then if it is a random, you know, standalone, like I said, it's just the first three of the title, just like if it was a series one. So you can find all the Naruto together under N-A-R all the one piece together under O-N-E, you know, that kind of thing. The other the other categories and everything, like I said, I mean, I guess the best example is probably, you know, the diseases and disorders is where all the medical type stuff is. So that category is D-I-S and then all the cancer books would be under C-A-N for cancer. All the books about depression would be under D-E-P for depression so that they're as close together as possible because the teens really and Sarah can probably, you know, chime in on this is they're very much more into browsing than looking it up on the catalog. Yeah, they might come in and be like, I have to do paper on something for science. It can be anything, you know, and they can go to the science category and they can see the general things and be like, Oh, astronomy, I like stars, you know, and they can see what all we have on astronomy and be able to be like, OK, yeah, here's all the books I would need for my topic, you know, or I like animals and they could go to the zoology area and see, OK, here's, you know, your mammals, here's your insects, here's your other stuff. So so, you know, it helps them browse a lot more. So that's basically what we try to do is for the actual nonfiction books to basically put them in the category they belong in and then further catalog them by their next biggest subject in common. So like I said, the cancer, the depression, anorexia, you know, whatever kind of thing. OK, great. And, Sarah, I heard you just chiming in there about the browsing of the books. You said that's yes. Yes, nine times out of 10, I will always just browse. And I know lots of teens who do this too. We'll just go and we'll browse the shelves and be like, this looks good. And oh, or we'll ask them. We don't really use the catalog. There's like one percent. And that's only because we couldn't find it on the shelf. So we want to know if it's in so we can go back and look or if we don't know the author. But we mostly browse. And it makes it really easy to just go in the nonfiction section and there's a sign. It's like, oh, there it is. I can just pick a random one. Great. So easy. Sounds cool. OK. Jumping down to a new question I just got here. If you have any non. Do you have any nonfiction series like opposing viewpoints? And if then would you if you did would you then break them apart into the appropriate subjects or keep the series itself together as the whole series? Do you have those kind of things that opposing viewpoints? Yeah, most of those ones pretty much, I mean, just like in using Dewey. I mean, they were all over, you know, whatever one they want. I mean, so so those ones, you know, most of them pretty much fall under either the from the ones that we have in our collection. They either fall under the government section, the social sciences section or the real life section. And so, yeah, those ones are pretty much broken up. I mean, you know, the closest that any come for keeping an actual set together is probably the science area where, you know, I mean, looking at the picture, you can see a lot of the ones that are clearly from the same set. And so those ones are a little closer together with each other because their topics are pretty much the same exact thing and unlike one of the opposing viewpoints where it's over tons of different stuff. Cool. OK, interesting question. Someone noticed that the picture that you have is all girls. Are there any fellows that are involved in the in here? Oh, yes, we have. We have a lot of boys. I guess I guess none of them were there that night when they just didn't get their picture taken. Oh, yeah, I mean, we have. We have a pretty decent. I mean, we still are a little bit more girl than boy, but we have a decent amount of guys that participate in our members and everything. And we've gotten more of them involved this summer as well. And they'll probably be sticking around and joining tab for next year, too. How big are there? Good to hear it. How big is the group, actually? Do you have like a limit on how many officially how many kids are allowed to be on it? Or is it just a we don't have a limit or anything? I mean, it's pretty much anybody who can join can join. We do have like an application, basically for behavioral issues. So, you know, they sign the application and in case they are disruptive or they're mean, you know, we have a viable reason to say you're no longer in tab. You signed the form. But currently, like I said, we won't know the new numbers until after summer when we have our school year meeting. Currently, we're about like 30 to 35 people. Not. Wow, that's a lot. Cool. And then that's just the ones that are actually on tab. There's more than that that actually use the collection. Oh, yeah, that's just the ones that want to be just want to be involved in actually running the thing. So to speak, yeah. OK, a final question. Here's a nice question. Do you think that the collections focus has shifted in any way perhaps to more high interest topics because of what you've done here? I think we still try to try to keep it pretty balanced. I mean, we definitely got rid of, you know, the books that no one was going to care about. You're like, how did these end up here anyway? And, you know, because I mean, if I don't even know what it's talking about, a teen isn't going to come in looking, you know, for that. It'd be a miracle. And so, so like I said, that's why, you know, we do have, you know, the sections. Like I said, I mean, I love history personally. My teens, not so much. So we have the history category, but that doesn't go out as much as, you know, a more interesting, you know, like pop culture category would go out. Yeah. So we still have, I would probably say it's pretty half and half. And then in some of the categories like art, you know, I mean, there's, you know, what you can consider fun books in there, like how to draw, you know, manga characters. And then there's, you know, the more educational ones like, you know, 50 artists, you should know, you know, that kind of stuff. You know, so I mean, there's definitely probably in each category, there's some that are very much more, you know, like the drugs. I mean, that's going to be mostly, you know, research, you know, materials, you know, but then you have some like the pop culture where there's going to be, you know, some literary type, you know, works in there, you know, and then some fun stuff, you know, so we try, we try to make sure that, you know, we have the research materials there for the people that need it for their school papers and stuff, but also try to incorporate more high-interest things, you know, that will get them reading nonfiction for fun as well and not just through paper. Right. So that's that's where we try, you know, to incorporate a lot of the, you know, more interesting books that you wouldn't necessarily even consider purchasing for a nonfiction area. Right. The Moshi Moshi ones and things like that. Thinking outside the box a little there. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Great. And someone wants to know, remind us again what TAB stands for. That's the Teen Advisory Board. Yep. Nothing fancy about it. Nothing special to LeVista. It's just the Teen Advisory Board for the library. Cool. All right. Any other last minute questions are right at the top of the hour here at 11 o'clock. Anybody has any last minute urgent questions they want to ask? I'm not sure, Lindsay, if you have on your slides, they're a final slide or anything with contact invoices or was it just the picture was the last one? I wanted to make sure you got to the end of everything you wanted you had. Yeah. Does anybody have any final last minute questions for Lindsay or Sarah? There is Lindsay's contact information, so I'm sure if you do have any questions that you want to ask her afterwards, you can reach her there and she'd be happy to tell you everything they've been doing there up in LeVista. Just waiting to see if anything urgent last minute comes in. OK, I think we will wrap it up for this morning then. If nobody has anything that you just we need to have Lindsay and Sarah answer right now, contact Lindsay there up in LeVista and she will be able to help you out with anything you need to. So thank you very much, Sarah and thank you, Lindsay. This is a great session. You guys shared this is really I was very interested to hear about what you guys are doing up there. Like you see you as you mentioned this is you presented this at our state conference last fall and I saw it on the program. I did but I was unable to make it to it. There's just two more sessions to go to, of course. So I definitely wanted to get down the show here so we could get it so I could hear what's going on and we can share it with the rest of our colleagues out there. So thank you very much. We will wrap it up for today. We got a few thank yous coming in from the audience as well. So thank you everyone for attending. I am going to pull back presenter control now to my screen here. Maybe there we go. OK, so thank you very much everyone for attending. That will wrap it up for this week's edition of Encompass Live. The session has been recorded and will be posted up possibly later today. When it is put up we will put it into our archived Encompass Live sessions web page here which you can get to on our main Encompass Live page. We have lists here of all of our sessions that we've ever done going back to 2009. So you can go back and see all of our recordings here and watch them if you want to. So that will wrap it up for today. I hope you join us next week when we will be switching from public libraries to academic learning in the learning commons how you and Kay moved out of the silos and into a dance hall. You and Kay's University of Nebraska at Carney out here in the middle of Nebraska and they have set up a learning commons that I attended a session that the presentation they did on this earlier this spring. And so I'm bringing Kerry Peterson who is the assistant director there at the learning commons now and Dr. Ron Woods who is work there via the library to come in and talk to us next week about how they pulled this off at the University of Nebraska at Carney. So I hope you will join us next week for that session. And Encompass Live is on Facebook as you can see here. So if you are a big Facebook user please go ahead and like us on Facebook and you will receive notifications there of any time when we have sessions coming up new things have been added to the show. I send reminders every morning when we have our show here did this morning. You can join us right now to log into our sessions when the recordings are available. It'll be announced on here. So if you're a big Facebook user please do go ahead and like us there on Facebook. Other than that we are wrapped up for this morning and thanks you very much for attending and we'll see you next week on Encompass Live. Thanks. Bye bye.