 Okay, 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, you might call it a webinar, where we cover anything that may be of interest to librarians in Nebraska and across the country. We do a variety of topics here, presentations, interviews, mini-training sessions, whatever, to our attention. If it's related to libraries, we'll put it on the show. We're not very picky. That's about as picky as we get. We do these sessions live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time, but they are recorded, so if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. You can go to our website and there are recordings of all of our shows that we've done since we started doing this in January 2009. We have commission staff, Nebraska Library Commission staff, that come on to presentations, and we bring in guest speakers from sometimes from elsewhere. Today we have a mixture of that. We actually have our monthly tech talk. Once a month, usually the last Wednesday of the month, I bring Michael Sowers, comes on the show. He is the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Library Commission. Morning, Krista. Hi, Michael. And he does his tech talk with Michael Sowers, where he shares some news items of the day. We'll see how that goes today. Anything new techie that's come up in the month, but he also brings in guest people to do a presentation or something that is usually techie related, sometimes vaguely. And that's what we're doing this morning, is a tech talk. So I'm going to actually just hand over to Michael to get things started and tell us who he's got with us on the line today. Thanks, Krista. I will start out by saying that for these tech talks, I actually pick the guest, so I'm a bit picky. So I'll make Matthew a little better, I think. Thank you, Michael. You're welcome. Today, we have Matt Hamilton on the line. I found a little biography for him. I'm going to read this here. Part hardware geek, part software geek. He brings a punk rock. Do-it-yourself ethos to librarianship, often turning tradition on its head. That is the IT director for the Anything Library System in Colorado and was named a library journal mover and shaker back in 2010. I've known Matt for a few years now through various conferences and whatnot and a slight, weird Colorado connection in that before I came to Nebraska, I was in Colorado myself and my wife, who is now with me here in Nebraska for a few years, was working for the Rangeview Library District before they went and created a scribble and changed her name. So I've always been watching what's going on there and I heard Matt was doing some very different and interesting things, even beyond what I had already heard about. So we brought him on today and Matt, just say hi and let everybody know you're already there. Hi, everyone. Matt's got a short kind of presentation to kind of get us all started and get us all on the same page with what's going on at Anything. So I'm going to go ahead and let him go through that and then we'll kind of turn into a bit of a conversation after that. Matt, go ahead and take it away. Great. Well, thank you both for having me on this morning. I'm excited to talk about our studio initiative here at Anything. It's something that we've been working on for the past year and we are very excited about the results and about some of the things that are coming up. So just to get started, Anything is we were formerly the Adams County Library System. So Adams County is the county just above Denver County it's a mixture of suburban and rural areas. We have about 1200 square miles in the county and our library locations span about 300 of those square miles. So we have seven branches and a bookmobile and the population is in many ways a challenge socioeconomic population. So I know a lot of folks see our beautiful buildings and some of the things that we do and they think, oh, you know, Rangeview has tons of money, but we actually started out as the worst funded library district in Colorado and several years ago just prior to becoming Anything we were able to pass a mill levy and we were able to become the second worst funded library district in Colorado. So we are moving up in the world and we're very excited about that. But we do operate on an operating budget of about $12.5 million for our seven branches. One of the things that we did as part of becoming Anything is we really developed this model that we refer to as the experience library. And so we really wanted our spaces to be developed and designed around people and not just the collection and of course we don't neglect the collection by any means but we certainly want people to come into our libraries and to encounter and discover and hopefully be delighted by the different ways that they can learn and build community together. And this has included things like our community gardens. So this is actually some kids making seed balls with one of our concierges. We've had programs that are kind of mixed science with food. So this is Chef Ian from the inventing room. He's doing molecular gastronomy. And like a lot of places we've also had some technology centered, mostly gaming centered programs for our teens. Now I have been watching the UMedia project in Chicago Public Library for several years. And when the grants became available, funded by the John B. Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, to build digital learning labs in libraries and museums across the country, I was really excited. And we got together here at Anything and we talked about it and we decided that we would throw in and try to become one of the initial grantees and we were lucky enough to be chosen as one of the first 12 institutions in the first cohort. And this project was based upon the UMedia model. And so once we got it, we said, okay, great, we got this grant. Now what do we do? And so we started with actually taking a visit to the UMedia space in Chicago. And at first we saw basically what we expected to see. We saw lots of cool technology and some interesting stuff going on. And we met together with the other institutions in the first grantee convening and we started coming up with a little bit of a model of what we were doing. And this is what we developed at that first initial meeting. And what this symbolizes is that we weren't rebuilding the library. We were just sort of taking something that we already loved and we already thought was great and just kind of creating a new twist. And so this is our version of the Anything bug because we felt that Volkswagen had done a very similar thing with their classic. And so our goals initially for this project were that we wanted to re-envision the approach across the district to our team technology programming. We wanted to focus more on content creation rather than just consumption. And in order to do that, we wanted to use the grant funds to build our staff capacity to support this. We wanted to create portable kits for use in team programming across the district. So kits that would include, say, a camera and a light kit and microphone that could be checked out so that any of our team guides and any of our locations could offer this service. And we wanted to establish a pool of volunteers committed to working as community mentors. And I'll talk a little bit about that mentor piece in a minute because, well, that part was the most interesting. And then we wanted to design and implement a model lab. We wanted to open our very own space, and we chose to do that at our anything-right-farms location, and then produce a recipe so that we could reproduce the lab itself in our other six locations. So as I mentioned, we did visit Umedia, Chicago, and one of the things that we were surprised by is that the equipment itself was pretty modest. It was available for anyone to use within the space, and even a geek like me could get in there and try my hand at some turntableism. But really, for us, the transformative moment was when we had a panel with some of the mentors and some of the teens that had worked in the space. And we had been hearing a lot about this Hamago concept, and Hamago is shorthand for the concept that came out of Mimi Ito's research describing the stages of teen engagement with technology hanging out, which is kind of what you would expect, just sort of hanging out, and maybe you're playing some video games together, messing around, which is where maybe you're starting to play around making some remix videos or little basic YouTube videos, and then geeking out, which is really sort of the goal of these spaces is to be able to give the kids the opportunity to take that innate curiosity and start to develop some real skills and perhaps even start to develop a career path in that particular area. And we felt that that was important. It was already something that we were focused on in sort of our focus on 21st century skills development. And one of the reasons why digital media is especially good for this is because it really does help, well, someone once put it, filmmaking is summer camp with goals. And so the creation of digital media really is something that helps build project teams and helps build that teamwork, relationships, and collaboration skills in a way that is somewhat unique. And we felt like we were already doing a pretty good job of hanging out and messing around. It was really going to be the geeking out for us that was going to be a challenge. And so we got started right away. And this is actually a program that one of our team guides, Kate Sweeney, offered in one of our meeting rooms where we took a couple of IMAT computers that we had originally installed in our children's area. And they weren't actually that usable for children, strangely enough. I know Apple has a certain reputation, but for what the kids were trying to do, they weren't such a good fit. And so what had happened is they were actually sitting in my inventory in the IT basement. And Kate found out about this, and she said, I want them. And so she set up her own kind of temporary media lab in a meeting space and started trying this homago activity. So some of the kids came in, and they were just in one corner of the room hanging out. And the reason why that was important is that sort of set the stage for them to get comfortable. And she just started playing around with GarageBand. And that sort of piqued the curiosity of the folks who were innately interested in music making and said, Miss, what is it you're doing there? And that eventually led to a smaller group of kids who really did want to geek out. And they eventually started making their own music, and they would come back and they'd asked to burn it to CDs. And so that was something that was really encouraging for us to see, OK, the model works. It doesn't necessarily take a lot of equipment. It doesn't necessarily require a huge transformation of space. Great, we can do this. And so for us, the challenge at this point really was to level up. We said, OK, we've been an experience library. How can we really take this to the next level? And how can we incorporate the mentorship idea? What the teens had told us in Chicago was that it wasn't really the act of creation. It wasn't really the access to equipment. It was really the relationship with the mentors that had been transformational in their lives. One of the teens told a really great story about how she had just come because some cute boy was at the bus stop and she said, oh, where are you going? And he said, I'm going to the library. You want to go with? And her response was, why are you going to the library? But what she found was that there was a spoken word artist that's one of the mentors, Brother Mike, at Chicago Public Libraries' New Media Space. And she got a little interested and then she would come back. She'd get a little bit more interested. And eventually she ended up going to a national competition for spoken word poetry, which is something that she probably would have never been exposed to. And so that was interesting for us because, as I mentioned, we are the second worst funded library in Colorado. And so we act on a very thin staffing model and we said, gosh, how are we going to meet that requirement of the space? How are we going to be able to fulfill that part of this project? And so we came back and we started thinking about, OK, let's transform our goals a little bit. And so after that initial foray, this is what our goals shifted to. We said, this really isn't necessarily about technology. This is just really about our team programming. And we really want to focus on helping our staff support relationship building, leadership development in our teams, and collaboration. And we initially said, you know what, this isn't about the stuff. We thought it was about the stuff. We thought it was about the equipment. It turns out that that's not necessarily so important. So we almost struck the idea of offering the portable kits for team programming. But I was actually overridden on that one. And I'm glad that I was. Because as it's turned out, that type of programming really has been very popular across the district. And it's been really wonderful and interesting to see some of our team guides who, when they first were confronted with this idea, said, gosh, I don't know if I know anything about creating media. I don't know that I can do this. And some of those folks are most enthusiastic adopters today. And so it really shifted from just the Hamago model to the model of connected learning. And this is something, if you follow library blogs, you've probably seen Buffy Hamilton does a really great job. He's written about this in a number of articles on our blog. I definitely recommend going and checking it out. But this model of learning sort of explains how and why Hamago works and what we can do to kind of support this in our institutions. And when I look at it, I think this is really something that fits well with libraries. Some of the principles of connected learning are that it's interest-powered. And so unlike a school, we don't have a captive audience. For kids to come in and want to learn these things, they have to want to learn these things. It's not just a matter of their parents are telling them, well, go to the library and learn how to make a video. Or a teacher saying, today you're going to create a presentation or you're going to create a slideshow. And that really, I think, helps because we are drawing from their own intrinsic motivation. It also really starts to build that peer culture. And so there's the old joke about Facebook is your high school, so you're connected with all the people that you go to school with. But Tumblr is the social network of all the people that you wish you went to school with. And so by building these affinity networks of kids who share the same interests and then connecting them with mentors who share the same interests, it really creates these powerful opportunities for scaffolding their knowledge, building a collaborative learning network, and being able to take it further. So what we did was we went ahead and we wrote this idea into our strategic plan. So this is one of our fourth initiative in the Anything Strategic Plan for 2012 and 2014. Creativity and innovation are supported by technology. And we do believe that everyone is creative. We do believe that we should provide the tools for people to explore that creativity, connect with others and ideas. And when we say tools, we don't just mean providing a computer or a piece of software. It's also the opportunity to learn how to use that and the space to be able to form those learning networks to learn those things together. And so the grant proceeded led by a number of teams. And so we had our main UMedia, we referred to it at the time as the UMedia project. And so that team consisted of two branch managers, three team guides, one tech guide myself as the IT director, and our family services director. We also received input from team advisory boards at each of our libraries, including for anything right farms where we were going to do the largest remodel of the team space. The team advisory board played a large role in helping us actually define what the space was going to look like and make a lot of choices about how the operations were going to work, hours, that sort of thing. We also formed an advisory council that made up representatives from each of the school districts in Adams County. Our library district actually crosses, I believe it's five school districts. And so that's very interesting and it's really opened up a lot of great collaborative opportunities and some shared understanding about, well, what are your goals and how is this idea of STEM education changing you and changing what you're doing and what can we do to supplement what you're doing in school so that we're not reproducing it, but we really are an add-on, an added value to what you're doing. We also brought in members of other various community organizations, organizations like Denver of Media, which is sort of a public access cable network that is located down in Denver. We brought in members of the CU School for Education, so we have academic representatives and representatives from private industry as well. And then in order to get the work done, we needed to create some breakout teams and so we dedicated some smaller teams for the areas of communications, kind of talking about, well, what is this project all about? How are we going to roll it out? How are we going to announce to the teams what we're doing? How are we going to explain to parents what's going on here? How are we going to drum up enthusiasm and support for this initiative? The activities team was the team that really took a look at, well, what do we want to offer? There's really a lot that you can look at when you're thinking about a creative space in your library. There's everything from, okay, we're going to offer video, we're going to offer video game design classes, we're going to offer hardware classes, working with Arduino and microprocessors. We're going to have 3D printing. And so this team really took a look at each location and each location's community and worked closely with the team advisory boards to decide, well, what works best in this location? And it's not always the same for each community. Because our libraries are spread so far apart, the communities can really be very different. And then there was the mentors team. And this was the team that really sort of developed, okay, so are these folks employees? Are they volunteers? What are our policies around this? How are we going to recruit them? That sort of thing. And we ended up creating a slightly different model than what's in place at some of the media sites. We created a model called Artist in Residence. And that came out of this group. The space and operations team was sort of on the ground stuff. So they were the ones who came up with, well, this is how we're going to remodel the team space. This is going to go here. This is what we need to buy in order to support the activities that the activities team have indicated that we should support in the space. And here is how it's going to work. So here are the policies. Here's how we're going to staff it. And all those sorts of decisions. And then the partnerships team is really about, well, forming partnerships, both for recruiting our artists in residence and also forming partnerships to help develop and extend our programming offerings. And we're hoping that by developing these partnerships, we'll also start to find resources and funding to be able to remodel some of our other spaces in our other locations as well. And then there is the documentation and evaluation team, which was, their job was really to document the progress of the project and to handle the evaluation of the various activities as we go through the project and to write the final report as is required for the IMLS grant. Sorry, I had to grab a quick drink of water there. So our community partners in this were Boulder Digital Arts, which is a group of freelance, mostly graphic artists and some technologists that operate a co-working space up in Boulder and they offer classes for the community. We worked with them to provide content creation training for many of our teen and our tech guides. So things like classes in iMovie and Photoshop, how to develop a script, how to set up lighting for video. We did a very similar partnership with Denver Open Media as well. And then we worked with a smaller group called Rocky Mountain Training and we were able to give some in-depth Adobe Photoshop and InDesign training for all of our teen and our tech guides by working with them as well. And we're hoping that we'll be able to draw on some of their instructors to actually be artists and residents in the space. We also worked and continue to work with the University of Denver School of Library and Information Science. We've set up an internship to help us with the staffing of the space. This model of learning is definitely more staff-intensive than how we previously were handling our teen space. And so by working with some interns, that's going to help us kind of bridge that gap for us. And so the initial learning lab that we were going to build is at our Anything Quite Farms location. So this is a suburban community in the city of Thornton. And this is not an architectural drawing. This is something that I just did when I was sort of initially proposing the idea. So do not take this as high art by any means. But this sort of indicates how we incorporated that idea of space for hanging out, space for messing around, and space for geeking out into our revamp of the teen space at Wright Farms. The area where you see the green, we've added a Microsoft PixelSense, which is a touchscreen table that you can use for collaborative music making and photo editing and gaming and that sort of thing. We moved our public computers there and just made the space a little bit more friendly for teens to socialize. In the areas where you see the blue, we've remodeled those. What used to be referred to as the Wii Room is now a recording studio. And the area that was referred to as the Teen Lounge, we've put in a green screen, we've put in a video editing station, and we've added lighting so that teens can do video production in that area. And then actually for the geeking out space in the study rooms, we haven't done a lot because we really wanted to leave those rooms open to whatever the teens might need or want to do in that space. And so we are offering some screens where you can plug in a couple different laptops and you can collaborate on one big screen. We added some very large whiteboards on the wall so that they can kind of whiteboard things out, create their own storyboards and things like that. But really the focus of that space was not necessarily adding a lot of technology. So we were asked recently to name some accomplishments. We had a grantee convening in Washington, DC where Cohort won the initial 12 libraries and museums who received the grant got to meet Cohort 2, the folks who received the grant in the second round. And what we've been able to do so far is we really have been able to offer new programming across our district. We've had the opportunity for our teen and our tech guides to get some really fantastic training. In fact, I wish I'd had the opportunity to set in on a lot of the stuff because the chance to get tutoring in Adobe Creative Suite or Final Cut Pro and things like that normally is something that's probably too expensive for just the casual hobbyist to work on their own. And it's something that we probably, well, we definitely would not have had the budget to support on that type of scale if we hadn't got the grant. And we are under construction at AnythingCriteFarms. And although it says OpenSmart's 11th, construction is lagging a little bit behind and we're probably not going to open until the week after that. But we're still very excited to open up the space. But we didn't wait, as I mentioned, we didn't wait for the remodel in the teen space at AnythingCriteFarms to let this change the way that we approached working with our teens. And so what this is, these are some images from our Wednesday afternoons. Wednesdays at Wright Farms, we have anywhere from about 60 to close to 100 teens who come into the library. This is due to early release and our proximity to several different schools that are within walking distance. And originally it was a little bit chaotic. But after coming back from Chicago, our teen guide, Mo Yang, really took a look at what he could do to change the way that we managed our library on Wednesdays. And what they did was they created different zones. They created zones for hanging out. They created zones for messing around. They started staffing it in a way that the kids could always expect to find the same people in the same areas and they could start to build those mentor-like relationships. And what we found is that Wednesdays are actually very pleasant and even the adults have noticed and they've come up and they've made comments about, wow, you know, the kids really seem to be doing some fun things. And also it's no longer disturbing to me what they're doing. I'm able to come in here and I'm able to enjoy the library and I see that the kids are having just as much fun as they were too. At our Huron Street location, Kate has continued to do some really great work with GarageBand. She's also started doing digital storytelling classes as well. And after working with the same group of kids for about four months, she had the Itty-Think Grammys and so they invited the kids in to showcase their work and to really help with that identity-building component. So some of these kids maybe had never made music before, had never made video before, and they were able to say, you know what, I'm a musician. I'm a video maker. And they invited their parents in. They received awards. And it actually drew in adults who were just walking by and said, you know, wow, what's going on? And they enjoyed watching the showcase as well. Under the guise of the Studio Initiative and as part of our transformation into really focusing more on content creation, they also applied for an LSTA grant at our Anything Brighton Library. And they took a look at their community and they determined that a makerspace was a better fit for what the interests of their community were. And so this is actually our adult guide, Kathy Lane, is working with the MakerBot Replicator. We have that there. And this is LEGO We Do, which is really kind of a fun tool. A lot of folks maybe have heard of LEGO Mindstorms product, which is a little bit more challenging as far as getting to learn robotics and that sort of thing. LEGO We Do allows you to build these little objects and they include sensors and motors and you can start to learn using a visual programming interface. So it starts to teach kids how to work with sensors, how to work with motors, and also how to develop a sense for programming logic. And this is probably our tech guide, Aaron Bach, who's working with some kids on a project there. And then our team guide, Deirdre, is here working with some kids. They set up a photography studio and they've been having a lot of fun doing everything from fashion photography to other types of photography as well. And I'd like to comment that one of the reasons why this has been so successful for us at Anything Brighton is that we've really allowed that interest-driven learning not to just come from the community but to come from the staff as well. So Aaron was particularly interested in learning more about robotics and Deirdre is an excellent amateur photographer. And so by sort of tapping into the skills and the interests and the hobbies of our staff, it really helped us create the buy-in for trying something new in the organization. Anything Brighton was also the first place that we had our first mentor to work with the teens. And this was a great experiment for us because it really did confirm what we had learned in Chicago and from some of the other media sites such as Art Lab Plus in Washington, D.C. The kids just really enjoyed connecting with a professional photographer. And not just around photography, they were just fascinated about, well, how did you get into this and what was your career path and you've traveled where and what is that like? And so that has been very encouraging for us as we go forward with our Artist in Residence program. So this is the construction that's starting to happen at Anything Bright Farms. If you've never seen construction before, this is what it looks like. And we're starting to ramp up our excitement within the community. We've produced a promotional video and we're starting to kind of let the teens know and let parents know these are the kind of things that are going to be available here. And for us, the participation in this, the most exciting part has really been seeing homago work and seeing how it can draw out interest in kids and ability in kids that maybe they didn't really know they had and expose them to possibilities that maybe they wouldn't have had or maybe they wouldn't have known that they would have had. And also it's been really exciting for me to see how excited staff has gotten to implement programming that is based on their interests and their hobbies. Some of the challenges have been working with the partnerships, defining sort of who's going to do what and really creating that accountability. That's something that we're continuing to learn more about. Defining the role of mentors for anything was something that was really challenging for us too. This really, we had a volunteer program in place and we certainly had staff roles clearly defined. This was a whole new phenomenon for us. They weren't quite volunteers. They definitely weren't anything staff. And so kind of wrapping our mind around, well, what are the privacy issues about them working with potentially patron information and what about working with teens and do we need to worry about everything from criminal background checks and how do we know that someone is a good educator just because they're a good artist. And so that's been very interesting and I think that that's probably the area where we've actually done the most work. And then recruiting mentors has been very interesting as well. What we wish we knew when we started this and I'm the IT guy so this is what I'm going to say is that the logistical challenge of managing so many different types of media and equipment has really taken up a lot of time for my IT staff. Apple products are definitely very user friendly. They're phenomenal consumer devices but to manage them on sort of an enterprise level is definitely a challenge sometimes. And just, and everyone probably knows this, in any new initiative communication is key. Despite regular district wide announcements and meetings, many did still feel out of the loop in relation to this project. I noticed I'm taking a little bit more time than I intended so I'm going to kind of skip through this and I wanted to talk about one last thing and that was in order to really roll this out for our staff so our staff felt confident and comfortable working with digital content creation we took the opportunity just last week to use our all staff training day that we have the very president's day called TechFest to really give our staff a flavor of what is it like to work with the Homago model and what is it like to work with all sorts of these creative endeavors. And so this is our all access pass for TechFest that day and we broke into 12 groups and paired groups of 10 with a mentor in 12 different content areas. So this is one of our system administrators, Phil Gilchrist, he is working with our 3D printer. He worked with the group to show them how you design 3D objects using a software called Tinkercad and then help them print the objects that they had designed. This is Sheena is our tech guide at anything right farms and so she worked with the team showing them how to set up lighting, how to develop storyboards, how to create your script and then eventually produce a small video piece. We also had a Minecraft group. Anything has offered a Minecraft server once we found that a lot of kids were using it and they were wanting to play together and create together. So we had a group that explored Minecraft. And finally this is the, I believe they're called the PondTunes. We had a group who used GarageBand and learned how to write a song that day and that was a lot of fun. So that is our initiative called the Studio at Anything Libraries. We eventually hope to have studios open at all of our locations and yeah, I guess are there any questions? Wow. Thank you, Matt. That was wonderful and going long is not a problem because A, we can go long and B, the more you can tell us that the more interest I think everybody will be in this. First, we want to start, remind everybody that if you have any questions from the audience, just go ahead and either type them into the questions area and we'll happily pass those along to Matt or raise your hand if you have a microphone and we will happily allow you to ask your question directly. I think the first reaction Kristin and I had for you there is congratulations on the moving up in the funding list in Colorado. How to put a positive spin on it is wonderful. And speaking of money, here's the one question that usually comes up especially whenever there's a grant involved. How much money did you actually get from the grant to be able to fund this? Our ballpark it at least so we can get an idea. Well, so in the case of the IMLS digital learning lab grant, that grant was for $100,000 of which we spent around $35,000 on equipment and closer to, I want to say about $32,000 on the training for all of our teen and our tech guides. Those were the bulk of the expenses there. Okay. And early on in the presentation you mentioned something of a concierge. Yes. Could you kind of fill us in on what you were talking about there? Sure. So the anything staffing model is not completely different than other libraries but it's a little bit different. We have Wranglers who are our material handlers. So those are the folks who are shelving books and doing that sort of activity. And then our concierge are the folks who are kind of the public face of the organization. They are the ones who will be at our perch and will be assisting with whatever a patron might need. And then our guides are our subject matter specialists. So they're responsible for most if not all of the programming in a branch and they're also responsible to some degree for the collection in their particular subject area. So most of our branches have a teen guide, a tech guide, an adult guide, and a children's guide. Okay. All right. I have a question from the audience. Any other plans for showcasing the creations from the studio? This is from Brenda Howe. And I guess I had a related question in my list which is so how the creations and or what the library has done is there a way anybody else can get their hands on this stuff? Well, right now because we're just sort of ramping up, we don't have a lot of sort of end products. Certainly with the programming that Kate has done, the teens have produced some music. They've produced some videos. But because we're very sensitive to kind of protecting the privacy of the teens, that's not something we've really shared out a lot of. That's one of the things that we're really working on ways to do now, especially as we're about to open the studio at Wright Farms and we're expecting that we'll be creating a lot more content. In terms of like a physical showcase, that is definitely one of the key aspects of this that really helps the kid kind of get confirmation that what they've done has value and again really helps with that sort of identity building. You know, wow, I really am a video maker. I liked doing this. Maybe I can go further with it. We're looking at some online tools too. We're working with a closed social network called iRenix and that's really meant to be a place for the kids to collaborate on projects. So they can upload their projects. They can talk about it. They can get critique from the Anything Guides or from any artists and residents that they're working with. And then if they choose to share those end products out, they can share them out on their social network of choice. Okay, great. I mean, I gotta say, I love to see the stuff that they're coming up with and I realize you have permissions issues and all these, especially if you're dealing with younger kids. So that leads me to this other question I have which I'll kind of go in both directions from. I'm really focusing on the teens, which is spectacular. What about in both directions, younger kids and or adults or the teens that will kind of age out of this and not be someone who'd hang out in the teen section anymore? Where do you see this going out from the teens? Well, one of the reasons why we focused on teens was that the IMLS grant and the LSTA grant were both specifically targeted for teens. In the case of the IMLS grant, the MacArthur Foundation, what they're really trying to do is they're really trying to create a community of both research and application around customized learning, around this connected learning model. They felt that working in the schools, there are too many hurdles. Schools have too many restrictions that they currently have to work on. They've got to teach to the test, that sort of thing. By us being an opt-in space, we're able to kind of take some of this research that's coming out of the Connective Learning Research Network, apply it in a real-world situation, and hopefully we can help demonstrate the value of that approach, which in turn we hope will have some effect on the schools. For us personally, well, personally as in the library, we definitely want to push this out to other age groups. Teens were a good place to start because they do tend to be more comfortable with digital media tools. They do tend to be a little bit more comfortable in terms of experimenting and ambiguity. We're not quite sure what this program's going to turn out like, but let's learn together. But it is our intention to start to offer similar types of programming to adults and certainly to kids. I know whenever we had the opportunity, when we set up the training, we would invite adult guides and children's guides to attend the training as well if they were able to be free that day. I know that some of our children's guides are starting to experiment with some iPad-based programs. I think stop animation type stuff. Cool. I'm still waiting to play with a 3D printer myself, so I might have to take a road trip. Another question. We're not far. Yeah, I know. I'm looking for reasons. Connie from our audience has asked, how often are mentors working with the programs and how challenging is it to find mentors? I know you mentioned that that was one of your challenges. Yeah, so that is what we have the least experience in so far. We have had one mentor, the photography mentor, at anything Brighton in the maker space there, and we have a video mentor that we're working with here at Anything Bright Farms. And we, literally two weeks ago, finally finalized the job description and sort of our policies around what an artist in residence is going to look like and what the requirements for training and that sort of thing are. And we have started the recruiting process. We currently have, I think it's about six other folks in line that we're talking to and we're talking about bringing on board, but so far it's just been the two. Okay. And how are you trying to find these folks? Are you approaching? Are you advertising? Hot earlight. By any means necessary. Now, so we created a, one of our inspirations was really museums. And this was interesting. When we met as a grantee cohort in Chicago, there were libraries and there were museums. And as we learned more about the importance of mentors, we all kind of went, oh my gosh, okay, we really got to put more into this idea than we originally thought. And we were all worried about, okay, I can't just hire new mentors like Chicago did. We don't have the funding or the staff lines available for that. And all the libraries were really concerned and all of the museums were not. And it's because museums use volunteers as a field a lot more than libraries do. And so we went and we talked with museums about, well, how is it that you do this? And I had a really great conversation with the folks from the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. And I was really surprised by the depth of their program. They actually require a three-year commitment. They have an entire year of training before the volunteer works with the public. And so that really sort of inspired us to say, okay, if they can do it for three years, we can certainly find some folks. And they were who kind of first turned me on to the idea of using the Volunteer Match website. And we've had a little bit of success there so far, a couple of hits. And then we're really thinking in terms of personal networks. So I have a friend who works for the MIT Media Labs. He's one of the developers of Scratch. And so I asked him to come in and to do some Scratch workshops. Our graphic artists in the communications department is reaching out to her community. I've been looking at the Boulder, Denver, New Tech meetup group to kind of work with the startup community, because a lot of those folks are very interested in contributing to the community as well. So really kind of a wide range of approaches. Great. Yeah, I think that networking out there, especially with Boulder right over there, there's a couple of tech startups floating around over there. Yeah, just a few. Okay, so let me kind of change angles here a little bit. Have you had any ideas under this program that you thought were like really spectacular ideas, but then you just realized you just couldn't do it? Oh, that is a great question. I'll add, which might be easier. Have you tried something that just went, okay, yeah, tried that, isn't going to work. We're not going to do that again. Well, I know one of our guides tried a team program where they were drawing, yeah, they were using styluses to do drawing on iPads, and that didn't go over. And the 3D printing, we're still figuring out ways to incorporate that into programming. Right now, people come in, they see it, they think it's really neat, but in terms of how to work with it, it's a little bit intimidating. It's not something you can just pick up. Yeah, and it's definitely not instant gratification either. Absolutely not. Yeah, I know originally before we bought it, there were all these ideas, oh, we're going to use this program where you take pictures of someone from all these different angles and you make an action figure of that person. And then we got it, we started testing it, and we realized, oh my gosh, something like that will take four hours to print. Right. How are we going to do that in a program? So, yeah, and in that regard, we're actually working with a local firm called Lullspot, and we're thinking about maybe getting one of their printers. It looks like that might be a little bit of a better fit, and we're kind of talking to them about some of those hurdles to see what we could do to get around that. And then, probably kind of maybe my last big question for you is, a lot of our listeners, and especially here in Nebraska, are very small libraries. Right. And just the concept of a district pretty much doesn't exist in this state. Right. What if you really had to kind of pare it down? You are a single branch library, not a lot of space. Maybe you can find some money somewhere, but there's still a lot of limitations, staff-wise, time-wise, space-wise, that sort of thing. What are maybe the one or two things out of this you think that these would be the things to focus on or try in a small environment? Sure, sure. First of all, you don't have to have Apple computers and you don't have to have Adobe Creative Suite to do this type of thing. You can use really any sort of hardware, and there are a lot of free and open-source tools that are available on the web that you could use in terms of your technology. So what I would say the focus would be is to tap into the interests and expertise of your staff and the interests and expertise of folks in the community and really work on trying to pair someone who has some expertise in a given area with teams who are interested in that. And that doesn't have to be technology related. It could be knitting or woodworking or something like that. Kids don't get the opportunity to create the way that they once did. And so I think it's really just pairing the teams with a good role model and giving them the opportunity to create. And again, it doesn't have to be teams, but that's one age group. But that's what I would focus on. Yeah, no, that's I think wonderful, wonderful advice. The one other thing I'll say, and everything kind of Matt's mentioned where there's a link involved website group, Chris has been taking notes and we'll get those up as soon as we can. Unfortunately, delicious is down at the moment, which is where we usually post all that stuff, but it will show up in the show notes. Matt wrote a blog post for the Tame the Web blog just the other day about the staff day that they did and the tech fest. And I got to say the one... Oh yeah, I can... Right, yeah. We're going to go ahead and take control back. We'll have Chris to pull that up while I'm talking here because I can only do one thing at a time. But one of the things you mentioned in the article, and I think you also mentioned when you were talking about it in your presentation is that the staff at the end of the day had something... They accomplished something, they produced something, they had something to take away, whether it was a video or pictures or whatnot. And we've been doing more and more training kind of like that. We're trying to push that. And I think from the sounds of it... No, there's the article. Thank you, Christa. From the sound of it, the staff really enjoyed... I mean, just looking at those pictures, I got to say the staff definitely seemed to enjoy the training day, which is not something all staff generally get into all that well. Yeah, you know, this was really a big risk for us. We had had three other tech fests before in previous years, and they had been much more your traditional staff day. We had a keynote or two. We had breakout formal classes that were more of a classroom format or presentation format. And, you know, the reviews had always been positive, but this year we said, you know, let's do it. Let's take it further. Let's take a risk. Let's actually apply this model and get the stuff in people's hands. And what we found... And I had no idea how it would go over. You know, I didn't know if people would say, you're going to expect me to do what. I'm not creative. But as it turns out, it generated more buzz than any of our other tech fests, and people have continued to talk about it, and they've asked for us to do it again. They said, you know, can we do this next week? And so, yeah, it was really exciting to see the enthusiasm with which they embraced it and how much they enjoyed it. Yeah, I got to say that comment, can we do it again, is one of the greatest comments you can ever get. I did something at a conference last year, and literally people came to us at the end of the day. It was a day-long track, and they said, so you're doing this again tomorrow, right? And we're like, we wish. But no, I mean, because there was another day at the conference, and we're like, no, we're not. But, you know, tell the organizers that. I mean, that is a wonderful, wonderful compliment. What are two other questions about staff training? Because it's kind of a topic I'm really into. What was it the type where, was it mandatory to attend, or optional? I mean, could the janitors show up? What was the organization from kind of that point of view? So, yeah, all of our full-day staff development days, they're not mandatory, but we do ask that everyone comes. And generally, all the full-time staff will be there. And any part-time staff are allowed to have extra hours to be able to come that week as well. And yes, we encourage the facility staff. We encourage everyone to attend. We think that both sort of the building of the culture, of the organization, so a shared understanding, and just the teamwork and the bonding and the getting the chance, no folks from other branches, is just invaluable. Sure. And we're running a little long here, which is never a problem. But I have one more question for you. And you don't have to name names, obviously, but kind of from the sounds of how well this day went, did you have anybody that you could think of that was, like, in the morning, they were like, okay, I'm here. And by the end of the day, they were, like, totally changed, transformed, I guess might be the word I'm looking for. Yes. Okay. Success. That's what I'll say. That's fine. I was hoping you, I kind of assumed you would say that. Because that's, you know, the staff training, I'm going to get on a soapbox here just a little bit, is really important. In fact, I wish I could remember which library it is, but the last time I got on the soapbox, I heard from a library in Nebraska about a month later saying, you know what? We heard that advice. We are now closed half a day every month. All the staff come in, we watch a video together, we learn how to do something together, and they've just integrated that group staff-wide training into their hours once a month. They got the board approval to stay closed those three or four hours. And, you know, the patrons might complain at first that you're not open those hours, but the service to those patrons is going to be that much better through the training of the staff instead of, you know, and I understand larger libraries once a year closing, you know, that makes some sense. But the more the better, I think, and it's definitely worth the investment of that time. Oh, absolutely. We actually have three all-day staff training days every year. So TechFest is just one of them. And it's, of course, always got a technology focus. And then in addition to that, we have, like, concierge unites. So that's where all the concierges get together. Is that a word? Concierges. Okay. They all get together and they get some training and also some team building and, you know, get to talk about their role in the organization and kind of what their concerns are. And we have guide unites and wrangler unites and that sort of thing as well. Well, let me know when the next Tech one is. Maybe I'll crash the party or something. Sounds like fun. Oh, well, we would love to have you. All right. Any other questions from the audience? No, no more. It looks like there's no more urgent questions. Quite a few very good presentations. Thank you so much. This was a great session. Yes. This was wonderful. Thank you, Matt. Oh, awesome and amazing. Well, thank you. Thanks for having me. Yes, you're awesome and amazing, Matt. Well, thank you very much. Don't play it in pause. So, Matt, thanks once again. We're going to go ahead and we've got control back. We're going to go ahead and put everybody back on mute and just kind of wrap the day. I did have some kind of tech pointer resources to show you, but delicious is down still. So we will still provide those links in the... Oh, now it's up. All right. Okay, real quick. Let me see if I can... Wow, that is luck. 713. Here we go. I won't take a lot of time showing these. I'll just point out some of them here, and then you can look at them. There's maybe five or six. URL void. This was an interesting site that I found where somebody sends you a URL. You're not sure you want to click on it. Chances are if you're not sure you want to click on it, chances are you don't. But you can actually put that URL into the URL void website, and it will give you kind of a report of what other sites that track known bad websites think of it. So you can kind of look at it there. The docracy terms of service site. This is a site where you can track how terms of service for different websites and hardware are changing. So if you want to see how Facebook is changing their terms of service and things like that. You can track the history of what they've updated. And they analyze the changes too. So you can see what's changed and what that would theoretically mean to you. What does the internetthink.net? This is a neat thing. This one I will show you real quick because it's kind of fun. You go in and I'll let you invest a kind of how it works. But what does the library think of libraries? So it's going to look at your social networks and various other things and kind of give you a positive versus negative versus indifference sort of thing. And library is 68% positive. So we must be doing something right. Then the last one I'll just point you to there. Phone clean. If you are an iPod, iPad, iPhone sort of user, this is a sharp piece of software you can use to kind of clean up space. The cruft that the software from upgrades and things like that creates temporary files. People do that on their Windows boxes and Macs all the time. This is now a piece of software you can use to do that on your iOS devices. So just a few things there. And that's going to pretty much wrap up my tips and tricks for the month. So would you like me to bring up the end compass live? Yes. Thank you, Michael. Glad we got that. That was perfect timing. All this whole hour delicious has been down and we were not able to get to it. And just now, poof, it was back. Thank you very much. Delicious. So thank you, Michael. Thank you, Matt. That was a great session. So we will wrap it up for today's episode of M Compass Live. I hope you join us next week when our topic will be part three of our digital preservation series. The last, the final part. This is on the management and providing access. We have Karen Kier from the Nebraska State Historical Society has joined us twice. This will be a third time talking about the Library of Congress's software program for doing digital preservation. The previous two sessions have been recorded on our website already. And next week is the final part three of the series. So that will be next Wednesday on the show. So I hope you'll sign up, register and join us for that. Also, end compass live is on Facebook, as you can see here. So if you are a Facebook user, you can go ahead and please like us there and you'll get notifications of when we have new sessions and recordings are up. We will link to and like other pages of the organizations that are related or have been on the show. So definitely if you're using Facebook, go ahead and like us and you'll be notified of what we're doing there. And we really should mention tomorrow. Okay. Are we bringing that up? Yeah, go ahead. Okay. So we have an event. Just want to do a personal bug for tomorrow. All right. A big talk from small libraries, second annual. So I guess once you have a second one, you can call it annual. Conference for highlighting all of the sessions are done by libraries with very low FTEs. I think our lowest one is under 700 or something like that. FTEs. Sorry. Pop served. But everybody's definitely around 10,000 or less. We have seven or six one hour sessions and five 10 minute sessions going on throughout the day. We have had over 500 people register so far, but there's still plenty of room and you don't have to register anymore. Just go to this website and I'll see blogs on Nebraska dot gov slash big talk. The login instructions are there. It starts at 845 AM central time tomorrow morning and we'll go to 5 PM central time. It's going to be a wonderful day. You can come and go as you need to. The schedule is on there. Speaker bios are on there. And Chris and I will be living in this room all day tomorrow along with our co-worker Laura running that show. So even if you're from a big library, some of the topics maybe of interest to you, let's you see what small libraries are doing. So please join us tomorrow for that. So this is a free and open to anyone. Send this URL out to anybody you know. Michael said is the login info for it that you can. If you did not pre-register, go ahead and join us whenever you want throughout the day. As we have speakers from all across the country. This is not a Nebraska centric thing at all. We have speakers all the way from New York to Alaska literally and everything in between. So check out the speakers list and the schedule and join us tomorrow and join us next week for Encompass Live. And other than that, I don't see any other urgent last-minute questions coming in, which is good. Thank you very much and we'll see you next week on Encompass Live. Bye. Bye.