 Hello and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live, I am Krista Burns at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Nebraska Library Commission's weekly online event. We cover commission activities and any library topics that may be of interest to librarians in the state of Nebraska. We have presentations by NLC staff, by guest speakers that we bring in from the outside, anything and everything that may be of interest basically. We do these every Wednesday at 10 a.m., free one-hour sessions, so you can just come to our live sessions as we are doing now, or all the sessions are recorded and can be viewed later if you cannot attend the live session. This morning, I will be speaking on Web Junction, how it can be used for rural libraries. When I start out with a PowerPoint presentation I have here first, then I can go through a few slides of, and then I'm just going to jump right actually live into Web Junction. Easiest, best way to learn about it is to just show you how it works. I'm going to start out with a little introduction to Web Junction in general before we get specifically into the rural libraries help section. Web Junction, the website that is created, its main purpose, their motto here, they connect, create and learn. For librarians all across the country, anyone who wants to join, it's free to have a membership to it. It's a way of getting connected with other people in your same field, communicating with them, discussing things, learning, creating your own communities within Web Junction. You can create your own groups, we'll show you that when we get into it. Meet other librarians, do the same thing that you may be doing out and about. And learning, there is a whole section of courses that you can take to do your own professional development or learn something that you need to learn about, anything that you're involved in that you may want to know more about. Basic History of Web Junction, the Gates Foundation has a library program that you may have heard of, they've done lots of things with it over the years. Providing computers to libraries, internet to libraries. State of Nebraska has been involved in it. We have a website there, if you want to, the URL is available, where we have everything that we've done in the library program, providing computers and now we have a current grant program, we're providing funding for computers to libraries. In 2003, OCLC and some other people gave the Gates Foundation a grant to build a web-based community. They knew that there's lots of social networking and web communities out there, but there's nothing that was just for librarians that was focused just on something specifically for librarians to use and for their own purposes. As they decided that it was something that was needed, there's a lot of librarians out there all over the country that are trying to get their jobs done and sometimes they're alone, they're single person libraries or they're even in large libraries and just want to see what everyone else is doing. So, Gates Foundation decided we needed a place to do this. It was launched in 2003 originally, so it's been around for quite a while. Just last year, about a little over a year ago, they redesigned Web Junction, made some changes to it, updated it, made it a little easier to navigate and added some new things to it with another grant from the Bill and Gates Foundation. Why did they think they needed a new one? There's lots of things that have been changing. Since 2003 when they first came out with Web Junction, of course things have changed. People are using the Internet differently, people are just doing their jobs differently and Gates realized something needed to be done to meet those new needs. It had been the same design for quite a few years and you know every now and then you've got to refresh your website, you've got to make things look newer and more up-to-date, so they decided to do that as well. It did need some behind-the-scenes help to make it a little easier to navigate, better to use for people on the site, quicker to use, so some of the behind-the-scenes things were a lot of the work actually that they did and they did a huge revamping of their courses, catalog of the online courses that you could take with them, getting other institutions involved with providing online courses through it, so making it a much more cohesive environment for education of librarians. And here is just a screenshot of what the Web Junction looks like today. I just took this screenshot yesterday of my home page and my personal page in Web Junction. I noticed this morning it's already changed, so it's always being changed around and adding new things to it. You can see here there's my profile on the right, we'll get into all the details of how this all works, there's information about me, this is me logging into my page, so you can see everything there, and information about the topic of the day, a current topic that they've got as highlighted in the top story, community spotlights, upcoming events that they're doing, just any, and so as I said it's always changing to keeping things up to date on there. One of the big changes they made was how you navigate Web Junction. Now this isn't new anymore, as I said they made this change to this new design about a year ago, but depending on when was the last time you were used Web Junction or that you looked at it, it may look completely different from when you checked it out last. One of their big changes was adding these tabs, which they've actually rearranged a little bit and tweaked even since they did first come out with the new design last year. These tabs are all the main areas that people were going to, they try to gather things into different areas that everybody was using, so that you can just quickly get to the sections that you want to use. The URL for Web Junction is just there, www.webjunction.org, and what I'm going to actually do is just pop right over into it now, so we can just, I'll show you every, all the different parts here, all going to all these different tabs, just live in the interface. Now there is more to this PowerPoint presentation, and I'm going to be putting, so there'll be screenshots of things that I'm just going to show you live in the session today, and the presentation will be made available to you afterwards, so that you will be able to download that habit for yourself if you want to. Hold on just a second while I switch over to Web Junction itself. Okay, so here is now, it looks just like the previous screen that I was showing you, but this is now, as you can see some things have already changed from the PowerPoint I was showing you. There's a different featured member here, but we're going to go through all this. Over here on the right-hand side is my account information. As I said, I am logged into my personal member account in Web Junction, so I have links to everything that I can access here. Over here there is this current monthly issue that they're talking about right now, digital branches and virtual reference. There's information about that. There is this community spotlight, there's always a featured member, someone who they pick from the members, people who are members of Web Junction and talk about what that person does, and then you can see their specific profile if you want to, so you can find out what other librarians in the field are doing. Courses that they're offering over here also just below that. New courses, they've partnered with Amigos Library Services, a library network in the southwestern part of the country to provide courses. They always have a featured course of the month that gives you a discount on attending it if you'd like to. Upcoming events, there's courses that you can take in Web Junction that you'd pay for, but then there's also free events that you can attend that are just online webinars, so they have an upcoming events calendar here. Sometimes it's the things they're doing, Best of All Library in America 2009, they're coming up with. Apparently hurricane season is coming, so hurricane preparedness and response is a hot topic at the moment. They also have a blog for Web Junction called Blog Junction, where they post just quickly here the links to the most recent posts. Then if you wanted to, you can go and visit the actual website itself for the blog, and then you can follow Blog Junction if you want to in your own RSS feed. They also have a newsletter they offer. It's about monthly called Crossroads that you can subscribe to, so if you want to just have them be sending you things to keep up to date with, you can subscribe to that here as well. Such as a basic look at what we have here. What I want to do first is go right into some of the areas of Web Junction. Did you give me an idea of what it is, what it's all about, and how you may be able to use it? The first thing they have out here up here on the top in the tabs area is it's called My Web Junction, and this is your personal page where anything you're doing will be collected. After you've created your account, which I'll show you some of the behind-the-scenes stuff of that in a second, you have this link available to you, and it is everything related to you and your work and what you're doing. There we go. In Web Junction. This is my page. I see over here on the right-hand side. This always remains wherever you go on Web Junction. Over here on the right-hand side is this My Account box, so you can always get back to your profile courses that you're taking, areas of the site that you're interested in, that you've bookmarked over here. They've linked to over here. You can always have access to them. Everything else around the page changes depending on where you're going on the site. As I just mentioned over here, Groups is one thing that you can do now in Web Junction. You can create your own group or you can join a group that exists, so this is where librarians get together and say, hey, I'm interested in this topic or here's something you want to know more about. Let's create a group and then we have a location, a place in Web Junction where you can all get together and discuss. What's really cool about these groups, I show other ones that I'm a member of, they can be on anything. There can be groups out there. You can do a search and find a group you might want to join or you can create one of your own. For example, here in Nebraska, we actually created a group called Nebraska Librarians. A place where librarians in Nebraska can meet, get together, chat, talk about things, whatever they want to do. Jump over that here. You can see who the members of the group are. This is just showing me and another person is the member of the group, but you can see all of them if you wanted to. There's usually multiple on any group page and here you've got these various tabs. There's an overview telling you what the group is about. And then there's a documents tab and discussion tab. And this is very cool. One other thing about Web Junction, it's very similar to a Wiki type thing where anyone who is a member can upload things. So if you have a document, it can be of use to other librarians. You can submit it up into this group. You have to be a member of Web Junction first of course, but you can post your stuff up here. So you can share with other librarians. Anyone who wants to can post to this as a member. And that's how this is put up here. Michael Sowers, our Technology Innovation Librarian here at the commission, put up a document about Creative Commons. It's a PowerPoint presentation. So if you want to, you can view it and download from here and take a look at it. But anyone who's a member can go ahead and submit a document to a group. So there's a lot of sharing and collaborating that can go on. And then in the discussion tab is where you can have discussions or you can talk about things. Any topics that you are interested in, anything that's going on, whatever you want to is where you can get discussions going on in here. So this is just a group that we set up. As I said, and I showed you on my page, there's tons of different groups that you can join. Definitely something to explore if you come up with an idea that maybe there's certain group that you'd like to create. You can go ahead and do it. And then you can just share with your colleagues, hey, I've created a group on this particular topic. Come on and join it with me so we can discuss things and have a place to go to, to discuss and share and collaborate. Below that, we have my friends list, which has, this is just, it gives me a highlight of the most recent friends I have here. It looks like I can see a list of all of my friends if I wanted to. You can also see other people's friends. I'll show you that. I can go into, let's see, here's George Needham from, let's see, let's see, he's got a profile on here. So this is me looking at someone else's profile information, someone else's info. My info, my link back to my page and stuff is still here. But now I can see stuff about George, his member information, information he's put up about himself, things that he's done with people or people he knows, and then his friends down here at the bottom. So this is one of the very cool things about Web Junction, you can see what other people are doing, you can see what their activity is like, what the people they are friends with is like. If you find someone here you know, you didn't realize they were in Web Junction, you can then become friends with them. Or if you find someone who you're interested in getting to know better, you want to know more about what they're doing, you can just look at their profile information or become friends with them, track it all through there. At the top here in the center is bookmarks. As you are exploring and doing things throughout Web Junction, you can bookmark pages. Just like adding a bookmark in your browser or a favorite in your browser, you can within Web Junction itself save pages. Sometimes you're, as you know on the internet, you're bouncing around here and there, and remember how you got to where you are, but you want to make sure you save this page, you can do that right here in Web Junction. You'll notice at the bottom of every page, way down here in the lower right is a link that says bookmark and with a little logo, Web Junction logo. You click on that and it will add it to your bookmark list within your My Web Junction page. So I've added a couple of things here that I had looked at previously, the Nebraska Librarians Group, a Nebraska Librarians Training Group, a document about opening Word 2007 files, and another group, Experience Web Junction Project. Any other ones I've done? No, that's just it. There's those four. Okay. So anything in anywhere you are on the page, if you're on a document, if you're looking at an article, a story about someone, someone's profile, whatever, if you've got that link lower right corner, you can bookmark it and be able to get back to it quickly. In the center of your page, you've got updates. These are things that you have done, as you can see earlier today, I updated my profile a little bit, so it says that, or things that other people who you are friends with have done. So I can see here that Royce Kids has registered for some courses earlier this week. Ruth He is now friends with David. Royce joined a group called Kansas Creativity, et cetera, et cetera. Discussions of people involved in, so you can see what people are talking about. This is people you are already friends with. This is not every one and anyone in Web Junction. This is strictly for the people that you have friended, some people that you know. And I chose just the recent ones here, but you can always go back and see more if you wanted to and go farther back in time. So that's a really interesting place. You can see what everyone is doing right there on your page and maybe get involved, maybe realize, oh, I was interested in that too, managing difficult patrons with confidence. Obviously something that a lot of libraries and library directors may need to do. So there might be some course that you may want to take. Now there is a comment section on your page over here on the right hand side. So if there is, people can just send comments to you, little things they can say. We've got a lot of things from Michael Porter, he's actually an employee of Web Junction, works for them. And Michael Sowers here at the Library Commission, Charity Martin, librarian here in Nebraska. So this is where you can out there communicate with each other. Send little messages back and forth. And then on the bottom left hand side, popping back over here as I'm scrolling down my page, is any courses that you may be registered for, that you're taking, things you have done, there's a whole tracking system of that. So I've got this here, having to do the Opportunity Online Hardware Grant, that's the recent Gates grant that we are involved in here at the Commission. So I was doing a course related to that. So this is your main page where you can track of all of your activities. Now when you first, any questions about this yet? Before I jump on to anything else? You have a question you can raise your hand and in the, go to webinar software and I'll know. Okay. When you do first get your account set up in WebJunk, when you first set up an account, you don't want to go in and put in profile information. You don't want to tell all the librarians using it, who you are and what you're all about and why you're here. Over here on my account page is where I can go in and I can see my profile. If I click on my name here, I can see how other people see my profile from the outside. Just like when we were looking at George's profile, this will show what my profile looks like. It tells me at the time this is my public profile. So when someone else is looking at mine, they'll see all this information, my member information I've put in here, my activities and then when you're viewing it in your account, you're my account info will be over here in the gray box. I'm looking at my own profile, so I've got my account information here. So you can see I've put in here some information. I've got my email address here at the library commission. Websites, I've got a personal website and the commission's website here for people to find out more about what I do. A little blurb about a bio of myself that I put together, just explaining who I am, what I do here. And then some information about that I have chosen about who I'm involved in, where I'm located, that kind of thing. Now all of this information here is shown because you, I've added it to my profile and you can choose what people can and can't see about you, which is really nice. There's a lot of privacy settings they set up in web junction to make it so people don't have to pick and choose what they want to share and what they don't want to share. I'm going to go over here and I'm going to go into editing my accounts. You can see the kind of things that are available to you, how you can control who sees your info and how much they see. But before, if you do want to get involved in this kind of thing, you obviously do want to put some sort of information out there about yourselves. People know who you are. They know where you're coming from, what library you work at, what type of library you're in, just so that they can you know if you the same kind of person that they are maybe working in a similar library and it might be someone you might want to talk to more about. So it's always good to get some information in here and make yourself somehow available so people know who you are. As I said, you've got your email address you can put in here and as you can see that was available to people to see, so I made sure that it was my work email. You can upload a photo of yourself. That's always very nice so people can recognize you when they see you or maybe they see you somewhere else and they don't remember who you were or what your name is. They might remember your face. They come along here and they say oh I've seen that face before. I know Krista. I'll friend her as well. So it's always good to have something up there for yourself. Now some people are a little more worried about putting their face up and that's fine. You can also use a little graphic if you want or a little animated picture, you know draw a picture of yourself, something like that. Whatever you're comfortable with but it's always good to have something to show people you were in here you were doing something creating some information about yourself and participating. You can add some professional interests if you want to. Just some sure any words you want to add about what you're involved in. They do have a list of interests you can choose from. I'm not going to click on it right now because it takes a while for this giant list to come up. That's a good list of just all the interests that anyone else has typed in and you can just then click and choose things like yes I'm involved in instruction and library 2.0 and academic libraries and things like that. So you can give a quickie kind of idea of what you're involved in. Your basic information address I've put on my information for where I'm here at the library commission. What kind of a library you're in? We're a state agency so I chose that but you would choose whichever kind of library you are in for your organization type. What you do at the lab that institution so you could choose from here what kind of library and you are where you work at. If you're involved in any professional associations ALA, NLA, whatever you can type them right in here in this box so you can enter that information there to let people know what groups you're involved in. The next section is any website you want to add and as you saw from mine I have two that I put in the commission main website here at the library commission for our department and my own personal blog that I have out there and then my bio. This one I've in mind is kind of long some people just put in a couple sentences whatever you want to talk about yourself and let people know. And then at the bottom of that is some information about some subscriptions and email communications that you can get from Web Junction if you want to. As I said they've got crossroads which is their monthly newsletter that you can receive an email if you want to. Any partners you may be affiliated with you can be involved in different groups in in Web Junction. Special news anything random they might want to send and then course and content recommendations from your friends. That's really cool. Some friend years or some colleagues years may take a class and say take a course in the Web Junction say you know what Joe over the library down the street he was asking me about this I'm gonna let him know that this class courses out there that I took it and I thought it was good. If you have that checked you'll get those kind of recommendations from your friends. Now this is not you're not going to get recommendations and weird advertisements from everyone and anyone or from Web Junction. This is specifically people you have friended in Web Junction and so you know these people already they may send you recommendations for things you can do in Web Junction. Now back up to the top affiliations this is the one at the bottom they're talking about you may see this on my main page this is different areas and groups that you can be affiliated with if you want to. Some of them are restricted and require approval as you can see certain areas Arizona, British Columbia, Connecticut have their own areas of their personalized versions of Web Junction. So those you can see it says little requires approval and probably since you're not in Arizona or any of these areas in Nebraska you wouldn't get into them. But if you scroll down you'll see there's some other ones are just open and available. There is a area on Web Junction specifically for government information so that may be something you're involved in at your job you can join that group and you get information and updates from them. There we go down at the bottom is the other ones that I'm involved in also there's specifically a rural small library section that we're going to actually look at closer and Spanish language outreach is a big area so that you could also get information from if you want it as well. So this would be things as you see on my main page if you saw on my profile they were links to these areas because I joined them here and they will send me information via the system as well if there's any updates and things that go on with it. And the last tab in here in your account is your profile viewing and this is where you decide who can see your personal information in Web Junction whether anyone can see it or no one can see it and which bits of information you want people to be able to see. Okay now first you have your member information fields and this is all the information that was on that on my personal page and you can pick and choose as you can see for each bit of information who you want to see it it doesn't have to be an all or nothing. You can have only your friends see things meaning only the people that you have personally friended within Web Junction so only people you know and you can pick and choose and you can see do I want it to be them to be my about me my affiliations that I'm associated with my avatar being my picture the city I'm in country do I want to share my email address you know all this information so you can just be the people you friended or you can do it with people you friended and anyone who's a member in Web Junction so someone the only people that can see all the information will be also people who have joined the community itself Web Junction community and then there's everyone Web Junction is an open website it's not a website where you go to and you can't see anything unless you log in that's what's great about it to you can check it out you can explore it you can look at things a lot of stuff in there without being a member first of course take to take a course you'd have to be a member you want to join a group you have to be a member you'd be a member so they know who you are but anyone else who wants to just start exploring and seeing information in here they can also see who are meant is member of Web Junction but it's up to you as a member to decide if you want the outside world basically anybody to see it and what you want them to see you may decide I'll let them know who I am what I'm y'all about but not my email address I want random emails from everybody out there so you could uncheck that one and not have everyone see that maybe you only want your friends to know who your email addresses up to you you can pick and choose all this now as far as everyone seeing it yes it is open to the whole world however no one's going to really be interested in Web Junction except for really other librarians or information professionals because it's a community specifically dedicated to that unlike things like Facebook or My Space where it's just there's no specific focus on the kind of people that are in there and why they're there it's just anyone and everyone can be there and doing anything they want to Web Junction is specifically for librarians it's a very specific focused area so I wouldn't were I personally do not worry too much about the whole world as you can see I've got everyone switch this one back seeing all my stuff but that's because the only people who care who are going to even go and use this or other librarians and information professionals anyway so that's what I want to be in contact with I'll tell you right now I've been a member in Web Junction since probably 2003 or when it first opened up I've never received anything bad that I didn't want to by having all my information out there it's been very very good and useful below that there's also more areas that you can choose also from your profile if you want people to see your comments or not the courses you're taking the discussions you're involved in who your friends are you can limit that as well the groups you're part of all this you can also specify who gets to see it in those same three categories okay any questions about Web Junction general and setting up your profile and how you get that all going no questions okay I've gone back to this is just my main page when I first log in to Web Junction my first web junction network and what I'm going to do now is I am going to finally jump over into the rural and small library section that I wanted to focus on as one particular part of Web Junction today you can see up at the top here that you've already saw the what my Web Junction section which is all your stuff but then there's other areas that they have different tabs for the courses I'll have a section their member centers where their help is how to navigate if you need help using Web Junction that kind of thing library services is a area here we get information about patron training populations programming basically just the running of a library is in that section technology is a section for anything technology related computer skills public access computing security social networking also some information about that and then library management is a section about running your library the kind of things that as a manager or being in charge you would make want to be interested in and you can see there's a budget and finance friends and trustees dealing with them there's a whole section for that funding marketing so all these are general areas about running your library but there is also a specific area specifically in Web Junction for rural and small libraries one of the big pushes for Web Junction one of the uses of it is libraries out there on their own little libraries don't have a lot of anyone else nearby to talk to can't maybe always get have the time to get away from their one person library and travel to a workshop or travel to a conference to get away so there's a really big focus on helping on rural and small libraries that kind of situation have their own area to go from their own space to work in so this is the real small library section the community it is set up just like the group that we looked at before for Nebraska librarians where you have your overview section talks a little about it a section of documents where people can upload things to share and then a discussion area now a read the association for rural and small libraries actually was based out of Web Junction until just recently this is last week I think we before last actually they started out the association station for rural and small libraries arsl is really good organization to get involved in if you are in that situation being a rural or small library location they started in September 2007 and they had their own site out there and they're cruising along but they needed a place to host their information to have a place for their librarians to go to so they partnered with Web Junction and had a section for the arsl specifically as part of Web Junction and they've been doing great in there for a few years they have an annual conference that they do but now they're no longer a new organization they're doing pretty well and they now have created their own website with their own URL so in addition to looking in using this area and Web Junction for rural and small libraries I definitely recommend taking a look at the arsl's new own website where they have information about being a rural and small library and here we go here's their website it's very snazzy website actually I haven't explored it very well like I said it just went live like two weeks ago but this is where you can get a lot of good information about the association you can see here they've highlighted different libraries on the front page here the pictures and information changes their conference just happened earlier this year earlier this month beginning in September but their next one looks like is going to be in Denver ah Denver in 2010 I think the one they had in September was in Tennessee but the next one will be in Denver that's pretty close to us maybe something to think about attending their Denver conference yes Tennessee here we go there the concert the annual conference where they actually promote our premiere the new website was in Tennessee so not as close to us as Denver would be but you know so maybe you might want to look into that in this rural and small library section you can see on the left-hand side here there's a whole bunch of different sections that they have created for each kind of area that they think would be useful for rural libraries one of the big things that this started out with and people a lot of areas in the country were involved in workshops on this is the rural library sustainability project where Web Junction and Gates partnered with state libraries across the country to do workshops on library community connections technology support patron training funding our advocacy so there's a whole bunch of actual workshops and we held them here in Nebraska in 2006 locations across the state they were held at but if now that these workshops these sessions are over they still have the area in Web Junction where you can see the documents that were used in the class materials that were used in those sessions the discussions that happened as a result of those sessions so this is really good you can go and even though you know every state that wanted anything they wanted to upload their information here you see there's some general items here from Minnesota when they did their workshops but you can download and look at any of these that you want to these workshops are not going on anymore you know they were done as I said but the information is out there for everyone to share and use if you want to and the discussion area is there so it's a good place to start to keep it up you know see what's going on what kind of things they talked about back then and how the training went so that was a big project that Web Junction and Gates started out with was this rural library sustainability project and now based on that the information is here and a lot of the areas in the rural and small library section in Web Junction have been expanded to include information gleaned from these workshops and developed from there. Advocacy in rural areas very important there's a whole section on that so trying to talk to your community members, promoting your library, getting the word out about the services that you provide, how important they are and useful they are to the library, a lot of information about that on here. They have this brainstorming section which is really cool thing they do in a lot of areas where it's just the spit out an idea and see what everyone else says, discuss it, see what it's all about so you can get involved in that. Planning for advocacy that's a big thing that you need to do is you know for some people it's really you know they can do the stuff right off the top of their head right off the cuff but you might need to do a little more planning so a whole bunch of planning worksheets and examples in there that you can use. Now in related to advocacy their next topic here is on funding so if you're looking for ways to raise more money for the library to convince people that funding of the library it may be the free public library in the area but free is not really free. Free as in get sure you have a library but it still needs to be supported and run with some sort of funding. So same kind of thing here brainstorming area where you can get together with other colleagues in rural and small libraries and talk about things like grants, donations, other sources that you can get funding for to keep your library going. Ways of getting friends and trustees groups involved that's a big deal as well that they can help you know if you and your own staff don't have the time working on it get your friends group involved get your trustees out there you know working for the library. Now outreach also in rural areas is a big deal as a big issue you definitely want to be involved in that and getting out into your community letting people know that you are there especially in the areas where there's not all there's big ranches and a lot of other things around you're going to do a lot of outreach to other groups in your town in your city getting involved with them so that you can both benefit from the resources that you all have and this here also has that whole brainstorming section needs and assets assessment resources a very big important thing to do when you're trying to figure out outreach how are you going to do it what do you really need what's what are the people in your area really desperate for is a good thing to do your needs assessment. Any questions so far about any of the areas in here? Now as you can see there is if you have a question feel if you raise your hand and I'll either type it into the questionnaire or if you have your microphone I can unmute you and you can use that just let me know by raising your hand. You can see there's a lot of sections in here and of course in one hour to not have the time to go into every single one and show it to you but that's great about web junction when you have the time you can go ahead and go to the website and explore all on your own. As you saw when we were looking at the profile you don't even have to be a member to start exploring it you can start looking at these groups looking at these areas checking out the documents and discussion sections and seeing if it is something that will be of use to you before you even just go through becoming a member yourself if you're not one already. So definitely encourage you to go out and explore all these areas and see what you can find that would be of use to you. Now training is a big area of need both and as you can see here they they didn't have it this way before and this is something based on your discussions and people talking about things in here they separated out patron training from staff training. Two very different things that you do need to worry about and deal with. Your patrons they just need to know how to use your resources what databases maybe you have available if you have your computers what resources they can use at the library that kind of thing. So you definitely would go in here to find more about how to get your patrons up to speed on using the library how to get them to know what you have available what's in there for them. Staff coming from a different point of view trying to get your staff to know how do we help the patrons what do what do our you know local people really need and we need to know how to teach them these specific things. So you can get a lot of ideas in the brainstorming section here from other colleagues on web junction who are in the same boat or shoot trying to get their patrons and their staff trained and up to speed on using the library. Technology is big in areas some libraries as well too it's a good way to keep you know if you are in a rural area a good way to keep in touch with what everyone else is doing like through web junction is your technology your computers. That's one of the big one was also one of the big focuses when web junction was created. Gates knew that there are a lot of libraries out there that don't have their own tech person don't have their own computer person who knows how to fix this computer or update this thing or what needs to be done. They needed somewhere to go for specific technology assistance for a library. There's lots of websites out there for using a Microsoft product or an Apple product or whatever but when you're in a certain environment you might need more specific information and details and instruction about that environment like libraries. So here specifically to using tech now web junction general has stuff about technology in their whole technology section for libraries of course but here we have specifically rural technology. The kind of things and issues you might have working in a smaller or rural library. A lot of things that libraries are doing us out there are wireless rather than having fiber and lines run to your library you could try wireless for your internet access. So there's information about doing that. Also it's a nice resource here that you should take a look at especially for small libraries not a huge budget or any library with not a huge budget. Everybody's having budget problems now. TechSoup stock for libraries. TechSoup is an organization where they have got discounted software available to libraries and non-profit organizations. So you can go to their website and you can buy a Microsoft product or some other product that you need at a really big discount specifically because those companies are providing the information, the data, the software via TechSoup at a discount for specifically two libraries and so this is not something that you'd use you know for yourself it's specifically for you as a library. So definitely if you're looking for some sort of software or you need something that you need to update check out TechSoup. They've got a lot of good useful resources at a really good discount for libraries. Now a couple of also things that in the rural library section rural and small library section that they have here is ways to update you on current information. There's a real update section and real webinars that they do. They do these webinars online. The update section I'll just pop into that one first has a newsletter that you can have sent to you and then you can see discussions about it here you can see past issues but you can also submit something to the newsletter which is nice if you want to you know share something that your library is doing and have it put in their newsletter they have an email here that you can send to and then you have maybe have a little story written about your library. You can also look at past issues I'm not sure how recently they've done. June 2008 is the most recent one they've got in here. A lot of things have been transferred to being online so much more but this is where you can look at the previous ones that they have had and the webinars is where they're doing a lot more up-to-date sharing of information previous ones and upcoming ones but these are online web-based events just like what we're doing right here today. The rural webinars are free there's no cost for them they're not like taking a course some of the course the courses in Web Junction up here in the top we have the course catalog where specific classes that are run by institutions or universities or Web Junction. There is costs for almost everything in there but these rural webinars that we that they do here there's no cost for them you can just attend them here watch them live and they are recorded too so you can see them afterwards as well. The one they've got coming up the Best of My Library in America 2009 library journal shows Union County Carnegie Library in South Carolina is this year's Best of My Library in America and they're going to have a webinar with the director there to talk about what they're doing at that library so might want to see what the what who library journal thinks is the Best of My Library was doing to make themselves best. You can also you know this is the one that's coming up but there are lots of previous ones that every very useful to you to look at as well they have the archived webinars where you can see all the previous ones that have been done. Here's the one from the Best of My Library in America from last year. Board challenges, library surveys, bringing people together, community partnerships, everyday library advocacy so I can go on and on here. Grant writing in the rural library big topic you want to get monies for your library. At ALA they had a rural forum back in 2007 they had information about that so basically just any topic you can think of they've got all of their archive sessions available here so you can anything if you've missed a topic go here and you can watch these I highly recommend these I've watched a whole bunch of them as they came out live or in archive and you can get a lot of good information from here. They also have the events calendar where you can find out well this one has the most recent one coming up right now but their events calendar where you can find out other events that are coming up in web junction. Let's see there's a digital reference summit next week and then here we go next month is when the best my library in America webinar will be done and you see you hover over this and tell you the details about the event. They use the Wimba software it's just a different online webinar software similar to our go-to webinar that we're using but it's just the one that they've chosen to use so you can go there and register for that that hurricane preparedness that I was talking about in a previous page there they've got a webinar coming up about that on the 21st in October. It's coming up so definitely take a look at the calendar there and to register for things but also the archives totally that you need to go back and look at those because there's a lot of good events that they've held in the past. We do promote them here at the commission on our blog every now and then you will see Laura Johnson our community our continuing education coordinator posts reminders about upcoming free webinars and information webinars and events that are going coming up and she mentions the web junction ones in her posts so keep an eye on the commission's blog for more notices about that and she talks about things beyond web junction of course just anything that she comes across that may be of interest to librarians in the state and here we go here's a home here's the other archives all these done by hosted by Jennifer Peterson who's a staff member at web junction. Any questions about these but attending sessions web junction or any of the areas that I've gone into? Okay well that's the basics of web junction and just highlighting the rural resources for your rural and small libraries. Yes Susie you have a question do you have a microphone Susie? Oh wait you have a microphone I've unmuted you if you want to ask your question. Steve is asking in the questions area if we're going to do a webinar on tech soup. I had I didn't have one specifically planned yet but we could definitely they've got a lot of good resources in there that they do that they offer it's a pretty huge website I actually haven't even been able to explore all of it myself. That is an idea I will add that to my list of ideas for a webinar possibly in combination with other resources for software for libraries we can do something like that but I will add that to my list. Thanks Steve and this is a good time to actually say if you do have any ideas and I did send an email about about this recently if you do want anything any topic you want us to do on our Encompass live here definitely let me know send me an email call me on the phone if you just have something you want to know more about we can either present on it or find someone to present on it if you want to present on a topic there's something you're doing at your library or some area that you're really involved in that you want to make sure the rest of the Nebraska library what community knows about it. Contact me and offer to do a session you know you can use our platform our weekly platform here to do it we are more than willing to help any any library anyone any issue I'll get it out there for people to know about and as we are doing now these are all recorded as well so once you do it once that's um really great you don't have to get you as long as your information is so current and you know up to date we just have that um recording put out there and anyone can listen to it and watch it over the weeks and months after you actually did it live so anybody have any other questions about web junction um or about using the rural area and here any other areas of web junction I'm doing no nothing else okay then I guess I've covered everything that you needed to know or wanted to know um I definitely highly recommend going to webjunction.org checking it out exploring it if you don't already have a um haven't already done so um Steve you had a question yes you said that we could participate in a in doing a webinar are you going to do a training session and how we would do that so we could contribute actually using our software here that the go-to webinar software is really easy um doesn't really I mean as you saw here you guys kind of popped in really quickly to do it um a whole session on how to use it would maybe not take more than five or ten minutes on it um basically what I would do is if you have an idea contact me um and then I can just talk you through the kind of things we have when I sent out my email it's a very easy system what I'm doing here is just screen sharing um anything on your computer you can share as I did you saw PowerPoint a website a live video anything um it's very easy to use software um every time we do one of these someone here the commission usually me is hosts it's hosts it's you're not on your own um so you've always got someone here you know holding your hand whatever uh to keep you through it you don't even have to come here to link into library commission to present you can present as you are now logged in as in attendee and just um be the presenter um from wherever you are you are situated so it's actually very easy to use do you have a list of the past recordings of the sessions you've done that I might like to view yes I do yes we do we have our um and actually I'll just go to it here since we've got the page up our encompass live website is on the library commissions um web page web pages you can just go to commission's website and um search for encompass live and these are upcoming sessions listed here but then we also have a link right here at the bottom for archived and encompass live sessions and all the ones we've done um I still have to get last week's recording up but all the ones we've done in encompass live are all here for you to view so as you can see here we've done a lot of varied topics uh we did have a break during this past summer where you see this break between June and August um where we were in the midst of switching software programs that we're using so for a while we didn't have a online um web webinar or software so you'll see a little break in our dates there um but yep you can watch all these and see how it's been done see how other people have done it um to see if there's something that you would want to do definitely and for upcoming ones that we have scheduled here you're welcome any other questions anybody have anything else they want to know um about either web junction or encompass live okay then i think we will wrap this up then um back to our web junction to finish up as i said go here explore it if you want to look for me search for me by my name christa burns in web junction and um friend me i will friend you back um and so you'll you can see what i'm doing in there we can um communicate on there if you have if you do have any questions or um comments you want to know anything else about it please feel free to contact me you guys all know where to find me but this is my our email address and the 800 number here at the library commission um we do have new emails here at the commission you may have noticed uh nebraska dot gov is our new email um however you do still have our old one that's fine it is being forwarded for us um but definitely give me a call email if you do have any questions want to know more about web junction or if you do want to talk to me about using um encompass live so thank you very much for attending and hopefully we'll see you next time thanks a lot bye bye