 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am not your regular host, Krista Burns. She is somewhere in an airplane at the moment on her way to some training in New Orleans. I am Michael Sowers. I am the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is our weekly online webinar that provides learning topics and presentations of interest to Nebraska librarians and anybody else who is welcome to attend. This runs every Wednesday at 10 a.m. Central Time for about an hour. We have plenty of topics coming up and a very interesting topic here today. Before we get started, I'd like to say that at any point if you have any questions, if you do have a microphone, you can go ahead and raise your hand in the GoToWebinar interface, and I will happily turn your microphone on for you. If you don't or just don't want to do that, there is a questions area in GoToWebinar. Just go ahead and type in your questions and I will relay them to our presenters. I'll be keeping track of that and dealing with any issues that may arise as they come along. And we are recording this session. So as always, you're more than welcome to listen to this again, or if you're joining us by listening to the recording, welcome. This morning we have Joyce and Nora from the University of Nebraska Omaha Chris Library, and they're here to talk about some community programs and partnerships that they're doing here. And Joyce and Nora, are you there? Yes, we are. All right, I'm going to go ahead and just let you go. Thank you. I am Joyce New Year. I'm Director of Patron Services here at Chris Library, and my co-partner is... Nora Hillier, I'm a reference librarian here at Chris. We're going to talk to you about our community engagement project that we have set up with Girls Inc. here in Omaha. And Joyce and I were very interested in doing something in service learning or community engagement. We saw that there was a strong service learning movement here on campus, but because we don't have any credit courses as librarians, we really couldn't do a service learning course. So we talked with the service learning coordinator and decided to do something in community engagement. And he introduced us to the directors at Girls Inc. So what we did is we talked with the directors at Girls Inc. and asked them what do they need, what are they lacking, and here is our expertise, here is how we can help you. And as a result of that, we set up a three-year partnership with them to try to develop a library for their girls to use. We wanted this library to be more usable than what they have had in the past. Right now, the girls can't check out the books. It's really just a roomful of books, excuse me, kind of unorganized. And we wanted to help them develop that. Nora, if I could interrupt for just a moment. We're getting some sort of tapping or vibrating coming through. I don't know if that's something going on on your end. Are you still hearing it? Not at the moment. It's intermittent, but I just wanted to check. It might be a technical issue. Let's just go ahead and proceed. Okay. Just a little bit about Girls Inc. They are located in North Omaha and South Omaha. The school picture at the top right is their North Omaha campus. It's a converted elementary school. And the bottom picture is a church that they've converted into a space for girls. You can see the different age groups, mainly 5 to 8, the different ethnic groups that are supported, and they serve over 800 girls each year. They have after-school programs in the summer. They have girls all day, every day, Monday to Friday. And they serve them lunches and dinners and do different types of programming for them. So one of our projects, actually Joyce and I, we consider ourselves like project managers. And we are like the go-betweens between Girls Inc. and different education classes that can set up service learning situations for the UNO students. And what we did in the past is partnered with a library science collection class. And they came in, this was April of this year. And we went to the South Omaha campus of Girls Inc. and worked on their library there. The class developed a community analysis of what the Girls Inc. organization is about and who they serve. And they did an evaluation of the current collection. And then they built a list of new recommended resources. The girls in the, or actually the students at the UNO class, studied what the community needed. They first theorized that it was mainly Hispanic students, but they realized that there's a large population of Sudanese students who use the Girls Inc. facility. And so that kind of changed their community analysis and what they needed for the library. So from this analysis, the UNO students were able to learn about the theory of library science and how to apply it and then they actually applied it to that particular community and that helped them gain a sense of responsibility. And in the meantime, the Girls Inc. facility in the South Omaha, we were able to weed their collection and build a usable library there for them. And then the UNO faculty saw an increased motivation in the students in that applying this theory gave them some good experience and the students were highly motivated to help out this group of Girls Inc. students. For instance, in the library itself, they had three or four sets of an encyclopedia. And so probably three of those sets were not usable. And also the class noticed that there were several shelves that it looked like the books were never touched. And so in evaluating the library and what was needed, they were able to weed out the books that were not touched, weed out several sets of encyclopedias and use those items. Those items were then donated to the community. Here's a picture. We have done this twice now where we have gone into the libraries first time in North Omaha and this is the North Omaha site where we have gone in, weeded the library, cleaned it up, and we arranged it. And this is the before pictures of the North Omaha campus. You can see that there's books kind of scattered everywhere. It looks a little unorganized and it would be probably very overwhelming for maybe someone who is six or seven years old to come in and try to find a book. It was very difficult to find anything at all. Here's another set of pictures. This is from North Omaha. We did this in March of 2010. This class came in, they looked at every book, took a book off of every shelf one at a time, looked it over, and decided if they were going to keep it, put it back on the shelf, or weed it. It ended up, we had about 76 boxes of books that we had weeded out of here. And then here is North Omaha campus when it's cleaned up. And we were able to open up some shelf space. We organized a lot of books by author and age group and series. We were able, the picture on the bottom right, that is the reference area. We were able to put books by, for instance, history, country, languages, things like that. You can see we still kept a few sets of encyclopedias there. This is the South Omaha campus pictures of before. You can see in the bottom left there's Melissa Kass, a librarian here. She was the instructor for that particular class, and she's trying to decide how to put the books back. This was a lot smaller space than the North Omaha campus. There's a few girls there, but it's still important that we would get this organized. Here is the class. Again, they took every book out, examined every book, decided what to keep, decided what to weed, and this is the pictures of the girls doing that work. And then here is the finished product. They were able to put books on the bottom shelf for young kids to get to. I believe we kept one set of encyclopedias out of all of this, and they were able to organize by genre or age or series here again. In addition to the library science classes for the collection development, we also partnered with the young adult services class this summer. We went to Girls Inc. North and we had books that we were able to give them ahead of time. You can see we had four different books, 48 girls. This was over a period of two weeks, and we had 16 pizzas and 12 dozen cookies, and a very enjoyable time for all of us, both the girls at Girls Inc., the students in the library science class, Nora and I were there along with the instructors from the library science class, and we also invited the area of public librarians to come and talk to Girls Inc. about the programming that they have in the public library. So the students in the library science class had to obviously read the books also, but then develop a set of questions, a plan how they would get the girls talking if they weren't talking, and after doing that, then they were able to apply that in a real-life situation. The outcomes from our book club, again, the students, the UNO students, gain real-life experience, and that's something that Nora and I have been really anxious to see happen, and also to keep going and talking to the instructors. That's been part of the big benefit that you learn these things in class, and it seems like it should go that way, but you never really know until you get there. It's kind of like teaching. You can practice all you want, but once you get in front of the class and you have to start teaching, that's when you find out what really will work and what won't. So being able to give the library science students this opportunity now has been very beneficial. Another one of the outcomes from the book club we experienced were the students that had never really ventured into North Omaha and were somewhat bleary and found out there really was nothing that they needed to be afraid of and really enjoyed the engagement that happened between them and the girls. So some of the assumptions that they had about North Omaha were challenged and they came away with realizing that not all of their presumptions were true. The Girls Inc. members, besides having this interaction with the UNO students, also learned about their public library and about the resources and programming that happened at their local library. As a result of this, after we went through our book club, 20-some girls from the Girls Inc. campus did go to the public libraries. They have library cards and they participated in the programming in the public library. So we felt really good about that too and we're hopeful that the participants that we were with this year will be the role models for this coming summer. And here's a picture of the group, one of the groups we were with. This is the older group, the Girls Inc. members, library science students and Nora's in there and you may recognize Dr. Becky Pascoe was there too. This was her class. Everyone's smiling and we really did have a really good discussion. We didn't always stay on topic with the book that we chose, but the girls enjoyed sharing some of the books that they had read. We've also been able to put good books in the girls' hand in a variety of ways. Melissa Kast has a Scholastic Book Fair here at UNL every spring and every fall. Part of the reason for that is the number of books that are sold in our library also gets some new books. And each time she also has a nonprofit organization that people can donate books to. So we've been able to get around 20 books maybe each time for each campus. So Girls Inc. North received 20 new books and the South received 20 new books from this book fair. Dr. Pascoe got a grant from the Service Learning Academy and was also able to contribute some more titles. The library science collection development classes were after they we weeded those collections. They were to pick two books that they took back to class and discuss why they weeded those. And then they were also had to pick two books to replace those. With the grant money Dr. Pascoe purchased those choices from the students and we put those back in the library. And the Book Club Girls this summer were each able to choose one book of their liking and we bought one book for each of them and they were pretty excited about that. We had the public librarians show them on computers how to search for books that they might like in the Omaha Public Library. So if you liked reading Twilight here are some more books that you might like and that's how they were able to choose new books that they wanted to read. So along with the community engagement and the theory and thinking behind it is not just a one time we're going to plant flowers for you in the need. We are dedicated to making this sustainable. It's not just come in, swoop in, leave you alone and never see you again. We don't want to do that at all. So part of our project involves as many library science classes as we can and to keep the agreement with Girls Inc. we really have a real life laboratory of building a library from the ground up. They just have a building. They have books, but again as we talked about they weren't exactly the right kind for that community. So sustaining our engagement with them is really important. Part of that is the pursuit of our, Nora and I have been writing grants and we haven't been successful yet but never say die. So we will continue to look for funding and for part of that funding is for new furniture in both of the libraries. It's a real circulation desk and we identified the Nebraska Cornus for State Industries at the Correctional Services to purchase that furniture from. We also would like to get them an automated library system so they really can check out the material and we can barcode them and function like a real library. So some of the ideas if you're interested in doing this for yourself we're always happy to talk to anyone. Feel free to give us a call and at the last slide we'll have our email but it really starts with a big picture vision and not everyone listening, maybe not very many are in an academic library but public libraries can do this too. Special libraries, school libraries. I think anybody is able to do some community engagement but you do need to have that big picture in your mind and then start tying the pieces together. For us it was the desire to engage our library science students with real life applications. And to also demonstrate to the wider community not just Omaha but also nationally that libraries can be part of the community engagement. So if a company in your metropolitan area or your town is looking for a partner or needs some kind of information a library is an ideal partner to do that. We're all thinking about how to make ourselves viable and make sure that libraries are kept in everyone's nature so partnering with the wider community is a means of doing that. It's important if you're going to do this that you know you have to be very perseverant. It takes a lot of patience and you get shot down but you keep going. You have to go out and look for them for your partners and they do not come to you. It's rare if that happens, not if possible but you're the one that needs to go out and start looking. You have to get out of your, maybe you're used to sitting in the desk or staying within the four walls and you have to get outside of that and go into the community. What's going on in your community? Can you see a place that your services might be needed? And I think the last bullet point under the multiple partners where every group has an information need whether they realize it or not I think that's really true and if you stop to think about you can go down your street and look at the businesses and think about what kind of information need they probably have. They may not even know they need it but in talking with them you'll find out that they do have a need that you might be able to match. We've talked about that's really the reference interview in a different setting. Oftentimes if you're doing some reference people come to the desk and they don't really know the question they need to ask it. They come with them and conversing you learn and help guide them to what they're looking for. So this is an outside picture of that. And that's pretty much I think what we have to say and give you a chance to ask some questions. Great, thank you. I'd like to remind everybody listening in live that you're welcome to either raise your hand if you'd like to ask a question via your microphone and I will happily turn that on for you or you can type that into the questions area of GoToWebinar and I'll happily pass those questions along. I don't have any that are in right now from the audience but as I was listening I of course came up with a couple because you know me I always have questions for people. Yes you do. Joyce may be well. I do know you. You touched upon this very briefly at the beginning but I'd be interested in hearing a little more in how you found Girls Inc. and what was kind of the process in getting this all set up with them. What was involved in that? What needed to be done to just make this happen with them? And that's probably where the patients came in at the most. It took us over a year and a half to really get going with Girls Inc. So it started with Paul Seder is the director of service learning here on campus that we both knew and had heard him talk about service learning classes which is a completely, it's its own pedagogy, it has all of these requirements for classes to go through to really use service learning and the point behind all of that is you give students at UNO real life experiences. You partner with nonprofits. You are providing a service that the nonprofits would not be able to purchase at all. They don't have the funding. There's benefits among all of the players, the faculty, the staff, the nonprofits and it really is a semester long intensely involved learning process and at the end of the service learning class there's a piece of reflection that all of the UNO students write and it's really a research paper. That was not a possibility for Nora and I to do because we do not have a standalone class. So we started looking at what could we do and I talked with Paul Seder and we talked about community engagement which is I guess you could call it service learning light, very light because it's more just an engagement. It's not the intense one-on-one that you usually get in the service learning. So we talked with Paul who has a mind that's able to keep all these nonprofits that he's talked to. He's really done a lot of the networking. He gave me a list of possible partners. UNO, we're very fortunate that UNO has the administration that supports ideas like this. They have a dinner every spring where they invite all the nonprofits from Omaha into a big room and then everyone from the UNO campus come and that's where you can network and that's where you can start talking about here's what we can do, what you need, will this work and it's kind of fun to be in all of that discussion. For Nora and I, Paul gave us a list. We started looking through, okay, maybe we could do this, maybe we could do this. We did go to the Douglas County Correction Facility. They have a program where the inmates read a book and record it and then that book and recording is sent home to their children while they're still incarcerated. Nora and I went through that training in the hopes that this might be a way that we could get library science students involved also but ultimately realize that it wasn't a practical means for the students to go through the training, then you have to go through Pat down going to the jail wasn't a good fit so that took some time. However we were able to donate some books for that program and so then we went to Girls Inc. and started talking to their program manager and she said, well, yes, we do have a library and then that's when we really could start going and that's kind of a long and involved explanation but maybe it gives you an idea it does take a lot of time and you may be tempted to say it's not worth it but I would encourage you to keep trying. Oh, that was wonderful. In fact, I already I've got two other ideas of things you just mentioned to think about and talk to me that Department of Corrections program sounded really interesting and that kind of answered one of my other questions which was did you investigate any programs that you decided weren't going to work and that would be I guess a good example. That's always a kind of different sort of librarianship which not everybody can do. Right. We have ideas for other community engagement projects. We are talking with the gerontology professor here at UNO and she heard about our program with Girls Inc. and she thought we could apply that to older adults possibly set up a library in assisted living or in nursing home situation. So we're going to be talking with her in the future and then also we were approached here on campus by someone who suggested that we do this for boys also. There is no boys Inc in Omaha, but there is a girls and boys club and we were going to investigate that also to see if we can set up a library or set up something where we can get books into children's hands. Yeah, that sounds wonderful. I'm suddenly also having flashbacks to I taught a couple of semesters at the University of Denver program several years ago and this experiential learning, I'm remembering that in a knowledge management class I taught their big project was to actually go find an organization, a business, whether it was where they worked or someone else and actually talk to them and interview them and work with them and try to come up with a plan and I think as good as all the theory and the classroom work is getting out and actually working with a real live organization I think it's probably going to have you you're going to learn way more out of that than anything else. Right, and I would add you wouldn't have to because not everyone has the opportunity that Nora and I do, we're lucky that we have the library science program here and what an ideal partnership that is to be with them and also involve those students but if you're a public librarian you don't have those students, they may practice them with you you can still go out in your community and see what kind of resources that maybe the local business is thinking about expanding and or maybe someone's thinking about getting a organic grocery store what are the markets like for that in the area and do the research that we all know how to do, we just don't realize that there are so many people out there that don't have that opportunity and they also don't know we can do that for them. And I think you just reiterated half of the one of the keynotes from MLA conference this year right? I came in the room from Douglas County was talking about his library and going out into the community and providing those resources not even necessarily having been asked first but just kind of showing up and saying hey we can help and one of the notes I made was talking at your dinner meeting with local nonprofits there and I'm just thinking wow that's a good idea. Feeding is great but even if you don't have the budget just invite them over and start talking to them and say hey how can we help yeah that's wonderful. Right, if you sit around waiting for them to come to you it will not happen. I agree with that 100%. Yeah, exactly. The other question I had in working with the girls and if this didn't happen that's okay but did they have did the girls you were working with have questions for the students and the librarians about kind of librarianship and what they're doing and beyond the book club itself how was the interaction with the hey a bunch of librarians are helping us what is what's up with that? Well I and I'm glad you brought that out because that was another piece of once you start doing this it feels like there's all these little pieces that start fitting into this big puzzle and it really is a partnership and an engagement in a lot of different areas so they were interested it was good for them to be around UNO students to talk to them and they now realize we would like to bring that book club here on campus if we can get them here to this campus and they can look around in this library and at least feel comfortable here and hopefully they will think about I can go to college too and so that would be another piece of this the interaction between UNO students and girls is that experiential learning that you can't teach in a classroom so they did ask questions about what it was like to be a student and the UNO students were good about adding that into the discussion I don't know that we talked specifically about being librarians but they did talk about how they like reading but they also have they've now had some very positive experiences with not only Nora and I but the public librarians too and like we said it's not a swoop in swoop out we have been there for the last track how many times we've been to girls now and we're now becoming familiar faces at least with some of those girls and that's a good thing too I was kind of hoping to hear that three girls said I want to be a librarian when I grow up no we honestly did not hear that we did hear they were interested and I think this is where some of the perceptions of some UNO students were challenged one girl talked about being a physician she wants to be a pediatric doctor another one talked about being a lawyer where some people had the impression that these girls are just going to be lucky if they graduate out of high school these girls have high expectations and they've set girls Inc is a good program and we may have one of the premium organizations but it was good for that interaction to happen too and they're all going to make more money than the librarians don't want to stop them from doing that so again I'd like to remind the attendees happy to take questions I haven't seen any others coming through I just kind of have one more and that's the and again you kind of covered this but ask a little more directly what's next what is the next thing you're going to be doing either with girls Inc or the next program or where is this going well unfortunately we have not had luck getting money we've had several different grant opportunities and we've been turned down but we have three more ideas of where to get money possibly through I think it's through ALA there's a national program national library the museum too so we're going to try there so we still want to get furniture for them new shelving, new tables, new seating and a library system and one where we can teach them how to use it and we want to teach them how to use it so they can carry on with it so that's our immediate goal is to still get money and then me personally I want to pursue other community engagement opportunities besides girls Inc and they may be not as involved as what we've done with girls Inc because that really we signed a three year memorandum with them and it's we're into our third year already the time has gone fast but it's important to know you don't have to do that, it may be a one time meeting with somebody or two times whatever involvement you can do any kind of engagement is good for both both the library and for the partners that you're working with so I would encourage people to think about it doesn't have to be big and lofty like this one is and part of why it's so large is because we have the library science classes here so even something small is beneficial definitely alright well I want to say thank you very much this has been very enlightening to me I had no idea we're doing this, I guess I don't follow the UNO program probably as much as I should but and I was not surprised to see Dr. Pasco in a picture, she's just everywhere what would we do without her so last chance if any of our live attendees have any questions I don't see any others coming in on the Q&A and nobody has raised their hands so just as a kill little time here Joyce, Nora, I want to thank you once again for doing this for us today it sounds like an amazing program good luck finding some more funds you know that's the tough part really at this point for just about everybody so thanks again and thanks you all thanks to all of you who attended this has been encompassed live for Wednesday October 26th, 2011 and this recording will go up shortly and the power points will also be made available when the archive goes up so thanks again for listening and attending and we'll see you next week bye bye thank you