 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I'm your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. We are a webinar, a webcast, an online show. As you the regulators know, the terminology is up for debate, what you want to call these things, but whatever webinar seems to be the word of choice. We are here live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. But if you are unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. We do record the show every week and it is posted up to the website afterwards. I'll show you where to find that at the end of today's show. So you can always come and watch the show when it's convenient for you. The show is free and open to anyone to watch. So if you have any colleagues, friends, family members, anybody you know who might be interested in any of the topics we've had on the show, please do send them to our website. They can sign up for our live sessions and they can watch any of the recordings that are on our website. We do a mixture of things here on Encompass Live, book reviews, interviews, mini training sessions, demos of services and products. Basically, our only criteria is that it's something library related, something that libraries are actually doing, some resource or service that libraries could use, something being done on behalf of libraries. But we're pretty broad with that. So you may sometimes see some topics that seem a little out of the box, not that you would think of for libraries, but you know, hold on, watch with us and you might learn something that could be done in a library. We have Nebraska Library Commission staff that do sessions sometimes. We also bring in guest speakers and that's what we have this morning. With us to my left is Erin Willis, who is from the Bennett Martin Public Library, which is part of Lincoln City Libraries, just up the street from us. You're based out of, yeah, you're based right up the one right up the block. She walks away. And she's a curator at the Heritage Room of Nebraska Authors there and they have been working on, and I'm going to let you explain more of it, something coming up officially next year, but a lot of the stuff related to it is starting already this year. In Nebraska's 150th birthday anniversary, I hope I get the sesquicentennial. That's right. That's right. And that's actually in 2017, officially, in Nebraska. But there's lots of programs and things being related to that. And of course, libraries, we are involved as well. And Erin's going to tell us what she's got put together related to the celebration. So I'll stop talking and let you take over and tell us all about what you guys are doing. Thank you all. I'm really happy to be here and really excited to talk about this project. I think this is one of the best ways that we can celebrate the sesquicentennial of Nebraska. I'll first introduce myself a little bit more. So my name is Erin Willis and I am the curator of the Jane Pope-Geske Heritage Room of Nebraska Authors. And that's a special collection in Lincoln City Libraries. It is their archival collection and we collect books by Nebraska authors. And we've been collecting books by Nebraska authors since 1949. When a librarian there, Ethel Jane Maher started collecting books that she realized were valuable to the collection either because they were first editions or maybe they hadn't been inscribed by the author or they might have been a friend. The authors at that time in 1949, many of the authors that we recognize as being Nebraska authors, Marie Sandoz, Beth Streeter, Aldrich, John Nyhart. All of these people were still writing. Willa Cather had died the year before. But a number of these authors were friends of Lincoln City Libraries and so this librarian started collecting books. And this collection was part of Lincoln City Libraries and Lincoln Library supported it until the 70s. And at that point, Jane Pope-Geske, who you all probably recognize as being a past director of the Nebraska Library Commission, was one of the early, you right? So for any of you who didn't know, she was a champion of Nebraska authors and literature and books in general. And she really supported this collection and she with another number of other supporters created an endowment through the Nebraska, Nebraska, I'm sorry, the National Endowment for the Humanities. And they, there's now an endowment created with that and with the support of volunteers and donors to create the matching funds for this endowment, which is what now supports the Heritage Room. And the committee that supports the Heritage Room is called the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association. And so that is the, that is the board of directors for the Heritage Room of Nebraska authors. And so that's a long introduction for where I'm from and why I am the person who's going to be talking about Nebraska books. Judy Kiedel, who you'll see on the slide, is an educator with the Nebraska State Historical Society and she is the chairperson or the committee chair for the special, this special, and this is a subcommittee of the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association and it's the Nebraska 150 Book Selection Committee. Judy unfortunately wasn't able to make it today, so I'm going to do my best to talk about the books with her authority. So, so we'll see how this goes. So I'm going to move on to the next slide and talk a little bit about the Nebraska books and the committee who chose the books. First, I'll just give you the mission statement of the Nebraska State. It's called the 150 Celebration and it's the Nebraska 150 Commission who developed the mission statement and I'll read that here and then we'll talk about how we're aligned with this mission. The mission of the Nebraska 150 Commission is to come together with Nebraskans across the state to celebrate and commemorate history and build a platform for appreciating our diverse backgrounds for generations to come. The sesquicentennial will provide opportunities for native and non-native Nebraskans to recognize our shared heritage and reflect on our past while building for our future. So when the Nebraska 150 Commission which has been around now for about two years planning for the sesquicentennial celebration which is March 1st 2017 and so they've been preparing for this and trying to find ways to call attention to our shared history and I need to give a shout out to our to Gloria Strope who was our past board and LHA president and her husband John Strope who conceived of the idea of coming up with a list of notable books that represent Nebraska's history and so building on this idea we gave the idea to the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association who agreed that this was a good idea and then we came up with this committee that you see here so Judy Kiedel from the Nebraska State Historical Society is the committee chair. Sharon Bishop is a retired English teacher from Henderson she also works with the Robert Brooks writing project at the University so she does and she writes about place conscious literature. Debra Dregos is here at the Nebraska Library Commission and she's also a new board member on the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association. Kathy Johnson is a librarian at the University at UNL. Dr. Michael Page is a UNL English professor. Lorraine Riedesel is the library director at Beatrice Public Library. Gloria Strope who I mentioned is the NLHA board president or she was past president last year. Autumn Sweeney is also an NLHA member she is she's from Omaha and she's a librarian and also a parent a mother of five so she helped us with the children's book list and and also she's a reader so she she's read most of the Nebraska literature so and then myself as the ex-officio curator of the collection so I contributed a little bit to what this group had to offer so these are the people who selected the books for the book for the book list so our own mission for Nebraska Nebraska 150 books is what what this reading initiative is called and the mission of our group was to choose 150 books from Nebraska to read in conjunction with the state sesquicentennial. Now part of sub point one here was that we had to be fully aligned with the mission of the Nebraska 150 Commission and so this involved involved a petition or we had to make our case to the Nebraska 150 Commission and they have an endorsement process and so we were as of January the endorsed book list for the sesquicentennial and so that means we are the authoritative list and this was based on our committee and then we also had to give them our initial list things that some ideas that we'd come up with and they endorsed us as the right people to create this list and then when the blood's good to know that not just any any old person can go off and do something related to the celebration that anybody who's any any event that's being done or project has got to be officially. Exactly if you look at that the Nebraska the 150 Commission website is any 150.org and you can see all of the endorsed programs at that website and they do they have a pretty solid vetting process. They have a committee that meets regularly and they evaluate the process so we had to go we've gone through two steps to be to be we were first endorsed in January and then after the book list came out and the book list actually came out in April so that we could have a year-long reading initiative and so when the book list came out in April it was reevaluated by the commission and at that point we were given signature status so we're one of the one of I think at this point I think there are four signature programs with the sesquicentennial so we have a little bit more weight and more stake in the sesquicentennial as an endorsed signature program and so you can see that on the sesquicentennial website. So we are fully aligned with the mission of the Nebraska 150 celebration and so our next step was to consider the genres things that would be appealing to diverse groups of readers and so we just generally speaking we have fiction, nonfiction, young adult, children's and poetry and those are you know those are separated out by subject categories but also just the broader genres so readers can choose what they would like to read and then number three is to highlight the top 12 recommended books in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, young adult children's genres so that Nebraska's can read one each month. The idea was and we'll see this in a later slide that in order to prepare for the sesquicentennial we wanted to have an achievable goal for Nebraskans and so this is part of our reading challenge that I'll also talk about but every month we feature one book from each of these categories and we give extra information on the books and just highlight their significance in their place in Nebraska's history and so you can look at our website which is Nebraska150books.org to see those books categorized every month and and then you can this is just a way for for readers to have an idea of what we're reading and what they could be reading every month so it's nice to have something like that that's like not so um overwhelming as here's the 150 exactly yeah exactly you to start with and I think um that was the idea too is there is such a huge body of literature from Nebraska um in in the heritage room alone we collect we have more than 14,000 books by more than 4,000 Nebraska authors so really um there's a huge scope to Nebraska literature and we just had to break it down and break it down until we could have an achievable amount of books for to highlight for the for this for this reading project so let's uh move on here to the next slide which is what is the Nebraska author criteria and this is a criteria that we borrowed from the um from the Nebraska from the heritage room and the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association this is what we use to decide what can be included in the collection the first criteria is that the author was born or grew up in Nebraska and so anyone who started out here uh whether or not they moved away when they were 10 you know if they were born here or they grew up here they are considered a Nebraska author second criteria is that the author was educated in Nebraska a lot of times professor or people come to school here and um spend a large part of their education and their formative writing years in in Nebraska and they would be considered a Nebraska author um and number three that the author spent most of their productive writing years in Nebraska and as a general measure we use 10 year you know about 10 years is uh it's hard to hard to say um exactly what what is i mean there's a little bit this is kind of a case by case situation but you have to evaluate each one on their own but yeah right so we like to say if they they spent productive writing time here in Nebraska um then we consider them a Nebraska author so that's what we use for the um author criteria now the Nebraska book criteria we gave priority to books about Nebraska so if Nebraska authors were writing about Nebraska or if the books had a Nebraska setting those books um we consider authentically Nebraska um we also had to consider availability if we are asking patrons and um readers to read books um by Nebraska authors the books need to be available for them so for example um we might have chosen more Harley Burr Alexander books um Harley Burr Alexander was the gentleman responsible for the narratives in the state capital um and he wrote he he contributed significantly to the Nebraska story and he's somebody who we might um have put put some of his books on the list um and we do have one of his books but unfortunately they're not in print anymore we have archived copies um and limited editions in the Heritage Room and they're in various libraries throughout the state but there aren't enough that we could legitimately keep something like this on the list that everybody who might be interested to be able to get a hold of right exactly and so this is i mean we get a lot of questions about why certain books aren't on the list when they um you know when they were such a big influence in Nebraska and we um this is one of the things we just have to say they're they're not available unfortunately even if they are um significant to Nebraska some things just couldn't be on the list for this reason and third is that the titles will reflect a variety of works that have appealed to Nebraskans over time um so this is this was probably the hardest thing to um to make sure that we had a variety I think it would have been um easy to say all of them you know Willa Cathar's books should be on the list but we we have to we wanted to make sure that we our book list was representative of um Nebraska geographically um we were thinking with respect to time in history that I mean we're covering 150 years here so you know there was a lot of good literature produced in the 1930s and in the 1990s but we really had to um keep a um keep time in history um in mind when we were thinking about it we also had to consider diversity and um diversity in authors and diversity in subject matter and so those were all considerations in um in deciding on the final titles so we have two different lists which uh we'll show you next um but we the short list of books um which is 12 books from each category fiction nonfiction young adult children and poetry um we decided that the books on that short list should be by a Nebraska they need to meet the criteria for a Nebraska author and a Nebraska book and the books on the long list which is 150 books there are 150 books on that list and those um could be a Nebraska author or they could be a Nebraska book so as long as they meet one of the criteria it might be that the author is from a different state but writes um writes about Nebraska and um that is that's acceptable on the long list so uh let's move on here if I lost my there it is okay uh oh I covered most of this already historical relevance attention to diversity time in history geography and that the books have to be available uh so with this in mind we um we developed the book list and this took months we started meeting in September and met um met about six times between September and December to really uh pinned down well first we exhaustively considered which books should be on the list and it's funny we all thought how will we come up with 150 books and then the book list was hundreds of books long and so at that point it was winnowing the list down and trying to decide um which of these excellent excellent we have some incredible books by Nebraska authors we really had to decide which of those um which of the books best represented um all of the all of these things we wanted to consider um and so from about from late October through December it was just um getting that list down to the really the most significant books um from Nebraska authors and so uh as of let's see late January we had uh a book list that we thought was very good according to the standards of our group and um was agreed upon by the members of the selection committee and at that point um we decided it was time to get the list out there kind of do a beta test uh test reaction see what people thought of the list and I I should say it's good for something like this for a community reading initiative um and especially something with the scope of an entire state for a for a reading initiative that's going to um have readers all over the state looking at these books you really want to have as many eyes on the list as you can I mean you really want to make sure that you have the best possible uh books on the list and so we after our book committee agreed on the list um we sent it out to educators throughout the state um teachers uh grade school teachers middle school teachers high school teachers professors librarians we had we sent it to bookstore all the bookstore owners across the state and they have a very good idea of what um what kind of books are sold and what people you know what's appealing to readers so we sent um and then humanities professionals so we had um we had different people in um in different you know the center for great plain studies for example or you know anything um any group that um historical societies things like that we sent the list out to them too to have a contextual input for the list and so and then community um community members so we also sent it out to people who just read who we know to be good patrons and who read uh broad um array of literature we sent the list to them too so we sent out all these letters and then when the comments came back we re-evaluated them and incorporated a number of changes actually into our list and that's how we came up with the final list of books and so this is going to be hard to see which is why i put download the printable book list at there's the website right there it might be easier to just go to Nebraska 150books.org yes definitely yeah so this is the you can type it all in yeah um it's something you've been seen the show before i'm gathering up all the different URLs for this and the websites and everything the um the 150 celebration the 150 book site heritage room everything um into our delicious account um from library commissions you have a collection of all those links available to you afterwards too so you can click it so then when i send you out the info about the recording when you build so this is uh so this is a book that's easily downloadable and it's a one page you can print it front and back and we also have these available to order our program is sponsored by a grant from the humanities Nebraska and humanities Nebraska pays for the materials and so we can they pay for the postage as well so we if you want these book lists to pass out to your patrons we can send you a stack of book lists and those are just easy to grab and look at and these are just titles uh titles and authors and um if you want more information about the books uh when we have time at the end of the show we can look through the individual book pages which will talk about their publishing statistics you know a little bit about the books where they're published the author websites their um dates they were published things like that but this is what you're looking for on the website and so you can download those and print them and see all the books that are on uh those are the 150 books full list full list yes so now what we're going to look at is the shortlist the manageable short list of books and um this is the fiction list and i'll just quickly um there are 42 of these by the time you do the fiction non-fiction um all the categories so i'm just going to briefly go over a couple of these um and talk about them just so you get a good idea of why some of these were in their or were included on the list um the swung gondola by timothy shaffert uh timothy shaffert is a professor at unl and um has written several books the swung gondola is a book about the omaha fair in the late 1800s and the the book is kind of magical it's it's a fiction story but it's also um it has that element of historical uh historical fact and so um so that's a if you've read maybe the um the devil in the white city it's compared to that book quite a bit um so except for this has fictional characters but um like devil in the white city yeah that was a that's an excellent book so this is um has the same kind of tenor um patient in room 18 is by an author that people don't uh really recognize others being a nebraskan or being as significant as she was minyan eberhardt wrote uh prolifically mystery books she was considered america's um oh no i can't think of her name agatha christie she was at the agatha christie of america um and she was a hugely popular um bestseller in the fiction or in the mystery category so this is one of uh patient in room 18 takes place at brian hospital here in lincoln and um it's just it's one of her one of the books that has been reprinted three of her books are um in reprint right now through the university of nebraska press and this is one of them uh mayan tenia was an easy easy pick very reflective of nebraska and um probably our most famous work to come out from a nebraska author the meaning of names by karen shoemaker is the nebraska one book one nebraska pick this year i'm not a dead karen on the show a couple weeks ago yeah there you go so you might already be familiar with this book and this is a world war one story tillie olson was a very famous short story writer tell me a riddle was uh oh henry prize winner it was it's been anthologized over and over and over and so this is just an example of this short short story category um lantern in her hand best reader aldrich was also a one book one nebraska pick at one time and this is a homestead homesteading um story and then hector's bliss is also a homesteading story this is about uh black settlers who or black homesteaders who settled at goose lake nebraska and it is fascinating it's um a story that not many people know actually um so that's a good one to look at a different plane was edited by ladet randolph and it is a contemporary nebraska fiction writer so a lot of names that you would recognize as being very famous ron hanson tom mcneill um these uh was the collection of short short stories then yes short story essay uh booked by all different authors from nebraska so that's an excellent one just to get a general idea of nebraska literature goodnight nebraska is uh is a fictional book about a small town nebraska um and it's uh this is kind of our our big big name book this was a bestseller and it has a a solid nebra i mean if you want to know more about nebraska you know it gives a good idea of the nebraska small town atmosphere kind of you know friday night lights ish except for with really really interesting characters the nebraska football atmosphere small town atmosphere and then just some really interesting personalities a perfect evil was um well alex kava we all know to be an excellent and prolific nebraska author as well and a perfect evil is her story that centers on the the bank robberies the very famous bank robberies in nebraska uh the home place by rite morris is um was a the first book of its kind actually it's full page uh margin to margin pictures and the story is about uh one a man one day visit you know comes home to visit the home place and so that's uh um that's a really interesting representative book of um kind of mid-century nebraska writing and then havens wake by lidette randolph is uh summer story a summer family story just your your all around good character driven fiction so those are um that's our representative list of nebraska fiction so nonfiction um and these might have to go a little faster through these but history of nebraska is uh has been edited every 10 years about because we keep because nebraska is changing and evolving all the time and so um that is a really good one to just have a a general grasp of nebraska history i am a man is by joe stirrita and its chief standing bear's journey for justice uh was really compelling and moving um and it's when it was published in 2012 i think it was instantly uh picked for nebris nebraska's uh one book one nebraska and then we also nebraska or lingon libraries chose it for the one book one lingon um and it was really a compelling story that not not many people knew about at the at that time um and so like this is really called attention to the native american plight and especially in nebraska local wonders was the runaway favorite by our selection committee and also the people that we that we submitted the list to ted kuzher as you know was the national poet laureate for four years and local wonders is his story about living in rural nebraska and it really um considers the land and the atmosphere uh salam abut sir photographing the american dream was written by john carter john carter just died a couple years ago but he um really called attention to these photographs of nebraska homesteaders and these photographs are world famous um salam abut sir uh has become he's coming back into vogue um recently and partly um in a in a in a big way nationally and uh has a lot to do with this book um paul johns guard uh has written oh gosh more than 80 books i think he's um in his 80s and uh he's still going strong still going strong he still publishes one or two books a year and the seasons of the tall grass prairie is uh talks about nebraska um throughout the year and um art our ecology and the land old jewels was uh the marie sandos pick this was not marie sandos is one of um one of the authors that was most debated she has so many excellent books and to really try and choose the best one was hard the first one the one the more prolific authors trying to pick because like you were saying earlier you don't want to just have all the big names and all their big all their titles you want to let people learn about some of the people authors and writers and maybe you never heard of exactly exactly yeah yeah so how right how do you make that choice and in this case this is one of the situations when we had originally chosen shy and autumn by marie sandos and uh this is one of the cases when we really listened to the input from our um the professionals who we sent the list to they everyone said you can't you can't keep old jewels off the shortlist so we um old jewels is on the list and really uh i mean really it belongs there it's um a great story of marie's dad jewels and they're um kind of the life of a rugged pioneer man so that's a great one keith county journal is another ecology kind of book and um this book is on the land again the harmony a harmony of the arts nebraska state capital um is just what it sounds like uh it's about the state capital and um beautiful pictures in this book so that's a great one to look at um all the strange hours the excavation of a life lauren isley is one of our uh he's called you know the modern thorough he like he writes a lot about uh he was a nature lover um he writes poetry and all the strange hours is the story of his life um by him so that's um the autobiography the middle of everywhere the world's refugees come to our town by mary pipher most of you will probably recognize mary pipher for her um her book reviving ophelia which was printed um early oh gosh 2000 maybe some late 1900s or you know early the century but that kind of launched mary pipher um into her writing career and uh she writes about this is a book about refugees but she really cares about people and um this one talks about immigrants who live in who settle in lincoln and uh why they come to lincoln and so this is uh a great regional one and a good um helps you understand immigration a little bit better as well the autobiography of malcolm x uh this book doesn't talk about nebraska so much uh we had a hard time i mean for this one to meet the book criteria and or i mean the author criteria and the book criteria we had to stretch it a little bit because it doesn't really focus on nebraska although the opening line does talk about his home in in Omaha so this is um so this one we made an exception for because it is such a significant important book for an important um person yeah yes exactly an important story so um and then the fighting the world the autobiography of george norris was our final pick so we hope that that covers you know uh non-fiction wise a great um helps you understand nebraska a little bit better the young adult in picture books um night of the twisters by ivy ruckman is uh great book it's a middle school read and it talks about the night of the oh there are seven or eight tornadoes in grand island nebraska and it talks about the story of a little boy who endured those tornadoes bag in the wind is a book of poetry and pictures by ted kuzer it's a children's book and beautiful it's about um conservation and recycling um so that's a good one to read to a classroom the c is for cornhusker is a nebraska state alphabet this is these books are famous they were um there's a book for every state c is for cornhusker is the nebraska state book and there's um there's something relevant to nebraska for each letter so you can go letter by letter through that book sister sweet ella is a book by rosecrans hoffman uh rosecrans hoffman is famous for illustrating a number of books but in this case she wrote and illustrated sweet sister ella so um that's that's a good one by her it's also a picture children's book billion actually i have a question about that one um someone had obviously they put this question before even got to the list um they did any obviously looked at this before and this may be a little bit about more about availability she says that sweet sister ella is actually out of print officially and very expensive to purchase oh dear um but and why you know why is it on the shortlist so i just did a quick search myself um it is available on amazon um you can get either anywhere from like seven to twenty dollars but what i did also now this is what i was gonna ask is as far as availability are you looking when you were talking about how available is it for someone to buy it or someone to borrow it from a library well we were looking at libraries specifically um we did worldcaps search of Nebraska libraries and inner library loan yeah this one is actually in in world cat there's a hundred and twenty libraries that have this particular title so we're hoping people could get it from inner library loan which is the whole force page of it is all Nebraska libraries yeah but you can get it from anywhere in the country too so a little bit of um leeway and availability i guess it's not just going by your own copy but just getting anywhere borrowing it from another library is is a way to get a whole of them and a hundred and twenty libraries out there having a children's book like that is pretty good across the whole country yeah yeah indeed so yeah i'm sorry yeah i wish it was more affordable i didn't um it was hard actually to look at all the ways that it was available for each book but before we made the decision um let's think too she's saying it's out of print and i'm not sure about that i haven't gone that far um and you said you try to think that would be available could i mean when you were doing this would they maybe they at the time you're making up this list maybe things the situation was different they were there was well there were um we we checked the you know world cat was a consideration and then we checked um just amazon as a general uh you know just our one stop um to see if it was available so i guess yeah because they didn't check to see if it was in print but rather to see if it was available and at that point it was good an amazon one here for twenty i don't know what's considered expensive in the library for twenty eight dollars twenty eight is pretty yeah pretty standard actually um for for a new book um but that's for something that's out of print and this is harder to hold up yeah i would say that's an affordable price for um for buying it twenty and sixty five that's the right one yeah yep yep that's it and she has a very distinctive um if you look for anything by rosecran's artwork yeah you can tell that it's a rosecran's often book she has a distinctive flair uh for art um and so uh so moving on this billion blaze um also was out of print for a while it's back in print this is one of the hundred best um illustrated books for children and this is the first in a series of billion blaze books and this one is about little boy billy who's been given a horse uh by his parents and then when he's jumping his horse you know he's out in the field with this horse and finds a dog and it's the story of the boy and the horse and the dog and this has been this is back in print in soft cover so a really pencil sketch um just a really sweet um book with great illustrations the perfect perfect snowman by Preston McDaniels is an older book also illustrated children's book and um won a number of awards in its time and this one i hope is i know this is available in libraries and um hopefully it's available to purchase too it's still uh still enjoying uh success as a good book from Nebraska going north is a book by Janice Harrington and this is a story of a family moving from the south to the north a black family coming to live in Nebraska and Janice Harrington is still writing books she has a new book coming out this fall so she's somebody to look out for Eleanor Park if you haven't heard of Eleanor Park this is uh this is a wonderful book it's been on every reading list for teenagers um in the last couple years another one of the no-brainer yes um and excellent i i love this but i think everyone is touched in some way by Eleanor Park so that's a teenage book or um you know high school reading book the simpson sheep won't go to sleep by bruce errant uh this was a golden sower winner last year and uh also a beautiful illustrated book of um what's not it's about sheep um but uh had that rural flair to it as well and he's an excellent illustrator so if that's one to look for the Rhythmetist by Brandon Sanderson he is uh he is one of our more famous nebraska authors he is a famous uh fantasy writer the Rhythmetist was also he's uh he's excellent um and the Rhythmetist was a book that um that was also on all the teenage reading lists in the last um in the last couple years so um that's one that should be easy to find and is excellent and the house without a christmas tree by gail rock uh illustrated children's book as well and then prayer or pioneer girl a true story of a girl growing up on the prairie is uh by andrew warren and this has is a true story and it it has um actual photographs so you can kind of see what the pioneer life is like so those are the young adult and picture books and then poetry is um you'll see there are less there are less books here there are a lot of nebraska poets um and we had a hard time choosing so we decided to uh limit it to the state poets and the poet laureate and then we did two different anthologies one of modern and one of older nebraska poets to try and get a good scope for nebraska poetry so john nyhart was our first nebraska state poet and he was made poet laureate um there will never be another poet laureate from nebraska it would all always only be john g nyhart in perpetuity so his famous book a cycle of the west uh many people um may recognize the story or the song of Hugh glass from the movie the revenant uh which just came out this year and um and so if you've seen the movie and you were removed by the movie you'll definitely want to read one of the first that it's broken into songs so you'll want to read the song of Hugh glass and you'll really recognize some of those themes the lights and shadows uh was a a Pulitzer prize winning poetry book by Ted Couser who was our state or our national poet laureate so this is a must read as well uh then will William clefkorn was our state poet after john nyhart and his book nebraska this place these people is thoroughly focused on nebraska and um our place in people then twyla hanson is our current state poet and her booked potato soup is um is about um the is about the land and environment and um and personal experience so that's another good one and nebraska presence anthology of poets anthology of poetry just came out a couple years ago and this is modern nebraska poets and then 40 nebraska poets this one i will say is going to be probably the hardest book to find on the list it is available in libraries through interlibrary loan um this one is hard uh greg kuzma is uh has written and edited a a lot of nebraska poetry books so we've since this one is harder to find um there are there are a number of collections of nebraska poetry books edited by greg kuzma who does have um we chose this one because they're older poets who weren't included in the modern anthologies and so um so we we have a better scope but really anything edited by greg kuzma would um is going to be an excellent book or an excellent collection of poetry okay so this is this is where they're all listed so if you want to go to the website again um this will be listed on the links um that krista mentioned but this is the downloadable uh reading challenge entry form and so you can see the the books all sorted into their categories and um all you have to do is check off the books you've read write your name on the bottom send it send it back to us on the address provided you can take a picture of it and you know email it to us or you can um you can scan it or you can mail it and then we will have a drawing a prize drawing on march 1st so um this this reading challenge started in april so i i wish we could have gotten the word out more so you might be playing catch up to read yeah so we're about we have a little over six months so i mean as far as reading it you you could say i've read it before you could yes if you've read it this year you don't have to read it this year no i mean if you've read the book i already read that one yes if you've already read the book then it counts and uh nobody's checking up on you i mean this is that right you know like it's not gonna be a test there's not gonna be a quiz about what is this book about a good faith reading challenge and so um yeah we'll just trust that you've read the book so um we can again send these reading challenge entry forms to your library so you can distribute them to your patrons or you can download and print them from our website um at the uh the link provided right there just click on get involved and go to the nebraska 150 reading challenge uh so the reading with any reading challenge or with any um with any challenge in general it's all about the prizes i i did book it because of the prize because i got a pizza when i was in grade school and i think uh i think there's something about even a small incentive that uh really ignites uh desire to read just to be part partly to be part of something um part of a program but also um for the chance of even a small prizes um often all the motivation people need to to read and so that's part of the reason why we chose the uh why we decided to have this reading challenge is to kind of get a get a good buzz going for the books and then to also incentivize reading and um to make it a uh more fun program people like little competition sometimes like the summer reading program that the kids do is huge yes oh my gosh i know in lincoln we had i think we have something like 15 000 who participate in link time it's just just um reading in community and being part of something really uh being part of something bigger i think is a strong motivation in itself but um for the reading programs um oftentimes that i mean you know they might get a small ice cream cone for yeah i know actually we have some good prizes they're ice cream cones or train rides zoo passes things like that but uh this is this is geared to more towards well adults and children there are prize packs for all of those categories um the first one for anyone who's read all 42 books on that short list uh is eligible for a prize uh 300 voucher so i should say these are all drawings um and so each category has a number of prizes available so if you've read all 42 books you qualify for um the grand prize drawing which is a $300 gift voucher to University of Nebraska Press for any of their publications are merchandise so um that is the incentive for reading all the books on the list the gold prizes so anyone who's read 42 books or 12 books or anywhere in between you know above 12 books is entered into the gold prize drawing and those are being sponsored by bookstores throughout the state so if you live in Seward and you want you know you want a chance to win a gift card to chapters for example you know you can those those gift cards will be statewide local to where you are yes exactly and so um so you'll have a chance to read or to get gift cards um in your region and then um there are also prize packs being sponsored or being provided by the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association and those are um we have magnetic poetry and um poster book posters and um and art posters we have and notebooks and book bundles and so those will be included with the silver drawing gift cards and then um authors and libraries statewide have been generously donating books for book prizes so if you know an author or if you represent a bookstore or a library and you have new books by Nebraska authors these are the things that are being included in our book bundle and prize packs and so we want to give as many of these prizes as we possibly can um just so um all of our as many readers as possible can um can win book bundles so we're currently we're we'll be accepting book or you know book donations of books um until the until March 1st when we when we have the prize drawing so those are the things that your patrons can win by participating in the reading challenge um so how do you get the word out about the reading list and how do you get people excited we have those resources for you we are as I mentioned we're a program is sponsored by a grant from Humanities Nebraska um they are providing funding to or they have provided funding to print posters bookmarks uh book lists reading challenge and reforms and then book award seals uh the book award seals are well I'll show you what they look like uh this is what they look like that's the poster um and it is in the windows downstairs yeah it's 16 inches long you know it's a nice it's a really size not too overwhelming poster um that you can easily put on a bulletin board um you can use this as a backdrop if you want to create a book display of Nebraska books um this is we can send you as many posters as you want for that and then for giveaways um we have the bookmarks the reading challenge reforms and the book lists and um we can send you that's the back and the front of the bookmark so on the front of the bookmark it's the same image as the poster it includes our sponsors there at the bottom and then uh link to our uh note of our website so people can learn more about Nebraska books and then just for quick reference on the back is the short list of um the book selections so those are available to you we will send them to you for free and you can pass those out at your library and then below you'll see the Nebraska 150 books seal and those are those would be like the one book on Nebraska seal or any kind of award seal that you see on a book just to denote that this book was chosen for the Nebraska 150 book list so if there are books in your library that you want to highlight with the Nebraska 150 books award seal we will send you the award seal so you can do that so um there's an entry form I mean there's an order form for these things on our website um that you can well we'll look at that at the end but you can order any of these materials that's what this one librarian did say that she's wanted to have all of the books that are on the short list on hand in their library and this would be a good way to yes exactly to make that make the point that this is just asking our and all of these materials are free for these are all all free yes these are all free and we'll even mail them for free so yes you just send us for the items or the postage or anything just um contact yeah so we can actually this is my last uh well I only have two slides left and then we can go to the um to the website and you can see how to order these um I'll just quickly say that there are book clubs we encourage book clubs this is one of the book clubs it's being done by the Nebraska State Historical Society and um we encourage everyone to you know initiate book clubs at your library or to encourage your patrons to initiate book clubs and um I know the library commission has book bundles available that they'll send that is going to be a follow-up program which is right here yeah next month yeah we'll be talking more about the Nebraska 150 books so you can um so you can have some support and some resources and having a book club but uh right now with I think we just have a couple minutes left if we can go to the website oh she want to show you I've got the fire box down right here okay there yeah so keyboard there we go so I'll show you um some of the places to go on the website so you can order these materials and um and have them available all right so this is the website this um any of these spotlights right here will take you right to the page so if you see the reading challenge you want to join the challenge just click on that and it'll take you right to the to the reading challenge um and so some of these spotlights are you have the reading challenge uh book features by month and then this is just an explanation of why Nebraska books are significant but uh to navigate through the tabs let's first show you how to order materials all you have to do is go to the get involved tab scroll down here to free resources click on that this uh shows you what the resources are those are your posters bookmarks reading challenge entry forms book lists and book seals um this is where you mail the forms submit requests by phone mail fax or email um to that address or email address and then you can either just type it in the body of an email and just tell us where to send it or you can formally submit uh this form right here which looks like that you just write the quantity you want tell us where to ship it and um we do we package these about every uh week or 10 days so it probably takes about two two weeks at most to get them sometimes they go out the next day sometimes you wait for two weeks but shouldn't take too long to get them so you just send us that and we'll get you all of your materials so i'll close that and with just the couple minutes left i'll show you a couple points of interest under get involved here we have the reading challenge this will um direct you to all of the tell you about the prices well like here's where you download the reading challenge entry form um if you want to participate in an event or if you want to tell us about an event we publish all those things right here on the event calendar so you can see what kinds of programs we're doing um or what programs are going on throughout the state so for example right on the river is a writing program um hosted by karen shoemaker who is one of our uh who is one of the people represented on our list um we're having lidette ranoff and some of the other authors who contributed to that to that collection of fiction books or fiction stories and our johnny jane's reading series um so this will just tell you some of the things going on if you want to know what kind of new i mean that we keep our news try to keep our news current so if there's anything in your newspaper that you'd be willing to share with us please let us know we want to publish that and um let our patrons see what's going on uh now i'm just going to show you one more thing and then i think we're done so this right uh this is the sesquicentennial book list this is where you go to print the uh the book the 150 books on this downloadable um printable list right here and then um these are the 150 notable nebraska books this is a page that's in progress all the time we're constantly updating books on this page or on this um this individual books page but this uh will allow you to print the shortlist and then these are each of the books individually so you can if you want to know more about the book um learn when it was published what you know learn more about the author you can go to any of these so um let's go to let's just go to the meaning of names since we've been talking about Karen Shoemaker so you can go to the meaning of names uh it was printed by red hen press in pasadena in 2014 if you want to see karen's website you click there here's the publisher's website a little bit about the book um some of the book awards just to give you some context um easy context for the books so that's the website are there any questions about anything before we move on or before we're done actually this is it actually um we know a few minutes we always start a little after um if we we always go as long as is necessary for this so um yeah if anybody does have any um questions comments thoughts about any of this um i'm just looking up something here let's see if i can figure out how to do this um type it into the question section and okay someone did have a question about our book club kits about this and as as we as um as they're gonna mention we are gonna have the session yeah on september 14th next month lisa kelly will be with erin and we'll be back with us um lisa is always the one here at library commission who does our sessions about our book club group group groups doing a book group um reading book reading group uh the kits we have are gonna be here talk about that um and okay we do have a question um oh lisa is actually watching hi just looking forward to our session on the 14th yes i think a lot of people are too good um and someone does want to know um are there discussion questions for each title on the shortlist oh why i know i don't know if that's something you do i know we sometimes do that with our book club kits but i'm not sure ideally yes that was the original plan was to have discussion um discussion questions and more resources available um the the problem is uh staff time you know the ability to actually um thoughtfully come up with those questions as with any grant our grant was partially funded and so we were given the money for the resources um and the you know we have all the things you need for your book groups but we weren't um given any funding for extra staff to do these extra things that we were hoping um hoping to do to augment the reading list and so we haven't had i mean with time hopefully we can develop some of those individual book pages better and um they and hopefully come up with some discussion questions um that would help facilitate a book group but i know with any of the book uh book club bags or the you know the books that are distributed by the library commission a lot of those come with questions and so um that's something to maybe talk to lisa about but through our website right now there's not we do not have the discussion questions though i wish we did yeah and i was just looking at that that's what i was doing here um another question was also about the book club kits um that they know and we've also mentioned that that we do have kits that are for some of these books in here and they wanted to know if there was um specifically make a list of the kits that like a special sub list of here's all the ones that are book club kits that are part of Nebraska 50 books but i do see actually and i we we appears there is a way that we've done that um let's see here there's a way to search our list for the 150 titles yeah um and that's what i was trying to do but i do see i have it linked here for the show that's coming up on september 14th we do have a link right here several um titles from this list are available and if you do click on that this is from our um description of the show for next month um this does bring up all of the books that are um the have book club kits that are part of the 150 and you can see yes we do have for the one discussion questions here uh generic questions so if you're looking for ways to use these books and i'm i don't want to you know give so you guys are gonna do for next month but um yes there is um i'll be can search for the any 150 books and get all of them there all in one shot so you have no you know as opposed to just as juicing i can look for a specific title if i know but if i just want to know what are you know let's just do it the other way what are all the ones that are available and then i'll decide those are the ones that i want to work on um in my book club yes you can do that by browsing Nebraska 150 titles all right there you go but we'll have more about that next month so i'm not gonna you know go ahead and explore the list you're um you're okay so lisa yeah i was trying to find this and she says yes there's a way thank you very much yeah all right great anybody have any other questions about the um program the 150 books um any of the titles anyone's well i'm not gonna oh i was gonna say anything you think should be an illicit was that comes up pretty um and you think you're welcome to give voice to that unfortunately be it's a pretty rigid list at this point but we do we still do like to hear about notable Nebraska books that we might have it's hard getting it down to just 150 it is a whole remarkably hard of estates writing oh i couldn't even yeah and Nebraska has a particularly rich history of um of writers and i really do believe i mean uniquely um a lot of exceptional writing has come from Nebraska so i'm hoping that this will also just get people even if we didn't include your favorite title or something and at least we'll get people it's a start i mean this is just the 150 this is you know start with some of these authors and if you find an author on here um some of their books are on the list but other ones you'll hopefully expand and find if you like that particular person find other things that just didn't get selected for the list you know keep going exactly and i think that's that that's the whole point of this is just to call um call attention to the Nebraska literary tradition and to um just bring attention to to Nebraska writers um the mission of the heritage room is to celebrate to preserve and to promote books by Nebraska authors and so this is just one one of our programs that helps to do that and so this is just this is just the starting point so i hope this will um begin a journey for you and to Nebraska authors and what we have contributed to our state and then national i mean that the literary consciousness um all over well i've already seen some that i'm going to want to now grab so which is good or bad you know i have stacks of books that i'm still to read you know over the years of course i think we all do but there's going to be some other ones added to that pile unfortunately um this looks like any other urgent questions have come in while we've been chatting so i think since we are a little after 11 o'clock we will wrap it up all right thank you all for tuning in i'm glad to be a part of it thanks so much erin this is great um i'm glad to see all these titles and like i said i want to get into some of these as well and um as we said next month erin will be back we'll be talking specifically about using these titles in your book groups yes right um a silent for that one if you want to delve more into that and actual more things you can do um at your library and we will expand on you know specific things um and if you're doing something at your library you already have planned i'll throw that out right now um i'm doing this off the cuff i haven't told lisa erin but um contact us or contact lisa maybe and we can get you come on and talk about what you're doing at your library if you have something planned or organize or something we'd be glad to share it so that other libraries can get an idea of what all what is already going on out there what's already been planned absolutely um so definitely let us know when we can um have you chat about that um as well uh so that will wrap it up for the day show um it has been is being recorded as we speak um and it will be available on our encampus live website as you saw earlier when i first got to hear you can just go and google encampus live and it comes up luckily so far we're the only thing called that so it's pretty easy to find our website um these are upcoming shows but right beneath that is where we have our archive sessions if you click on there you will get all of our archives of all of our previous shows as it goes back to the very beginning which was in 2009 um so if you want to you can go back and watch all of our old things when we were very young show and just getting started um so some of the things on here may be um out of date but their first historical purposes artwork our new librarians read archiving things so they're all there but feel free to watch anything um this session we posted up here and i think last week's yeah love the recording we'll have the powerpoint presentation that we've been using and the links to all the different things just like this is the one from this one from last week's you'll be able to watch that ideally it should be up and ready sometime this afternoon i'll let you all know an email when it's available for you if you want to rewatch something or share this with anyone that you think might be interested in it it'll be posted there um so i hope you join us next time we have erin back which is next month and next week we have a making the most of maker camp at your library that's our next topic um maker camp is like you know these maker rooms or exploring rooms and things that have technology and things that people can use to just create there is a maker camp project which is kind of like summer camp for making so rather than saying we have this homemaker thing we have to constantly be going doing this is more of a you know um short term type thing and a couple libraries here in Nebraska Seward and Geneva who have done um uh maker camps and they're both going to librarians from their um libraries are going to come on and tell us about that hi he's still afraid yeah it's okay no it's all right uh lisa who we were just talking about just walked in say hi lisa you're here and i told them hello i'm here we were just talking about uh next week's shows um so i hope you join us for that also encompass live is on facebook you can click from here and in many other places on our site um if you are a big facebook user go over there and give us a like there we go this is the only thing will pop up if because i'm not logged in um i post reminders of when the new show is when a show is starting when a recording is available um reminders of the upcoming shows so if you are big on facebook do pop over there and give us um a like other than that that will wrap it up for this morning thank you very much and hopefully you'll see you next time on encompass live bye bye say bye lisa bye