 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is our weekly online event here. Yes, it is a webinar. You can call us that. We won't be offended by the term. We cover a variety of library activities, topics. Basically anything going on in the library world, we want to share it on our show. The show is free and open to anyone to watch, both the live sessions that we do and the recordings. We do these shows live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. And then they are recorded as we are doing it. They are then posted onto our website. So if you aren't able to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. You go to our website and see all of our recordings going back to the very beginning when we started this in actually January 2009. It's been a while now. We do a mixture of things here, presentations, interviews, book reviews, many training sessions. Like I said, anything library related, we are happy to have it on the show. And we do have commission staff, Nebraska Library commission staff that sometimes do presentations. But we also bring in guest speakers very often as we have this morning. And today we have a lively group from our South Sioux City Public Library here in Nebraska. I've been to Northeastern Nebraska and they've been with us multiple times. But two years ago they did a session about turning your library around. They did, some new staff would come in, did some great changes, updates, new programming and things. So the director there, Dave McSturff is on the line with us today. Hi, Dave. Hello. And he contacted me and wanted to do an update to let you know what's been happening since the last time they were here. I hadn't realized it had been a whole two years. It didn't seem that long. But I will hand it over to you guys now there, Dave. And you can introduce who's there with you and go ahead and take it away. Okay. Thank you for being here today in the room in the office here. We have Odessa Meyers, who's the children's librarian, Dan Neiman, who's the assistant director, programming director, technology director, pretty much does everything, and then me on Dave McSturff. And to give you a little background right now, it's probably, we're supposed to have a warm today. Today, it's supposed to get up to about 25. So I've got shorts and a t-shirt, going to enjoy the outside weather while we got it. And for those that don't know anything about our library, you notice the first picture here, the birds. We have an aviary in our library. And that's kind of one of our very distinguishing things that people know about our library quite a bit. And just yesterday, we got three new birds that were introduced into it, some dogs, and an orange weaver type bird that's from Africa. So we have a very unique kind of library here. And we're definitely different thinking compared to most libraries, or what I call the old-fashioned thinking library. That's definitely not us. So our presentation is called Turning Your Program Around Part 2, what the South Sioux City Public Library did to change the public perception of the library. And so we kind of used some of our old slides and added new stuff that we've been doing. So for people that haven't been here before, June 1st, 2009, the library definitely changed. I was hired, Odessa was hired, the library board that was in existence was replaced in this midst, and a new board was put into place. The perception of the library at that time it was boring. Nothing to do in the library, programs just the needs of the people. When you walked in the door, the walls were white. There was nothing up on the walls, no posters, no books on display, nothing. You didn't see a kid in the library. And a lot of people's comments, they didn't know we even had a library in the community. So in the last five years, these are kind of the changes that we've seen. We'll go through some of our stats, because I like stats. And then we'll turn it over to Odessa, she'll tell you what we did with the kids area. Then we'll tell some of the programming and then I'll finish up with some of the other things that we've done. Circulation checkouts when we started, you can kind of see we've doubled. More than doubled in just five years time period. And a firm belief I have when I stepped in the first thing that I said, pick a genre. And this was to all the staff and everybody started choosing books in their favorite genres. And we definitely saw checkouts improve quite a bit. And we really looked at kind of the unique genre that we're here to. Not wanting to put down women, but in a lot of libraries that I'm at, where it's a lot of female staff, they don't tend to think of guys sometimes for magazines and things like that. And our library, it was almost like 90% of the magazines were for women. And we've kind of changed that. And now we see a lot of change in checkouts and different things like that. Computer usage, you can see it's gone up 10,000. Reference question, that's just a little bit of a jump there. Adult programming attendance has just skyrocketed. This year we're already ahead of where we were last year. And children's program attendance, the total that we have for 2008, 2009 back then, we are already at that number in the first four months of this year already. So we're looking at another increase this year for children's programming attendance. The number of programs is what, once I started counting this up, I kind of really had to stop and make sure I was getting the right numbers because it seemed odd. When we first started, there was about 160 programs in a year here at the library. It was the kids' programs and adults' programs. Now for this year, our children's programs will average around 600 programs in a year. And that's with one full-time children's librarian and a part-time library, children's librarian that takes over in the evening. We do around 100 adults' programs in a year. And we do around 800 technology classes in a year. And that's with a staff of 10 people and only four of them are full-time. So a total of about 1,500. So that's a little bit of a jump, too. What do we do to accomplish this turnaround? The big thing, and Dan will kind of talk about this a little bit, interviewed library patrons. That was one of the first things that we looked at for the people that were actually using the library. And then we wanted to figure out the people that don't use the library, how to communicate with them. So we created a questionnaire. And I've actually sent the next questionnaire that we were going to be putting out. And that's a handout that's available. We created a four-page questionnaire that we're going to be putting in different areas in the community and then also handing them out to library patrons and then putting it online. Dave? Me and Lee. Dave? Yeah, hi. I just want to let everyone know that that's one of the things that you sent me ahead of time. Yes. Yep. Those of the handout and also another two hand documents that Dave sent me will be available with the show notes afterwards as well. I put them up into our slide share account so that people can see exactly what was on the questionnaire for their own use. So it will be available afterwards for everyone. Okay. And then meet and re-meet. And I don't think re-meet is a real word, but I didn't know what other word to use. With civic groups and gift presentations. And that's a very important thing because when you first start, especially as a new director, everybody wants to kind of meet you and see things like that. Well, you got to keep letting people know what you're doing at the library and how things are changing. Meet with your local agencies and see what the library could do to assist their agency. And that's something that I'm really kind of proud that we've been working on. There's another couple things in the works right now that hopefully down the road will be quite a change for our library and might be something that other libraries could start doing. Talk with the area school. Do a review of the services your community provides to try to fill in the gaps. For those that don't know our community, our community is about 50% Hispanic. There is no movie theaters in our community. There is no music venue places. There's no museums. There's no sporting events except for high school type stuff. The kids could participate in after school sports, but there's not any other kind of things that are in there. There is a Y in our community, but it's kind of out of the reach of a lot of our patrons. So the library tends to be the spot for a lot of people to be able to go to. See what other libraries are doing and recreate their ideas to fit your needs. And we do that quite a bit. Utilize the skills of your staff. That's the one that I'm really always kind of surprised when I talk to other people. I'm surprised how many people don't really ask their staff to help participate and do any unique things that they may have skills at doing. And keep an open mind. Even if an idea doesn't catch on or out of way, keep trying. We've tried some things that maybe had one person show up at. And you try it again, one person. And then finally maybe it caught on. So that's a big thing. Just kind of keep trying. So now I'm going to turn it over to Adapta. So changes in our youth programming. Like Dave said, I was hired in June of 2009. At the time that I was hired, 30 times were held consistently. And two programs that ran once a month. And so that was their consistent. Dave said that I think there was like 160 total programs in the library when we both started. We've increased that. I was three-quarter time for the first two or three years, two years I worked here. And I increased by 200% or something like that while I was three-quarter time. Now that I'm full-time and I have an assistant, a part-time children's library. And in the evening we increased even more by offering different programs at different times. The one big thing that I found, because my ultimate goal was to get more children's library. And one thing I told Odessa and Dan is we may be doing a lot of programs, but the big idea here is to show what can be done so we can actually get staffing numbers and up to be able to provide even more once they get impressed on what you're able to do with just a three-quarter time person. So that was the big emphasis on why we were doing so much at the beginning, too. And so this year now that I have myself at full-time and we have an evening, we're very fortunate to have an evening part-time gal working with me, we can do four storytime programs a week. That's just for the preschool and poppers. Now if you don't have a lot of time to plan or your part-time to four, you know, do multiple ones, they can be the same storytime. They can be the same craft, the same story, offer them at multiple times, different times through the day to fit other, fit working in as non-working parents or not outside as a home working parent. We show two of these a week. That is a, no staff needs to be there watching. You know, we have it in our library fall and we can put the movie in and it'd be good. I have a baby storytime once a week that has been increasing. The attendance has been increasing quite a bit on that one, because word of mouth is finally getting out. We have an art program which is free art. I set out supplies and they come in and they make their art program or they make their art project. So we have a weekly night of fun program which can be anything from board games to jigsaw puzzles to creating a little hand-held game out of paper, place and a balloon, things like that. And once a week we have a employee here who lives bilingual. That's once a month. And she does a Spanish storytime for us. I do the craft and she does the book. And then we were fortunate to be able to add clubs that are held once a week and we'll get into those clubs in just a minute. We do a lot of partnerships with the community which helps with me trying to it frees up my time because I don't have to plan it. I just have to set it up and organize. So on the left-hand side of the screen we're going together with the extension office and every child's ready to know. I can't think of who she's with. So we offered a T-week program. The parents interacting with instance where they were running the program. They utilized the library as a house. And I invited the people that were already coming into our library to join and get the word mouth spread, spreading through the community. Dr. Powell is a local gemologist who comes in and does the whole program for me. All I have to do is advertise. And the schools we have invited to come in and do multiple different programs. The one photo we have is the music in the school program. Where they come in, they hold the program in our library. We do have a staff member helping them set up the things like that. But the program is there for us. So if you can work with your community, it frees up a lot of your time for any kind of planning that needs to be done because they're doing the program themselves. Our summer reading programs, we work with our local office group. There's a lot of times that budgets are hard to come by to get some of our summer reading programs to get some of those digital formers in. And though we do have a small budget for our summer reading program, we also work with our South New City Optimist Club. And during the holiday season, which ours is wrapped up, they have an annual reeve auction. And because it's held the last two years, it was held in the library. And the staff helped work the reeve auction this year. And it's a new location to advertise another fairly new building in the community. But some of the proceeds, South New City Optimist Club does everything that was used in the community. And so some of the proceeds come back to the library to help with pay for our big performance, such as we bring in a zoo with educating animals. We bring in mad science performance. We bring in jugglers, puppeteers. And some of the proceeds help pay for our performers. And so if your budget is really small for the summer reading program, work with your community organizations and see what they can help offer to you. Since this is the big thing with the program, you want to keep your programming consistent. It's a major help for your family self. Remember when to stop in the library, what day they need to be here. Being consistent in special programs, whether it be monthly or yearly, is also a benefit. It's a benefit if you can have a program that's weekly. Like all my parents know when toddler time is, or what day a paddock cake house program is held. They know Friday they need to be here at 10 o'clock for a toddler time. Or seriously, they need to be here for the paddock cake house if it's a baby. And so if you have it, they know consistently what day to show up on. And it's a schedule for that. Our Winston nightclub that we've been able to introduce with Julie, she's not using children's librarian. We started at late this year. So they're just in the beginning takeoff with the attendance. Isn't that huge right now with them? We have a consistency of maybe five kids every Wednesday night for our club. But word of mouth is something that's how our programs grow in this community. And so it takes a little while. It might take six months before we see a huge increase in that. So we have robotics clubs. We work with the Extension Office again. They come in, they bring their robotics in, and the kids get to build their robots, and program the computers to run the robots. We have a Lego club, which is structured buildings at times. And then there's also three building times, so the kids can have fun. That will help get your twin boys into the library as well. Same with the Mad Sciences Club. We introduced some science experiments and activities with the kids. Now you have to realize that in our community, we have parents that work to shift a lot of times. So these kids are not getting any of these hands-on activities like they did when I was a child growing up. My mom would say, oh, mom, we have the ability to build Legos with her or do different science experiments, like make our own silly putty in. Really simple things like that. Parents aren't able to do that today. And so we as a library have taken that on to fill in these things that are missing in kids' lives. And the technology kids' clubs. We do right now have our traveling laptop we use for our technology class, which I think Dan talked about her days. But on Wednesday nights, it's not utilized. And so once a month, we have a technology kids' club where we use our laptop cart. And we let the kids choose what they need help with, if they need help with their Facebook or their email. Or we will find a new game or application for them to try and introduce it to them. Some are education, some are just for fun. And so those are just some things that we do with our clubs every Wednesday night. You want to make the library a fun place. We do have, I believe Barnes & Noble is where we get our posters. We have Diarrhoi's When We Kids poster up right now advertising the new book. We have our team space down in the lower left corner where we're putting up book reviews for the kids to push the books. Kids are always hanging out in there. We have a checker table. Kids are always playing with. I do happen to have a skill of making cue cupcakes for the kids. And so I'll make cue cupcakes once in a while and bring them to the kids at a story time. And then class time. Some libraries only do reading where they'll do a fingerprint reading. And that's great and that's perfect. We do incorporate reading and puppets in our story time. But we also make a craft. And I'll tell you, those kids just look forward to making something to take home with them. Here is the craft in the very lower right hand corner of what they've been making. There was a little lie in that. And kids, two years old can do something like that. The other three pictures are of my baby time. We have older siblings that do join us. I open the baby time. I say it's good for one or from birth to two years old. We do have some infants that are coming. But then we have the older siblings that aren't in school yet, coming with their two-year-old siblings as well. We do a craft with them, which is something that parents can recreate at home. We happen to make two or three bags with baby oil and paint. And it made marble painting inside of the bag. We get bubbles out like they could blow bubbles. We have puppets that the kids play with. It's very interactive and very encouraging for the parents and the kids to get on the floor and play together. Of course, we celebrate Dr. Seuss. Most people do. We had one of our staff members be able to dress up as Dr. Seuss this last year and walk around and play with the kids. They made their own Seuss creations. They had a guessing game of guess who the Seuss character was. We had reading time as well. We have a successful... This is my first year having a very successful TAB group. Very self-efficient. They can pretty much run themselves. It's taken me four or five years to establish it this way. And so this year, I was comfortable introducing a advisory board for our middle school kids. And that's our Minions. They chose their own name. TAB is specifically high school. This is 9th through 12th grade. And Minions is our middle school kid. 6th through 8th grade. Currently, we have 15 active high school TAB members and 8 active Minion members. What their job is is their running activities for other teens and the youth in our community. They try and help open up the library for others that may not always come in here. And I've seen a lot who avoid coming in and being active TAB members to make the library a funer place, a cooler place for them to hang out and be. These are a couple things of our TAB program. Last year, we had a spooky teen only Halloween party in the basement. Yes, it did take my time in the evening. We did it prior to Halloween. The kids had a flap. We had kids dress up. We had games. We had one of the kids, this Hispanic and his grandma and him made a pinata that we couldn't bust open because they made it so strongly. And we just had use of the library's basement. It was spooky and dark. We had black lights. It took myself to staff it. And that was it. I had all my teens. They brought their own music. They brought snacks in. It was very fun. They got to do their own type of thing. This year, what they wanted to do, and this was all the teens wanted to do it, they wanted to run a Halloween party for the kids in our community. And so we had a huge turnout for that. Dave was in his gesture costume down here reading and playing magic tricks with the kids. Our teens came up with the craft they wanted to do. We created the games. We had Tim, the both finalist skeleton. We had a vintage game they taught from the Frankenstein's mouth. They did face painting. They created paper plate monsters. They really went all out. And they came in and they decorated the whole kids area for the Halloween party as well. Your teens in your community are a huge asset. Thank you, Dave. A huge asset to your libraries. And to participate in anything. And really give them the reign to take and give you the ideas. Be open to anything that they suggest because they have great ideas. They want to do a puppet show. They want to do so much with the kids in our community too. They have plans to do a murder mystery dinner theater, which last one we did with three years ago. So I'll be working with a new tab group. Just a huge asset if you can encourage the kids to come in. And now it is dance time. Okay. Programming with adults. You've never programmed for adults about programming with them. And part of the thing that helps is bringing out most of the best in your library staff. And each of our library staff members dobbling, they all get in one way or another into programming, whether it's children or adults. So we include everybody and we include everybody based on most of them, their interests, their ideas. Because I'll have one set of ideas. Dave will have one set of ideas. But if we take all of our staff and get their ideas together and get them motivated, then we can have even more programs and do more fun things. What's kind of frightening, we have these those just hanging around in our closet at home. Yeah. This is from Off Like a Pirate Day that we used a couple of years ago to introduce the Mangle Language software that we have. We also try to connect with our library members. This was during our band book and we had a lot of fun. Dave's talking with one of the people that were there that morning. We value the opinions and thoughts and ideas of all of our card members. And then we also reach out to the rest of the community that are not card members. We consider everybody of the girl. They have a card in our service area if you want to reach out to everyone. This is also from band books that we're able to get our city administrator on the right to come in and be part of the read-up on. On the left is our newspaper reporter that covers a lot of our activities. We're able to make the most of that event to reach out to the broader community. Almost in every interest is a library service. The garden before we came here gardening was not really on our radar before David came here in 2009. But Dave has an interest in gardening and got a community garden going. That's an outreach for the library and garden classes seed saving. For now, we have our first tomato tasting contest for child varieties of tomatoes that were grown in the community gardens this year. Angled yarns is another program that has grown up, I didn't just from the last year or so, from a couple of our ladies that were interested in just getting together and practicing crochet and knitting in different homes. That's a big argument. There are a couple of our members that are involved in that group and they have a lot of fun doing what they do. They've created a lot of unique items. The sprites, again, was another group that just started this year. This is a writing group. This is one page of our leader of our group, Angela. She gets the program going and we've had already one writer's workshop monthly to share ideas, do different writing activities and just kind of keep going on practicing writing because that's a very solitary thing that you might have other people talk about once in a while. We definitely have a lot of technology classes. The Spanish technology classes have done a very big boom to our program with one of our most successful things we've done. They've not only made the help with attendance but they've also made it like a poor group that always comes to all the classes. They're always ready to learn different things and our 10 staff with the Spanish speaking staff members. And we have hatred driven programs. Some of the programs we start, some of the programs other people can suggest there are also programs that maybe we suggest like one or two families or something to really push it forward. The view movies is an example of that. One of our members that got some recognition from the Mississippi Journal on their interest in monster movies. I think his family sometimes is one of the main states that made the view movies a popular thing in our community. The cult show we've had different readers from different volunteers almost every year with our cult show and it started off as just something we did. Now we work with Outlaw Trail so you can see the bi-way, the cult way that's usually in October. For different stations from south to the Valentine's Travel Highway 12 exactly different cult activities for book clubs this is something that has grown usually and really without our doing a lot for a moment. We have a book club that I do cover to cover it's regularly this is some of our recent books. Oh yeah, we have a book club in our teens too I forgot that. Yeah, we have a teen book club we also have another book club that we can get together and discuss books. We also we also work with the Daxons about the book club to get materials for them and we will post-pollinate our group to go to their meetings sometimes their group will come by sometimes we'll do both things together and so that's another area that we have kept going and really members have really perpetuated that well and then we have community-based programs two of the primary programs when we moved into the building was a ESL program ESL classes and our GED classes but things that were stalwart they find on having we really don't have to do anything to offer a space for them to teach those classes let me encourage people to take them and we try to find out from them what materials we can have that would move back up what they're doing in their future we've worked a lot with the bi-wave system in Nebraska we've done the Outlaw Trail bi-wave stuff with the group show we also work with the Bullwoodson Park bi-wave which is also on that bi-wave on the Bullwoodson Park program of course we're doing the bi-sub-payment and we also try to track their events and see how we can plug in with them our community program we work with the ALA and the National Endowment for Humanities to bring the Civil War with them the Civil War and the Constitution program to work south of the city area that was a a really good program to have so what through the Civil War what related to the Constitution was well-attended and well-spoken this is one of our speakers Grant Heeder who is our opening speaker for the program where he talks specifically about what and the impact of his presence on the Constitution we've also worked with the National Endowment to bring the Muslim journey to bookshelf work library this is a program that encourages understanding of the diversity of Muslim and Islamic community diversity of ideas and promoted their books. We have a booktop where we have covered all the basic books and we review those periodically and promote them on our Facebook page for the people to read and thinking about cultures other than just the Western European cultures and then the one book programs one book, one Sea Land we participate with those every year and those are all sorts of fun different reading ideas but they also are very programming. This year the one book, one Sea Land we're doing the Orphan Train so we're going to have speakers on the Orphan Train in Nebraska come here in April for that program Ban Books Week was really highly popular last week was more well received than I had even expected. We had a read-a-thon on one of the days during Ban Books Week where we invited people to come in to download 15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour or whatever and we had several our collection of Ban Books were frequently recommended and a lot of them discussed one of the books on the shelf and participated in that and they were very proud to be identified as a rebellious reader being a rebel is kind of a fun thing and how do we get the word out the website is one of our starting points as far as getting the word out to community about different programming we also develop electronic newsletter that we have a link to on our homepage that gives us all of our programming gives bios of different staff members reading collections new booklets as well as the programming for the month we also have a page in our simply new book about everyone who has every household has a water bill or a record book they all get an insert from us called our programming there and our Facebook page on social media Facebook is our most popular and most used site and that's a source for a lot of library information we've had a lot of contact with our community Facebook page and then we have a library blog that we keep up with library information that will be of interest to our patrons as well as the program we also have a Pinterest board which we relatively is relatively new to our library of starting we have a lot of our staff that pins things but we have just recently created a Pinterest board as well for our library for different displays we do different reads, read-alikes different crafts you can create that are book-oriented things like that and we also have postcards that we have at the desk for different programs put two programs that I'm on each site to try to infer some entire small people to come and get involved in a program they may not consider that to me with the phone ringing in the background one of the things that keep emphasizing over and over utilize the community as much as you can the library Cardinal festival this will be our fourth year coming up the library the city and one other group were the ones that actually started the community event and I'm glad now that a lot of other groups have gotten involved because I was putting in 13-14-hour days up during Cardinal festival when it was starting but now we've kind of paired back our involvement in it we do certain things specifically for but we're not being as much into it as what originally it was and now this is going to be a continuing thing year after year and it's the city-wide festival the Chamber of Commerce we've been working with them a lot and the community college and one of the things that the Chamber now is doing is this Christmas tree was actually donated to the library this year planted before winter sat in the Chamber purchased the lights and everything and now this is one of their program is that they do a winter holiday right before the shopping season is supposed to kick off and then the library for the operation with that we have a box that people can drop off like their deans to win things we put a display up in the display case for businesses in town so that's kind of cooperation back and forth between the city and the Chamber we keep talking about building programs out of the interest areas that your staff, friends, group or other volunteers may have I'm one of those directors looking at magazines during the work day just a lot of them doing their work but you get a lot of ideas out of these magazines something as simple as I think this was a country woman magazine and one day one of the staff was looking at it and they came up to me after talking with another one and well what do you think about trying this so that's a new idea that we're going to be starting this next year just from that my background with gardening we started a community garden group here in town and then started the community gardens and the library was one of the main ones that started that we now have two big garden spots and out of that have now grown a community farmers market a community orchard is just now in the process of being put in this next spring the orchard will be planted right now they're doing classes at the library on how to take care of orchard and then this year we also started the community garden club and get master gardeners to come in and talk to beginning gardeners on how you can grow stuff and then kind of out of that became the seed savers library we had been doing seed distribution for four years and I had never known that other libraries were calling it seed savers libraries we've been doing it for four years so we've been doing this for a while this year we did a tomato tasting contest at the end we had six judges that judged we had participants you can kind of see some of the growers in the background watching paying attention to what was going on we had six categories we had almost as many participants as seed savers exchange which has been doing this for years and years and years so I was very impressed next year we've already talking besides having the tomato tasting contest also having a salsa contest and there are some of the categories right there and then once again one of the staff had a skill that we didn't know anything about till I kind of walked by saw a magazine sitting on the shelf walked up and I just had to say you know that would be cool somebody that knew how to carve pumpkins and she kind of like well I do that you know my idea of carving pumpkins has taken the big old butcher knife putting you know getting the triangle eyes and that stuff out and she knew actually how to carve the cool looking pumpkins so we actually had a class on that and that's now going to become one of our usual things once again without having a movie theater in town we are the movie theater so we do a wide variety of what we do real to real what we call real life type situation movies Dan talked about the B movie night at the Bijou and once again very unique type group of clientele that comes to those type of movies so you can really get creative on what you want to do the classic movies and discussion we tried that for about two years never got few detentments so we're moving on to a new idea with that but did you hear how long they said that we tried the program before we decided to quit and we would get anywhere from one person to maybe ten people show up but never caught on to what we kind of wanted but we kept trying so we're going to kind of try now what I call unique ideas like a spaghetti dinner we'll serve a spaghetti dinner and what type of movie do you serve with a spaghetti dinner a spaghetti wester so that's kind of the thing what we're going to go for you look for unique kind of twist on things and introduce those at different times plus there's more things that we've done the immigration services we had that here at the library for about two years it got very popular once people in the community start knowing it got so busy here and then there were people going over to the agency where they were actually doing the work that we shifted everything over there now so now people are now knowing to go back over there Medicare sign up trivia content I mean just all these different things that's fun out of things the smoking workshops food canning classes we actually just purchase two canners and that's something that somebody's going to be able to check out in the future it has all the stuff in there except for the canning jar they'll have to buy their own canning jar so we'll be doing classes on that we put in an art gallery like I said when the walls but we first started take those pictures down and that's what the library looks like in the art gallery is done by volunteers they come in and put everything up themselves it stretches around the whole reference area back in that area we added a 50 plus area which now is where the garden groups meet the tangled yarns group meet the scribes y'all the wide variety the book club met there the other night and all the chairs and everything that's back in that area is designed for more mature people that might not be able to get up and down quite easily the chairs are actually a little higher than normal and you can stand up without struggling to stand up we added the mobile computer classroom which was through a grant with the Nebraska Library Commission was able to get we now have 15 laptops that we can do classes with we have the lcd projector and we've contemplated now getting to the point of getting a couple cases and start taking those out into the community like to the senior center places like that these are the 42 tech classes that we teach in English and Spanish each one last 30 minutes to 45 minutes and we kind of have a sequence set up that if someone is interested in trying to get a better job these are the type of courses that you want to take if you are brand new to computers these are the courses that you want to take and so like I said the Spanish ones have been extremely popular so if you have anybody that speaks both Spanish and English and they're interested in volunteering get them involved in doing tech classes for you what's the future hold for us cooking classes that came out of that one staff looking at a magazine and we're doing a one for December we've got something planned for January and February and we're slowly kind of getting ideas on doing different things like that film classes you know how to create your own movie genealogy classes community health workers we are going to be one of the sites and it will be housed here at the library and twice a week there will be a community health worker that will be located here people can come in and ask questions of them and then they're looking for specialized individuals right now that are going to take training in the community to also answer community health social worker is the one that we are really interested trying to get going through the community health worker for and I have been talking about the context needed to make but I would love to be able to see at point for especially the rural communities that can't that don't have social workers around anymore that we are on a rotating schedule and we are located for the social worker one day per week or two days per week they come in and answer the basic questions and take care of that lot of simple little things that library staff does right now adult teens and young children's computer areas we are looking at redoing our tech area here so that the little little kids we just got a grant that we got two of the AWE type computers they are going to set up and we are looking at designing hopefully with the schools in the summertime that kids would be assigned to come to the library and do summer work at the library on these computers on working on the skills that they are lacking have a specialized just adult area for technology and a specialized area for them to use so that is a lot of libraries right in the province for the kids and the adults don't quite get along when they are doing technology together the last thing I can say everybody always goes my goodness how much money do you guys have in your budget field around this we spent maybe about $15,000 over five years for this so about $3,000 a year budget wise and a lot of our things are free we specifically look for things that we could do for relatively no costs at all our movies are part of our collection that we have we are well known in our area we draw a lot of people from three different states to get library cards here and check out our movies so we are well known for that our kids program is so attractive that we get people from free from all three states in here that come actually to our kids program they don't even go to their own local library so that's a big thing to us if we can do it if we can figure a way utilizing staff utilizing volunteers we try to do it so it all turns out are there any questions out there? Thanks Dave and Odessa and Dan does anybody have any questions nothing came up while you were talking everyone was listening very intently to all the great programming and things you've been doing there if anyone does have any questions type them into the questions section of your go-to webinar interface or if you have a microphone just let me know I have a microphone I want to ask a question and I can unmute you that was I remember we did this one two years ago guys and it was and then I was just stunned by how much of an increase and how much you've done I was going to ask about the money but you mentioned that already about how you as far as staffing goes I know Odessa you were new in 2009 and Dave you as well did you do have to this must take a lot of I'm sure a lot of people are wondering how much time does it take to do all of this and did you have to increase your staff a lot or how did you manage to pull off such a huge increase in the programming and the services that you're offering well actually we had one full-time staff member who retired and I was able to replace her with three part-time people but like Dan with his tech classes waiting he does them these are all things that we all know how to do everybody kind of went through and said okay I know how to do this I know how to do that I really don't have the plan I mean you pretty much putting together there's a PowerPoint that's at time but once that's done Dan his Thursday afternoon they're pretty much his tech time where he's got that set aside if nobody comes for the tech class then he still does his reference questions and there's other little things that he does when I have mine I set mine specifically that I do in times that I know I'm probably not going to have a meeting I have to go to or stuff like that if I do have to go somewhere one of the others to step in like I said with the story times if you can repeat your theme my well my story programs are all thematical you can do two three different story times each week to encourage multiple people coming in so it takes one planning time you know an hour to find your books your crafts create your master and you're ready to go and you can get two or three programs out of that one as long as you have it at different times different days you know yeah I thought that was a really good suggestion that you made yeah that you don't once the one book one time you just you say we're going to do it at 10 a.m. and at 2 p.m. and maybe it's you know and so on multiple days because everyone's schedules all these parents and the kids are going to have different schedules to that they need to work around and that's a great suggestion yeah yeah and hers is probably the most high and intensive I think Dan and I probably have the easiest for programs is so much of ours you know how hard is it to put together a movie you know and for us it's just naturally stuff we would do anyway with the the web page so you know just type in this that we've got a movie at such such a time or you know little things like that some of the things do take a lot more time I go out to meetings with a public health program that with several different special meetings there's another organization I work with that I go to and they've been in that group for four years and I show up for the meetings and so I mean a lot of these things like I said they don't some of them just don't pop up overnight and other things are just extremely easy the art gallery that was like one phone call somebody that was interested in doing it we've never done anything since then when I was three-quarter time it took a lot of time to try and get everything initiated and started to change our library into what it is now but now with myself being full-time and I do have the evening children's library I have a day that is set aside for tech classes and it's also my planning day so if I don't have anybody come from my tech classes on this specific day I can do all of my planning in that one day and have it done for the rest of the week or for the next week and so you just you just will find you'll be able to create your schedule to find time if you just want if you have the desire to do it yeah I think that's a good tip there that in the beginning like you just said Odessa it may take more a lot of work to get started and get figure out like you guys pretty much change the whole focus of what the library was because when you came in it was none of these things but once you get it all figured out and how it's going to work after that first big initial push it's going to be just like no big deal do a new one you know you'll have that you have this process down and you'll know where to go for your ideas and for your you know if you do crafting you'll have your website down you have your things that you go to to know my filing cabinet I have two drawers of my four drawer filing cabinet and it's a really long drawer so I don't know how to describe it but it's full of my four years of almost five years of story time that I've done and so if I get stuck or I run short on planning time I go back to one that I did four years ago pull it out well there it is yeah those kids aren't going to those kids aren't going to be coming to it now so yeah I've been trying to convince her she could do that more regular kids four years ago are now in grade school right you're going to have a whole new batch of little of kids that would have never seen that one before so but we have not really repeated a whole lot of things I keep track of all the movies that we've shown over the time I think there's probably about the only movie that I'm going to show now for a second time is it's a wonderful life and otherwise everything is relatively brand new you know it's just kind of and the big thing is don't put yourself in a box really think outside of the box a lot one thing that I want to work on with the adult programming is we are unfortunately and I imagine a lot of libraries are this way parents like to drop their kids off in the kids section of the library and go do what they want to do and so we want to organize this is an idea in my head and I want to organize it where we do have a craft time specifically for kids while the adults are doing a program on the adult end of the library and so we're having two things we're still watching those kids but we have activities for them while they're getting to do their activities it's going to be like a parent's night out at the library that's a cool idea we have one question that came in about when you're counting up your statistics for the programs you've got there are you including ones where you just offer space and the partners facilitating their own event and so like the library staff is not involved in it you're just saying yes you can use our meeting room for whatever does that get included in your statistics or do you count that differently? It's like for the GEDESL classes at the community college that whole thing there is that doesn't get counted but like say when we did the music in the schools we set up the whole thing we kind of coordinated it the schools came in did the presentation those kind of counts we did take because that was something that we actually participated in too When I organized with the community like the extension office and such to bring in or the gymologists who came in with his gym I made the initiation I contacted him I got it set up I advertised it the kids came in and utilized our space we counted that as a program that we did even though he was the one running the program Cool she says thanks for the clarification on the stats there Just a couple of comments have come in very impressed with how you turned your library around to meet community needs thank you for sharing I thought that was great too one thing that I noticed that you guys did and I've seen other libraries do it as well is looking into the community to see what is missing you said there is no movie theater so you've become that for the town I know another town in Nebraska there was nowhere in town to print out photos you know like you would go to like your local Walgreens or Walmart and bring your flash drive or whatever and be able to actually print out the pictures there's nowhere that did that so the library figured out and was able to get a photo kiosk so people would come to the library for that so I think that's something that you guys have done and that's just a great tip is don't just think about like you said Dave don't think outside the box look for what's missing in the community and become that thing That was one big thing with our DVD collection why it grew so large because we have one red box in the community and that's it and in our DVD collection it's so unique compared to probably most libraries that we draw a lot of people specifically for that and we do have one other comment from actually Brian Moss who is the at the eastern library system here in Nebraska is hoping that you might be presenting at our NLA fall conference next year possibly on something considered as being held up there in South City does anybody submit anything no not yet well you guys should we're going to be right in your town he looks forward to visiting the library and seeing what you're doing there I want to come and visit actually and see because I keep hearing about it whenever you guys do sessions on here and then help us live I want to see that aviary I want to see those birds so I'm going to make a point that you crawl in the aviary with a bead in your hand being the bird okay as long as as long as I don't get pooped on I'll be okay okay any other last minute questions from anybody on the line here today we have just a little past 11 o'clock now so it's about our hour I mean the big thing I emphasize over and over and over again you know the old idea of what a library is and we have real good example just right across the river from us they are very old-fashioned type library and we draw half our kids attended parents for our kids program because they don't like what they do over there it's a story and you go home and here they have a story they do a craft they have a snack and the kids are here for three hours with their parents not doing my program they're here reading books and playing afterwards after it's done they still stick around and use more of the library's resources yeah we do have a public stage for the kids to play with we have educating toys so it's a little playroom that they hang out in an hour or two after the storytime is even done so we schedule so many tech classes because we have so many different shifts of people like right now we've got a Spanish tech class that's going on and then there may be one in the evening another time and then we'll have some in the afternoon I'll have them in the morning afternoon and per day so you have to be flexible in your community if I could figure a way to do one at 2 a.m. in the morning we would do one at 2 a.m. in the morning because we have people getting off shift but only Dave would do that one I'm the only salary person well maybe that's what you'll come and tell us about in a couple more years that is one of the things we put on the questionnaire would it benefit people to have the library later on certain days or earlier on certain days and going as late as 11 p.m. or midnight because you have people getting off shift at 10 p.m. again that would be all Dave because the rest of us want to go home well doesn't look like any other new questions have come in while we've been chatting so I think we are safe to wrap it up for this morning thank you thank you so much guys Dave, Odessa and Dan that was great as usual lots of information was poured out there to everyone and we will Dave if you can send me that PowerPoint presentation I will upload it to our slide share account as well so it will be available along with recording afterwards and I'm going to pull back presenter control here here we go to just wrap up for the day like I said I have been on our slide share account we've got the the handouts that Dave mentioned I actually listed the technology classes that you offer you sent me and the evaluation and I've been saving into the commission's delicious account any of the things I could catch that were websites that might be out there that were things that were mentioned during the sessions this will be included as well in the archive when the recording is up so that will wrap it up for this morning show as I said the show is recorded has been recorded and will be available here on our archived and compass live sessions page where you can see here we've got all of our previous shows as I said going all the way back to January 2009 we first started so you can watch all those there and I hope to join us next week when our topic is on a unique well hope it's unique a collection that some people have heard of and think is oh yeah we always have that and some people have never heard of cake pan collections lots of libraries are doing this those kind of cake pans that make difference things like a picture of Barbie or something like that or a dinosaur and this is a library in Iowa that's going to be joining us north liberty community library D crowner is their library director and they have a collection over 250 cake pans that they are going that they have and that they are going to she's going to be sharing with us what they are doing there with that so hope you'll join us next week for that also end cup is live is on Facebook so if you are a big Facebook user please do go ahead and go over there and like our page on Facebook we post when new sessions are being added when something is started like this morning I said you can join us right now on the fly when the recordings are available we post here as well so when it is done and processed and ready for you to watch you'll be able to go there and find that out so that will wrap it up for today thank you very much for joining us and we will see you next time bye bye