 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host Christa Porter here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show as we are doing today. And it will be posted to our website in our archives for you to watch at any time at your convenience. And I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of our archive shows. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries. That would be similar to your state library. So we provide services and programming and resources to all types of libraries in the state. So you will find shows on Encompass Live for all types of libraries. Public, academic, K-12. Corrections, museums, archives, historical societies, everything and anything. Really the only criteria that it's something to do with libraries or library related. We do book reviews, interviews, mini training sessions, demos of services and products. All sorts of things. We sometimes have Nebraska Library Commission staff come on the show and do presentations about resources and services we're offering here. But we also bring in guest speakers as we had and that is what we have this morning. Tammy and Sarah are going to talk to us about the Libraries and Veterans Toolkit that they're both involved in. Let's see. I'm just looking at my legs here. Okay, cool. And with some great resources that all sorts of libraries can use, which I think is awesome. So I will hand it over to you, Tammy and Sarah, to fully introduce yourself and tell us all about the toolkit. Great. Thank you so much. And thank you everybody for coming to our webinar today. My name is Tammy Owens and my pronouns are she and hers. I'm the outreach librarian, outreach and instruction librarian at the University of Nebraska Omaha. And I'm here today with Sarah Lemire, project lead for the Libraries and Veterans Toolkit, who is also an Army veteran herself. And she was the one who started this whole thing. And I was very, very pleased to be a part of it, a very small part of it. So today, Sarah will introduce the toolkit and I will then, after she's done, I will also introduce her and speak about a few ways that I serve and support and celebrate military affiliated students at the University of Nebraska Omaha. And then throughout our presentation, we'll just have polls for everyone to answer and always feel free to ask questions at any time. Thanks, Tammy. All right. So before I kind of get started, I want to take a moment to acknowledge and thank IMLS without whose support we could not have done this project. We're really proud of what we've come up with and are very grateful for that funding. So to give a little bit of background, this toolkit came out of a larger project, which was called the Libraries and Veterans National Forum. And this project is kind of a brainchild that was really about stopping this kind of reinventing the wheels that I was seeing. Every time I go to conferences and talk about veterans, I hear from folks who are doing this work, but are not connected with other people doing this work. And so what we wanted to do was bring librarians together who are working with veterans, military populations in their libraries and share ideas. What are you doing? What are you doing? Let's not reinvent the wheel. Let's build on each other's work and borrow ideas because I know about you all, but I was looking for new ideas. And so that's, oh, somebody did this thing. I'm going to do that at my library too. That sounds like a great idea. So what we wanted to do was physically bring librarians together. And then of course, the pandemic happened. So what we ended up doing was hosting this project virtually. And the great thing about this is that all of the presentations that we have from librarians around the country, all kinds of different libraries are all recorded and available on our website. So if you're interested in seeing what people were talking about, what they were doing, we do have those recordings available. The forum happened last fall. And then we followed on that initial gathering by offering microbrands. That project also ended, but was a great way to get people engaged in talking about or engaged in and trying out things that they saw at the forum. And then we made a toolkit. And that's what I'm going to be talking about today. So quick acknowledgement again of my colleagues who worked with me on this project. My colleague Stephanie Graves was my co-PI on this project. Beth German, who is at Texas A&M and now is at Princeton, was our toolkit designer. And then Janina makes the magic happen. And we could not do any of this without her guidance and support. So before I talk about the toolkit itself, I want to get a sense from you all. Are you already working in this area? Are you interested in this but haven't started yet? So what I'd like you to do is give us a response at this link here. It's polllab.com slash tamulib or you can text tamulib to 37607. And then I'm going to switch over tab by tab here to pull everywhere so we can see what folks are saying. Okay. So that's right at the top of the page. In case anyone's worried about it going away. Yeah, let's see what comes up. So please go ahead over to there. There we go. Got some answers coming in. Absolutely. The top thing with these polls is that it's hard to tell if other people are still waiting to respond or if everybody said the same thing. So I'll give it just a second or two to see if anything shifts around. But it looks like not currently doing this but kind of thinking about this seems like the place that folks are, which is really helpful to know when we're thinking about the toolkit because that's one of the populations we're really trying to serve. Okay. Seeing no shift there, I'm going to assume that this is where we are. We're at the no but we're thinking about it at stage. That's great. Okay. All right. So now the toolkit is intended to serve multiple audiences. So it's intended to support folks who have not done this and are looking for ways to get started and also for folks looking for new ideas. So there are a range of activities that built into the toolkit from like I'm not sure what to do, what kind of things that I add to my collection, what would be something I could do for Veteran's Day to more, I'm doing Veteran's Day kind of stuff, how do I kind of push outside of the month of November and look at more broad programming. So the toolkit was populated by librarians like Tammy from all around the country. So we had academic librarians, public librarians, military librarians, VA librarians, just a whole host of librarians come together and come up with ideas, things that they're already doing in their libraries that they can kind of write up and kind of make a program in a box. What am I doing in my library? What's been successful? How would I tell somebody else to do this? And so we took those programs in a box and we put them in a searchable toolkit. So the toolkit itself, this is kind of what it looks like and I'm going to toggle over and show you it itself in just a second. But it's intended to be searchable and browsable. So you can look by library type. We want to push outside the idea that a program that was done in an academic library can only be done in an academic library. So you'll see that some things we were said were appropriate for multiple venues. The types of program. So are you looking for a display? Are you looking for a panel discussion? Are you looking to populate your collection? What kinds of things are in there? You're programming audience because a program that's for young children of service members is going to be different than for student veterans at a university. So programming audience and then the topic. Are you looking for something for financial literacy month? Or are you looking for something related to like art therapy and creative activities and things like that? So we have it sorted in all those different ways. And then everything is licensed, Creative Commons license so that you are free to use and build upon it and share it out as well. So I'm going to toggle over again and switch to my toolkit here. This is the actual toolkit. And so if I wanted to look for say something from a public library, I can click on public library library. And you'll see a whole host of programs available here. So maybe I'm interested in doing an oral history program. I can click on this item and I'll see that it has a description of what they did, right? I'll tell you the audience that it was aimed at costs, right? Costs are so important, right? It's sometimes like, well, I could do that. How much is it going to cost? You can see that often there's a range. So some things don't cost anything in the toolkit. And others have a more substantial budget timing. So knowing how long it takes to plan such an event is often really helpful. How long the event lasts. So some things it's like it's going to take an hour or it's going to endure for an hour and other things it's going to be for a long period of time. Any specific resources needed, particular tips for success. This is kind of that place where you could tell somebody, you know, this works but you really have to do this thing, right? It's going to be really helpful if you find a strategic partner or, you know, you want to make sure that you give yourself enough lead time because it takes longer than you think it will. Ideas for how to access it. Partners and stakeholders, additional resources. And then you'll see down at the bottom some of them will have files. So sometimes they'll have like an assessment tool that you could reuse or like here there's a sample budget. So they're trying to give folks enough of a enough of a starting point that folks could really say I can do this I can bring this to my supervisor and say I want to try this project. This is how much it's going to take, how much time right here are the people I need to reach out to. And you have a pretty concrete idea of what you need to do. So that's the idea of the toolkit is to give this kind of resource that folks can really get some ideas of what they could do to get started and how much of an investment it's going to be so that you can find something that feels like it's appropriate for the amount of time you have, the budget you have, the human capacity that you have, and really think about what can I do that's been successful in another library. All right, I'll hand it over to you, Tammy. Great, thank you so much. So I attended the forum and I was involved in creating the toolkit and I have been interested in this primarily because I've been very connected with our Military Connected Resource Center at UNO at the University of Nebraska Omaha. And so I want to tell you a little bit about our partnership and then about some of the things that we've been doing together. So go ahead and go to the next slide, Sarah, please. So our Office of Military and Veteran Services, as it was called then, began at UNO in 2012. The office is dedicated to the needs and the fulfillment of the goals of our Military Veteran Guard and Reserve Independent Student Population. That is their mission. So since its inception, the office has generally processed benefits, provided resource counseling, advised on programs and school admission, and really created a space that's really dedicated to the Military Affiliated Student Population. They have study spaces, they have computers, they have study rooms, and it really is designed by and for Military Affiliated Students. On the screen is our statistics from a few years ago and our statistics for Military Connected Students enrolled has generally gone up over the years. And I know that I am and I think the entire office is particularly proud of being best for vets. And then we also work really hard to continue serving our Military Connected population however we can. So our university also has connections with Off-It Air Force Base and in addition to the work that I do with our Military Connected Resource Center, our business librarian has worked with the U.S. Strategic Command Strategic Leadership Fellows Program out of our College of Business Administration. So there are many different connections to the military at UNO. I was wondering the question, do any of the other University of Nebraska campuses have a similar thing or is it mainly UNO because of Off-It being there? You know, I don't know. And I have, that's a really good question and that's something that I'm definitely going to be asking. I know that we have people at Off-It that I connect with and that MCRC connects with often. So yeah, I don't think their partnership is quite the same as this partnership I think that I have. But it's definitely something that I'll be asking. Yeah, you're right close to there, yeah. Yes, we actually get, and you'll see this in our library guide that I'll show you in a bit, we actually get active duty military folks coming to campus using the library at UNO. So it's a little bit different, yeah. Yeah. So our partnership between the libraries and the Military Connected Research Resource Center, this was one of the first partnerships that I pursued when I became the outreach librarian at UNO when I actually came to UNO six years ago. I started with a limited kind of service, but it really quickly became a two-way partnership because I would go in and we would all chat. I would really just hang out at the office because frankly not a lot of people know what librarians do or what they're there for. And this was especially so for this population. They had expectations about what a librarian was and didn't understand the kind of wraparound services that I offered. So the partnership process has really been iterative because staffing in the Military Connected Resource Center, they even changed their name over the last six years. It's fluctuated between, so when I first got there, there were five full-time employees, one of whom was quickly not there, he actually went into the military and was deployed. So, but five full-time employees and 14 student employees in 2016, which is a huge office. And they were doing lots of different things and lots of different outreach to one part-time temporary person holding everything together over COVID. And now the office is re-staffing, rebuilding, and they really do have great things to come. So we are now figuring out how that partnership continues going forward. So, so these are some of the services and programming that we do together to support military-affiliated students at UNO. So the items with the asterisks, asterisks, I know I would have trouble with that word, are in the toolkit. And I know that many of the other things are also in the toolkit, but these are the things that I'll be talking about today. So let me just quickly go through the first three things and then move on to the other ones a little bit deeper in in the slides to come. So research help is really one of the first things that I offer to all of my student success partners. I typically go to MCRC, the Military Connected Resource Center. You're going to hear MCRC quite a bit over the next few minutes for an hour or two every week. Students can also book time with me in my office at the library or online over Zoom. So at MCRC, I usually end up though offering really informal research advice to students who are, again, hanging out in the office. That is the primary thing that I do is I come there and I say, how is your semester going? What are you working on? And that's when students, especially military-connected students, will be like, oh, well, you know, I'm, I don't know, everything's fine. And I say, really, is everything fine? Because I can help. And that's when we get down to business and talk about how to do those research papers. So, and then pre-COVID, new student orientations were held in person several times throughout the summer. So I would go to those orientations and have a five or 10-minute PowerPoint for newer continuing students during that time. Currently, MCRC holds new to campus and new to campus familiarization events for students that are either new to UNO or never attended a campus tour or orientation. So that was a big thing. They were finding that students, even if they, even if they were UNO students for several years, they never really attended a campus tour because they just kind of came in as transfer students. And that was it. So we are a stop on the tour. And we actually offer students a 15 minute, 10 to 15 minute small group kind of walk around of the library. It is a tour, but it is a very personalized sort of tour. And then the next thing, the events and the receptions and events are things that are held either by and at MCRC or at the library. We, library personnel, regularly attend events hosted by MCRC such as a pre-COVID wellness fair where the library had a table and the library also occasionally hosts events for military connected students specifically such as a fair for employers to meet students. And more recently, our dean has become the student veteran organization's faculty advisor. So the SVO meetings are now usually held at the library, which is a really great connection. So I'll go into more detail about these last three, the library guide, reciprocal training and library displays now. So if you're at an academic library, something like a military and veteran library resources guide is a really, really easy way to reach out to your military affiliated students. So in the toolkit, you'll see that there are a few different guides linked and each guide has resources specific to their students or their patrons. And this is really the key to success, I'd say, to this type of passive programming personalized that information for your military affiliated students or patrons, especially for specifically your students or patrons. So on our guide, we have information for active duty personnel. We, because we're right there near near off it and we had so many people coming in and asking if they could how they could use our library and what they would need. So in fact, we had to establish those policies and those procedures for active duty personnel. And I even was looking through my back email just recently, and we even kind of had to explain parking. We tried to get parking on campus for them because they would have their off at sticker. And so we had to work with parking. And unfortunately, that couldn't be worked out, but we were able to tell them how and where to park most easily for coming into the library. So we have that information. We have a list of the technology available for checkout at the library. We have descriptions of the spaces in the library. So they'll know what kind of what it looks like and what they can do at the library before they get there, including how students can study with dependent children in the library, because that was something that we knew was a question. Can I bring my dependent children? And how do I go about studying and being there with them? And then a section with links to databases and doing research and a connection to me as well. So we have links there as well. And then the next one, the reciprocal training. So the toolkit, you'll see on the toolkit, and Sarah, I don't know if we want to go to the toolkit pages or not. It's totally up to you. But you'll see on the toolkit that the train, the trainer program, it's a very simple program. It doesn't have as much in it as the last thing that Sarah showed you. It is literally a training program to show tutors and student employees, the library guide, and to teach them when and how to refer students for a consultation with a librarian. But it's always really, really interesting because the students are eager to learn. And so just having this, here is an expert training me on what to do when somebody says I have a paper. And they are very happy to follow directions and know what to do in that situation. We extended that with reciprocal training. We had a training for library staff, which was attended by approximately a third of the staff members. And they attended training about what was then called the Office of Military and Veteran Services, which gave them information, gave our library staff information about the typical, and I'm using air quotes here because there is no typical military student, but the typical student and how best to work with military affiliated students. So that training was really, really helpful. And I hope to do that again because it's been some time since we had that training. So that was reciprocal training. And then the next one is just so much fun. There's library displays. We actually, very recently, these are pictures that were taken last night. We recently partnered with MCRC for a bit of a display takeover in our library. They actually designed four display cases using material from our collection to educate students about the history of military service in sort of by the decades. So it was sort of almost by U.S. wars throughout history. And that's in honor of Veterans Day. So really, really great. And it was especially great to partner with our affiliate with MCRC because they brought everything except the books and the videos that you see. They brought the flag. They put it all together. And it really connects this to our collections and our service and our services. And this was done by student employees at MCRC. So now they know the collection even more. If I were to select items, then I would always have this question. I'm not a veteran myself. I would always have this question. Is this appropriate? Is this book something that I want our veterans and our military affiliated students to be looking at and to know that this is part of the history? So because they were chosen by our students, that makes it so much better and so much more. This is something that just makes me so happy because it was done by them. And there are two more pictures, I think, of other displays on the next page as well. Yeah, these are just incredible. And they're all over our library, which is just really great. Yeah. So and then there are, yeah, go to the, you should go to the page, Sarah, on the toolkit because there are other things that this wasn't made. This wasn't created by me. But there are other pictures because I think the most important thing is to get that partner and to get those objects and other things that mean something to your community within your display that just really personalizes it and makes people stop and look too. And these kind of things really catch people's attention, both military people that you are serving or maybe military people who don't know that you have these resources and it kind of gets their, wait, what is this? Why is this here? And also people who had no clue and aren't military and just are like, hey. Yeah. And it just kind of tells people that we do have that connection and we are honoring people who have served or who are currently serving or who have a connection to the military. So, yeah. Sarah, do you have any other ideas about any of these things from the toolkit? I was trying to figure out how to share the links to them in the chat and clicking all over things. So sorry for that. Yeah, it's a little, it's a little restricted, but yeah, I can, I'm copying some of these links to, into, there's a chat section in your interface for all attendees and you can see that there. That will also put links, we can put links to this while there is, let's see. I'm just double checking here. Yeah, we do have a link to like the main page of the toolkit or the live guide in the session, in the show description. So that will get you there to all these different parts as well. And I'll mention too while we're talking about it that these slides will be available afterwards as well to everyone. So embedded links, you all will have access to afterwards when the recording is available. Perfect. That was sort of what I was hoping that people would be able to go to these embedded links after they were, after the show. So that would be great. Thank you so much. Yeah, and I think seeing like the images of what this looks like is really helpful. Like Tammy, the pictures that you're sharing of what the, your student veterans came up with and how they conceptualize the display. Like it just gives ideas of what this could look like and how this could be put together and what kinds of resources you might need or might easily have access to either on campus or just in your local community. Absolutely. And this is something that there's not a lot, right? I mean, there's a core. There's the flag. There's the, you know, they actually put the, the, the fabric on the bottom. I mean, this is all them and it's better than anyone that I've done in a very long time. So, so it's really great. And it just makes me understand that they would be open to and kind of excited about doing displays for other, for other purposes. So just kind of continuing that conversation and continuing that, that partnership is just really going to be a, I think a really fun thing for us because we have so many display cases at the library and we're able to work with them. And, and their feedback for me when I was talking about showing these off because I was so pleased with them, their feedback for me was just sort of that they had a really great time working with our staff members. We have a coordinator for our displays who is a staff member at the library and he just did a really great job in making them feel welcome and helping them and giving them sort of that autonomy that they wanted to be able to make these. So, so I think that they'll be back, which is a really great thing. And so I think that's part of it as well. One of the things I just wanted to point out is in the guide that, that Tammy you were referring to, they also mentioned some other kind of dates or times of year that this might be relevant. So if it's like, well, November's already passed, but you know, I'm interested in doing something like this. There are other times that you could consider tying in such a display. Yeah, that's good to know. I mean, it is kind of, you know, convenient and it didn't, we didn't do this on purpose that this is, we're doing this happened to be the date they picked and then it's like, hey, Friday is Veterans Day. How about that? So yes, for this year, if you're unless you want to rush, rush, rush and do something now, it may be a little, but there's so many other throughout the whole year. Absolutely. Okay, I can also send book the book lists that they sent to us. These students actually picked out pages and pages and pages of books for us. And so if anybody wants that book list to do a very quick display, I'm happy to email that out to anyone. You may have a lot of these books in your collection this afternoon. You can go grab them and do something right away. But yeah, I really like that idea of continuing displays because displays to me are some of the easiest ways for people to get that kind of connection in their brain going and to say, this library cares and what else can I do and how else can I, you know, can I partner with this library? So throughout the year, it's so much is just a really great idea as well. Yeah. And then I really wanted to share because I emailed with our assistant director over at MCRC and was kind of talking with her about, oh, I'm doing this presentation. I'm showing off your displays. I'm talking about, you know, MCRC and our partnership. This is what she said and what she wrote back and she said, tell them that the library is a great resource for the military affiliate population with computers, resource materials and helpful librarians. And to me, I mean, of course, this is something where she's like, yes, I know that you want, you know, I, what, what this says to me is that the conversations that we've had have kind of that understanding is there, right, that understanding at the highest levels of the organization is there, that we have it's computers, yes. And that was the first thing that she thought of, right, but also the resources. And then also the librarians are there if, if students need them or if she needs them. So, so this says to me that, that, that, that she'll tell people and that she knows what, what we have there. So, so this was, this was really fun to get. So that, that is what, that is what I wanted to share. So now we go back to you and to Sarah. Yeah, so I knew that in our initial question, it sounded like folks were kind of in the, in the brainstorming phase, right, what are some things that, that I might be able to do at my library. But we also wanted to see are there are things that maybe stuck out for you or things that maybe you've already tried or have thought about doing in the past. So I have, again, a question for you, which is, what is something that your library has done or that you're working on, or I would even broaden that to say, or that maybe that we talked about today, or if you've been poking around in the toolkit that has jumped out at you, what are some things that maybe are piquing your interest? I'm going to come back to my poll and move forward. And we'll see what ideas folks have. So again, it's that pollup.com slash timlib at the top, or you can text timlib to 37607. But we want to hear from you all. After a choice of question, they just type in whatever. Yeah, you're thinking about great. While we're waiting for that to someone did say, yes, please do share the book list. If you want to, Tammy, if you want to send that to me, I can send it out when I send out the recording, or I can send it. I mean, I can, actually I can send it out ahead of time because that won't be till right tomorrow. But right after this, I can immediately email it to everyone because I have everyone's emails who logged in and registered. Great. Yeah, it'll take me a few minutes because I need to get it from our coordinator of our displays. But but yeah, then I'll send it over to you. Great. That's great. That's one of the things that we heard a lot when we were putting together the toolkit was like, what books should I add to my collection? What are some good books to do book clubs on or to put on display? Right. We don't want to have to reinvent the wheel. So let's share those ideas. And so folks contributed those kind of things to the toolkit, too. So you can see what people did in their military collection that they added or what people book, what books they've been using on book clubs, building relationships with campus units. Oh my gosh, that's so important in it. It can be so rewarding. The green zone sessions can be great. A lot of times really understanding what the experiences that student veterans are bringing to the table is so important to see who they are as students and the strengths that they've written to campus and green zones are really good for that. It can be a great foundational piece for then building that connection with your military students team. That makes a lot of sense. Oh, I'm so glad. I'm glad you'll be using it. That's the whole idea. We want folks to use it to see what might, but they might be able to, you know, to back borrow and steal from the toolkit because that's what it's there for. You know, let's make all of our lives easier. You know, I am very transparent that I absolutely take ideas from that myself and, you know, I've been doing this for a long time, but I'm always looking for new ideas and people are doing amazing things that I would never have even thought about. There are some great marketing ideas in there. I think it was Appalachian State made, they called them cadet kids, cadet kids for their student veterans who had children. They put them in the library so that, or in the veteran's center so they would have something to do. There's a little bit of marketing for the library there. I thought that was really cute. Okay, so looks like our poll is winding down. So I'm going to see if I can figure out how to get back here. So I wanted to mention our toolkit is a living entity. It's a living document. If there is an idea that you have or you know somebody who's done something great, please encourage them to contribute it. We are continuing to accept submissions. I add stuff as soon as they come in because we really do want to make sure that we're sharing those ideas. If you try something for Veterans Day, if you do a display or you have an idea that you got from the toolkit and you did something a little bit different, please share that with us so that someone else can borrow that idea and continue to pay it forward. So we've got that shared for you. There's more information on our website. The link is there and you're also welcome to get in touch with us if you have ideas. If you're interested in talking more, if you want to collaborate, we try to keep that avenue open because we're trying to build a community around this work and we want to welcome as many into the community as we want to join. And like I said at the beginning, don't want to reinvent the wheel and no one else should have to either. Libraries, we're all about sharing and borrowing from each other for our patrons and we do it for ourselves as well too. Absolutely. Any questions for us at this point? Yeah, nothing came in while you were talking. That's okay. If anybody have any questions you want to ask of Sarah and Tammy about toolkit or ideas or recommendations for things you can do, ideas that you might have from this, go ahead and type into your questions section of your GoToWebinar interface. That's where the three I did post on one of our attendees about wanting to share the book list. I said with the recording, while waiting to see if anybody has any questions or comments or anything you want to share, the recording and the slides and since we will be getting it, I'll add the book list as well. It will be available, should be done by the end of the day tomorrow. I'll get it posted up onto our website for everybody so if you do want to access any of these resources and of course you should go right there to the veterans.libguides.com website at any time. It's not too late for me to see if there's anything there that you want to look through. Okay, I've got some questions coming in here. All right. Okay, so here's someone wants to know, how can we use fold three with this toolkit? Any ideas for someone just starting out? I'm not familiar with fold three. Hey, here we go. It is collections of original military records, fold3.com. I was either discovered your military, your family's military past. Oh, it's part of ancestry. So, ancestry is like military thing. You know, actually, I don't think we have anything in the toolkit related to like genealogy research or anything like that related to the toolkit. There's a lot related to oral history. That seems like it's pretty common connecting with the Veterans History Project of the Library of Congress. So, there's that kind of historical component, but not so much on the genealogy side and that would be really interesting. If you're doing something in that area, I think we would love to have that contributed to the toolkit because I think there would be other libraries that would be really interested in doing that. Interesting. Yeah. It's fascinating. I didn't know that was a thing. Yeah, I did not either. I know all about ancestors. Yeah, it's a discover your family's military past, has links to US, Australia, Canada, Zealand, United Kingdom, and then you can search by browse military records by war. I bet you could, you could do some really interesting programming there with, I mean, like exploring the military history of your local community and to encourage people to explore that resource as well. Yeah. That sounds like it would be a great program, like to bring in the person who does all the genealogy programs at your library and then maybe a partner from the community, you know, a military affiliated partner from the community, do this kind of really nice program on that. So yeah, that sounds really interesting. All right, we do another question here. Do you have many military affiliated staff at your libraries? Like besides you, Sarah, of course. That's a great question. So one of the things that I, to anecdotally noticed is that libraries that have active programming for veterans often do have either veterans or folks who are military family members on staff that it seems to be often like a labor of love, but it doesn't have to be. And you know, it can be helpful to have somebody who has some experience to kind of bounce ideas off, but if you don't have anybody on staff who has that background, you'll have folks in the community, right? Like Tammy, the student veterans can give you that lens. You know, if you're at a university, they're, you know, maybe staff outside the library who have a military background. I know on our campus, they just started a military like faculty staff network. I think we're having our first gathering on Thursday, so I'm interested to see how that will go. But it's an interesting idea to bring together and see who in the staff of the university are veterans. I think the idea is, you know, to create that sense of camaraderie on campus, but also to provide a support network for our student veterans. So that is you know, something that like our campus is working on. They also say you probably do have veterans in at least library networks. I have found that, you know, at my library, you know, worked there for seven, eight years now. And, you know, we'll find out that that person that I've been working with for, you know, six of those years is a veteran and we, you know, found out years later. A lot of people don't necessarily. Not everybody, I mean, not everybody mentions it right off the bat is something, you know, it was something they did and now they're working in a library and that's, it's, so you never know. You probably don't realize it. Yeah. Yeah, there, there were a few people that I didn't realize were veterans until I, until I asked, until I started asking around. And, and then now we have a lot of military affiliated folks. And in fact, our Dean is military affiliated as well. So that's he, his son is in the military and so he knows a lot about that. And so, yeah, there's, there are a lot of different affiliations, a lot of different experiences, and we build on those. Yeah, that language can be a part of this. You know, sub campuses will, will kind of lump everything under the umbrella of veterans, but not everyone identifies as a veteran. So we'll use military connected or military affiliated. You know, people don't always see themselves in the lens. So family members and are like, they would not, of course, are not veterans. They'll say maybe happen to be themselves. But yeah, and having, having those experiences and those people know me, if you at your library are not military affiliated, you definitely want to talk to someone who is to make sure whatever you're doing is correct, appropriate, something useful to them in your community. And yeah, just ask and see and never know. Local veterans service organizations can be a great resource for that partnering with American Legion, your federal board boards, whatever organizations are active in your community. They can be a great partner, not just to kind of get a, you know, as a sounding board for your programming, but also as a partnership and to avoid competing, right? And then you can consider other programming. Oh yeah, there's some organizations like that in your community, contact them first, because if they may be already working on something, particular thing you're doing, you could help each other. Yeah, rather than just, you know, going two different directions on the same issue or the same topic or resource. Yeah. I wonder if anyone here in the audience has done anything with their local American Legion or anything like that? I suppose based on your whole first poll question, possibly not, if people are just looking for ideas, but definitely a good idea if you're having those kind of organizations in your communities. Can be a really great way to get started. Yeah, if you want to bring people into what you're doing, that's where the people are. That's where these people, these affiliated people are. Connecting with existing networks is a great way to start getting the program developed. And that answers the previous person's question, ideas for someone just starting out. Yeah, don't try and go it alone, reach out to in your community. Yeah. And say veterans can be sometimes a challenging audience to connect with. So connecting with those existing networks can be helpful. Starting small kind of building can be a helpful strategy. And finding a partner in the community. So finding somebody who has those connections, who's willing to be a partner, but who can also help connect with other veterans. Because it can be a great idea, but folks are busy and it's hard to, I don't know, it's hard for me when I get home and feed my kids dinner to then say, okay, we're going to go back out and go to a program at the library. So it's easier to do that if you've made plans to do that and meet up with friends and you kind of have that incentive to gather. So creating that sense of a network that can then engage together can be a helpful way to avoid, I think, what we probably all experience, which is the program that two people show up at. And everybody is just burned out with life in general right now. And that, yeah, definitely you want to find out when would be a good time for those people to meet. Are they already doing some event maybe on a weekend and you could piggyback on that or something. Absolutely, that kind of thing. And once you get them there, they tend to be very engaged, but finding a right time, it really helps to have that hook into the community. Yeah. Have you experienced that too, Tammy? Absolutely. And I've experienced this whole idea, you said starting small and that's really, I mean, especially for that new student success librarian who's out there, start small, go in, hang out, and build on strengths our military community at our university is strong. They come in with the kind of education and the kind of skills that a lot of people only dream of. So understanding those skills and where they're coming from is, for me, it was a lot of hanging out, a lot of talking to them, a lot of asking them, what sorts of classes have you had? Where, you know, what are you taking now? What's your goal here? And then learning the language that our students kind of learning the language and the kind of the focus that they use and being able to explain for us, for me at the university library research and our databases and things like that, so they can get to their goals. So that's kind of where, where, how I approach that from. And then just, and I can see us doing a lot more programmatic types of things and just bigger and more involved kind of partnerships to come. I think I like how you're describing that too, Tammy, and that student engagement person too, starting in with that casual conversation. They don't even realize you're doing like your professional librarian reference interview thing. We know, yeah, you just kind of sneak it in there and let's, oh, how's it going? Now let's dig a little more deeper into how's it going. And I think that that's the way that it can start at a university library, at a public library, anything. How are you doing? What's going on? And then, and then it gets to, you know what, we've got something that you might enjoy, you know, not we can help you, but this is something that you might find useful maybe. Use that small talk if you have that skill. Absolutely. All right, other questions anybody has? You can type into the question section. Nothing came in here while we were chatting. I am going to, while we're waiting to see if there's any more, I'm going to pull presenter control back to my screen here because I want to show there it is. This out of my way. This is that Fold 3 website that was mentioned before. I just, I just did the Google's Fold 3 and it came up. And it's, yeah, and I saw little names here out of, it's out of Ancestry, yeah. Different countries, different wars, records by war. From your collections, original military records. Okay, now I want to develop a program on this. This is really, really cool. New thing, new Lib guy coming. From the US National Archives, National Archives of UK, and other international records. So this is from the actual country government, yeah. Now I want to look at this, see if I can find my family in here. I'll do that later. Oh, and the first, someone else, someone else, a different person says it's a great site, so yeah. Good to know. Is that I'm always looking for new ideas too, so this is great. Well, if we don't have any other questions, anything else you want to, any desperate questions you want to ask of Sarah or Tammy right now, get it into the questions section. Otherwise, there was the email there you had that was it libraries, veterans at Gmail, did I get that right? Yep. And it'll be on the slides when you get them. As well, reach out with any questions you have. This is our session page. I said here I've got a link to the toolkit itself, so you will have that as well. Or you can go in here into all the different sections that they were that was being shown today. And check it out for yourself later. So I think we will wrap it up for today then, or almost at 11 o'clock, because no problem here. If anybody has any desperate questions you want to ask, get them in. I got a few minutes here of wrapping up. Any last words from you, Sarah and Tammy? I think we've covered it. Thanks everybody joining us. And if you have any questions. Yeah, thank you everyone. And thanks for having us on this. And please feel free to email me if you have any questions or need any more information about any of the things that I showed today. Awesome. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much, Sarah and Tammy. And thanks, Tammy, for reaching out to me about bringing this on the show. I was glad we were able to do it. I think it's an awesome resource. Libraries are always doing new things and you never know. The users in your community are going to be varying. And this is definitely a group that I'm sure is in almost every community has veterans or veteran affiliated, military affiliated people in your community. So I'm going to put back to our Encompass Live main page here. If you use your search engine of choice, anything, type in Encompass Live. And we are the only thing called the Sunday Internet so far. Nobody else is allowed to use the name. These are upcoming shows, but our archives I said I would show you here is a link after at the end of the day today's show. Here's a link to our archives, most recent one at the top. Such a days will be up there. Should have it up by the end of the day tomorrow with the latest recording. Like I said though, as soon as I have that book list from Tammy, I will immediately email that out to everybody who attended today's show and registered for today's show just so you have that right away. It does take a little time for the recording to process and YouTube to process. So I don't want you to have to wait for that. But then when the recording is ready, I will send another email letting you all know that it is up and the slides are available too. The most recent one will be at the top here. You can search our show archives. I can show you that. You can search most recent 12 months if you just want something current or the full show archives. The reason we have that limitation to the most recent 12 months is because this is the full show archives and I'm not going to go all the way scrolling down because it's too long. Going back to January 2009 when Encompass Live first premiered. So do pay attention when you do do a search on our archives for the original broadcast date. Many of our shows stand the test of time and they're still good, valid information, but some things will become old, outdated. Links may be broken. Resources may have changed drastically or disappeared. People may no longer work at the same libraries that they presented from. So just pay attention when you're watching any of our archives. We do have, I've got a link here and I've got to open over here. We do have a Facebook page. If you do like to use Facebook, give us a like over there. We post reminders. It's a reminder to log in to today's show. We do a little meet our presenter posts. And then here's one from last week. We post here as well when our recordings are up and other social media platforms. Instagram, Twitter. We also use the hashtag and comp live elsewhere. So if you do want to follow that to make sure the else has come in. Okay. Yeah. All right. So in addition to, so that's that wrap it up for today's show. Next week, our topic is bad bosses. Tales from the dark side of library management. Brooke Zarco is director of our Blair Nebraska public library and technology center. We'll be presenting on that talking about things, bad management. It happens everywhere. And she's going to talk about how she's dealt with that and encountered it in her library life. So please do sign up for that. And then for other shows, you can see we're working into 2023 here already. We have shows coming up for that. You know, already, already scheduled. So please do sign up for any of those. And speaking about 2023, I just want to make one last pitch for our Big Talk from small libraries online conference. This is a conference we host here out of the Nebraska library commission. It's a national conference anyone can attend across the country. We are doing it for a little over 10 years now. And it is all of our presenters on Big Talk from small libraries are from libraries with an FTE, if they're an academic or a school library, or population served of 10,000 or less. So this is presentations from our smallest libraries. And right now the call for proposals call for speakers is open. So if you are a small library and you want to present on something submit a proposal, the deadline is December 16. Or if you know of any libraries that might be in this, this type, share this, please spread the word anywhere and everywhere across the country, that the call for speakers is open for this. The conference itself is on always on the last Friday in February. So February 24, 2023 will be the actual one day event. December 16 is the deadline to submit a proposal. So please do submit or share and let people know that it's open and it's coming up for again next year. And that please thank you everyone for being here. Thank you, Sarah and Tammy. This is a great presentation. Got some awesome resources here. I'm sure you get lots of traffic coming to this page now. After this, I hope. And please do everyone sign up for any of our upcoming shows. I do have some more dates. I'm getting December and January more filled in here. So keep an eye on our calendar for when all those new topics and shows get added. So thank you everybody and we'll see you all in a future episode of Encompass Live. Bye-bye. Thank you.