 Hi everyone and welcome to our training series on library services for people who are incarcerated. This is part of our Mellon Foundation funded expanding information access for incarcerated people grant project trainings in these in this series discuss a myriad top myriad topics about library services for incarcerated people, including services from public libraries prison in prison libraries, academic libraries, and today libraries that provide remote reference service for people who are incarcerated. This training is available publicly on San Francisco public libraries jail and reentry services department YouTube channel, and will be available through the American Library Association's learning management software. If you need professional credit for this training, please sign in through the system which will be linked in the video when it is available. And you can obtain the training and certificate certification for free through that system. We invite you to watch as many of these trainings as are available and to share them with your networks utilize them and las classrooms as relevant. And we thank you very much for your time and engagement with our project will open the training today with some testimony about personal experience from Brian Scott. And then we'll move to a few presentations about different models for providing remote reference service to people who are incarcerated. Hi, my name is Brian Scott, I am part of the American prison newspaper project for J stored, and also the executive director of our journey, which is a statewide reentry nonprofit in North Carolina. I'm also formally incarcerated. I served 20 years, beginning in 2001, and I was released in February of 2021. The first eight and a half months of my incarceration, I spent at the county jail. And as you can imagine, it was a very difficult and trying time. One of the things that allowed me to maintain some sort of dignity was the access to books and being able to read. I remember the very first book I read in the county jail was a novel called Trinity by Leon yours. And it was the first time I'd ever met Mr yours and just fell in love with the his style and the book Trinity. And that started me following up on him and learning more about him and reading more of the books that he wrote. It was actually a book handed to me by another prisoner in the cell next door. I asked him if he had anything to read. He said he had a book that he didn't want to read, and he gave it to me and I was glad that he did. He had a library cart that came around in the county jail and it had anywhere from 40 to 50 books. The books never changed. They were always the same 40 or 50 books. They were mostly novels they were a few self help books, and about five or six different types of bibles. And I read everyone that interested me. Some of them I read more than once during that eight and a half months. So the library system in the county jail had a lot that was lacking to put it mildly. The library in the prison once I got there was better. It had a wider selection. But again, it was very much limited to mostly novels. They had encyclopedias that dated back to the Carter administration. So they weren't that helpful with anything that had happened since then learning about it, but they still allowed me to expand my world. And I took advantage of it as much as I possibly could. Access to libraries in prison is a privilege. It is not a protected right, which means it can be taken away at any given time, even for the wrong that others may commit. There were numerous times when the library was just closed. And sometimes it would be closed all day. Sometimes it would be closed for days and even weeks on end. Some of that was because of staff shortages. They didn't have anybody that could keep their eye on the library itself. Some of that was again just for punishment. And that had an effect. When you close the library, it affects morale and a lot of a lot of other situations. And most of the books in these prison libraries, even though there were more books there, most of them were donated by us, the guys, we would get prison, we would get books sent in from family and friends, we would read them. And rather than letting them accumulate in our cell or paying to send them home, we would donate them to the library. And that was the vast majority of the books. For a while, the prison system in North Carolina had a budget that each person had for adding library books to the collection. But then when the economy crashed in 2008 around that time, that funding ended and they stopped putting new books in. So then it really was just up to us. And so the books that were in the library and accessible to us were mostly novels and that sort of thing. For a while, North Carolina prisons had access to law books in the prisons in the jail, excuse me, in the libraries. That was also taken away. That was actually a decree made by our state legislators who decided that we didn't need access to law, law books and law library. And so they removed all of those from the libraries across the entire state. And that was a blow because a lot of men had used those law libraries to help gain a better understanding of the legal system and help them as they prepared legal documents for their appeals or for other various other motions that they wanted to file. And the reasoning behind that was because of the number of lawsuits that were being filed by the incarcerated population. And so to kind of cut back on that, they took away the law library that we had access to, and they created something called prison legal service where if we felt like we had a legitimate claim, we could write this entity. They would look into it and file claims for us if they felt like that was necessary, but it was still a major blow, especially for those who were working on active cases whether they were still able to go through the appeals process. That was a bad day when that happened. In 2005, I was responsible for helping start the National News, which was the prison newspaper of National Correctional Institution. It's still being published today and I'm very proud of that. But one of the reasons we wanted to publish that newspaper was because we believed in the power of words. We believed in the power of communication. And we believe that words help us form communities. And the closer you are to one another, the less likely you are to hurt somebody because you see them as as an equal, and as a friend. And that was one of the main emphasis for the national news was just to encourage a culture of reading. And that's why I'm so proud that it is still going on today and at Nash and has spread even around, you know, the United States and thankfully to the J store people it's available on in that American prison newspaper collection. Access to information and knowledge is a human rights issue. It is just as important as access to health care for the incarcerated. If what better time to gain knowledge than during incarceration, when you have the time to read and explore the world beyond yourself. I always mystified me why that wasn't more of an emphasis during incarceration, why the library that we had access to was so limited in scope, when it could have been a much bigger portal to another world. It could help provide us with that in a limited fashion, but I always felt like and still continue to feel like more could be done exploring the world beyond yourself is the only way to repair the world within. Thank you. Brian thank you so much for that incredibly moving testament to the importance of accessing information inside. And just as a note, one of our future trainings is going to be about law library services for people who are incarcerated will highlight some pretty exceptional services that are occurring. I feel like what you said Brian really highlights how much variance there can be with accessing information while people while incarcerated, which is an incredibly important point to hold as librarians doing this work. I'm really excited given that introduction to get to share some examples of libraries outside of facilities that are still working to increase the amount of information that's available for incarcerated people. And with that, I will move to our first presenter. Hello there, my name is Megan Piper Davis and I am the manager of the reference department at St. Louis County Library, and I'm joined with my colleague Asha. Hello, I am a library associate at Brentwood Public Library, which is a small municipal library located in St. Louis, and I manage the reference by mail services there. And today we're going to talk about the reference by mail service that started at St. Louis County Library and grew to other St. Louis libraries. So we serve all people living in correctional facilities across the state of Missouri. We also answer letters that come from federal institutions across the country, but those come in very rarely. Letters are centralized to our reference department at St. Louis County Library, which I will go into more detail in a few minutes. We receive letters daily and have scheduled time for staff to solely work on answering letters. We try to get through letters as quickly as possible, but with how many we have coming in daily we sit at around one and a half month turnaround. Our whole reason behind answering letters from people that are currently incarcerated is equitable access to information. Our justice involved patrons do not have access to the internet and from what our department of corrections connections tell us the librarians inside the facilities are too busy with assisting in legal work or are restricted on what they can even do. Outside of the policy we have to follow we answer whatever the need is in a meeting with one of our department of correction librarians. He said, Wow, you guys can actually send color images. It's so great to hear because for them that is a request they actually cannot fill. We are able to supplement the institutional library by providing the service and give them a place to refer their patrons to. In the center of this slide, what you'll see is a quote that was within one of our letters that just shows a glimpse at our impact. All that you do and continue to do helps in ways you may not realize and we get so many of this sentiment and a lot of letters that we receive. So St. Louis County Library, very obviously probably to some of you resides in St. Louis County in Missouri. Statistically St. Louis County has the second highest incarceration rate in Missouri coming in behind our neighbor St. Louis City, which is a population we also serve through reciprocity. Our other why lies within these numbers you see on the slide. A good percentage of currently incarcerated folks are from our region. We want to create a connection with people currently incarcerated so that when they are released and return home, they know they have a place at the library to always get assistance. Or maybe they're not from the Metro St. Louis area. Hopefully our service can show them there's a library system that can and will assist them through any information need, and then they choose to live in our area because of our help. It's all about making a connection inspiring inquisitive interactions and letting people know the library will support them. So while I mentioned we serve all people living in correctional facilities across the state, the majority of our letters that we answer for people currently incarcerated come from institutions that fall under the Missouri Department of Corrections, or what I will refer to as MoDoc from here on out. There are 20 institutions that are within MoDoc, which include correctional centers, a couple of reception and diagnostic centers and a treatment facility. And I would say we've heard from about 13 out of those 13 of those 20 facilities. I started working at St. Louis County Library in 2020. So before me and free 2018 letters were being sent to the branches and branch managers would answer as they could. My predecessor had all letters centralized to the reference department in 2018. And just for some background, our reference department in St. Louis County Library is also a central location where we work out of one building instead of being across all branches. When I started in 2020 letters weren't coming in as frequently as they do now, but we still answered around 900 letters that year. For 2021, we wanted to see how we could grow. So I reached out to the Department of Corrections to get connected with someone that worked in a library. Thankfully, after many emails, I was connected with the library coordinator at the Missouri Department of Corrections, and she has been a huge support for the service, and has helped us understand more of what the institution librarians work with. Kimberly, who is the library coordinator at Modoc, had our policy posted in every facility library and informed her staff to bring awareness to our service. We also received great suggestions from San Francisco Public Library and New York Public Library on including a flyer with each response, which we always print on a nice colorful flyer. With those two more passive marketing attempts, we grew our service by 293% in 2021. We also presented about our service at the Missouri Library Association Conference, where three local St. Louis libraries agreed to join in on our efforts. This last year Missouri switched to digitizing mail, and we saw a massively steep decline in letters coming in, which resulted in less letters answered for us in 2022. This is something I've expressed concerns about to Missouri Department of Corrections and to the library coordinator, and we're working on ways to find out how to get our numbers back up. And we'll dive into those concerns that we have in a few slides later. For a while, our library letters declined from 3,616 to 2,416, combined with Osh's Library, St. Louis Public Library, and Maplewood Public Library, we were able to answer 4,429, so we did see some growth still. So I mentioned that we did the presentation at the Missouri Library Association Conference in 2021, and this is where our friends joined us that are also within the St. Louis region. So St. Louis Public Library serves the St. Louis City area Brentwood Public Library serves Brentwood City Municipality within St. Louis, and Maplewood serves the Maplewood City area, another municipality within St. Louis, and have joined us in answering letters. This could be a result of why we personally at St. Louis County are seeing a decline as we feel our justice involved are spreading the love to all four of our libraries. As I mentioned previously, combined we answered 4,429 letters, which was 13% increase from in 2022 from 2021. The first thing about having multiple libraries answering letters is that our patron base can write multiple libraries to get answers to many questions quicker and have many connections to librarians for accurate information. There are libraries that have centralized their letters to ensure that there are no duplicate requests and to better evenly answer letters from patrons, so to make sure that one patron isn't getting answered 50 letters while there's other people waiting. So centralizing this work isn't something we are looking at at the moment to centralize reference by mail between all four of us. We want to talk with the State Library of Missouri, as other states have done centralization through their states library. We also hope with our policy of limiting to two letters per month, but you'll see in a few minutes, we are not receiving duplicate requests as to not hopefully waste a question to get similar answers, which we are more than likely getting repeated questions and still. We are hopeful that that that limiter would not have repeat questions. We do have a shared folder between all four libraries of frequent requests. This allows us to ensure we're sending consistent information to our patron base on hot topics, like starting a small business, famous historical events, addresses for local organizations and then contact information for pen pals and legal assistance. And then, weirdly, celebrity networks, we have had two justice involve patrons call us out once for sending different network numbers on celebrities. So we decided to make one big document of networks, so that we weren't confusing anybody. We don't have centralization in the future, but we would need assistance from a large institution like the State Library, or a specific department devoted to working with justice involve to be able to be efficient. So this is a beautiful policy page that includes the addresses to all four of the library systems, we print this on brightly colored paper, New York Public Library had recommended jam and salmon, and send this with each response. So for characterization, I'm not sure how effective sending this policy letter is with each response, as it's not going to be on colored paper by the time our patrons get it and it's going to a tablet, but we do still send this policy just as a reminder of what we can and cannot do for justice involve writers in other states we often get asked for this policy letter and believe growth that we are seeing out of state correctional facilities is due in part to sending our policy on that right paper. So I'm going to talk about some of the differences and procedures next. Hello everyone is Asha so when St. Louis County Library reached out to us to see if we were interested in servicing patrons who were justice involved. I jumped at the opportunity when I was in my graduate program looking to obtain my MLS I did so with the purpose of dismantling the globalization of information prison and detention centers are notorious for being information deserts, and in my look work I look to bridge the gap. The link between full literacy and productivity is clear. So we're happy to provide these services to people who are incarcerated. With that said, our letter response process is a bit different from St. Louis County Library, due to the amount of staff working on letters. St. Louis County Library has 11 staff members answering letters, while Brentwood Public Library has two. So St. Louis County Library has a first in first out policy, where we have a workflow when it comes to our responses. And so you can see here what their process is. And here is what our process looks like. So we collect about 20 letters, and we separate them into categories. The categories are usually images, medical information, legal information, song lyrics, and random facts. We will then tackle each category until we complete our responses for the letters. It can make it easier to focus on each letter and tackle them more quickly. When we go into the mindset of, okay, I'm going to answer all lyrics request or I'm going to answer all image request right now. While the workflow is a bit different, the policies between Brentwood Public Library and St. Louis County Library are the same. Neither library provides medical advice, legal advice, tax or financial consultation. In cases where we get requests regarding legal information, we inform patrons that we are not able to provide legal advice and to consult with an attorney regarding any questions. When they request information on specific laws or statutes, we will print out the item in question. An example would be some of our patrons have requested the Missouri Constitution. So we'll send them portions of the Constitution or the full Constitution, just depending on what exactly they're asking for. A lot of times patrons will ask for legal referrals. We will refer them back to their institutional library as the Department of Corrections Coordinator communicated that the facility librarians do answer a lot of legal questions. We get a lot of questions asking for pro bono attorneys and we refer people to the legal services of Eastern Missouri or Washington University and St. Louis University's legal clinic contacts. While we cannot determine if attorneys may do pro bono work, these organizations may have a better idea. The same goes for medical advice. While we cannot provide insight into any medical situation a patron is experiencing, if we get a question like how do I find my BMI, we'll provide information directly from our reputable source. So some of the pressing issues here in Missouri that we have have to do with concerns regarding the digitization of mail, how long the information is kept, and at Brentwood we have seen an uptick in the number of letters that are being sent back to us. There's a lot of frustration regarding the policy that the Missouri Department of Corrections doesn't want us to send pictures and images in the same envelope. So when a patron is requesting information on workout routines, we have to send one letter containing the images of the workout without captions or explanations, and we have to send another letter with that information. It can be time intensive and it can disrupt the workflow, and these kinds of inconveniences can lead to staff putting letters off a little longer to get to the letters that we can answer a little bit more quickly. Additionally, letters can get backed up during certain times of the year because of other duties. We're fortunate to have St. Louis County Library, St. Louis Public Library and Maplewood Public Library to fall back on when we need support for the demand. Lastly, we have had some concerns regarding requests that can be deemed as inappropriate. We're volunteering a service because we recognize the need, and it's important to ground ourselves and remind ourselves that the mission of the work is to provide information to those patrons. We can see that it's making a tangible difference when we get feedback from our patrons. Additionally, some of our policies that we've had to put in place to make sure that we're not receiving too many requests is telling patrons that we'll only answer two letters per month. A DOC policy is that we can only send up to 10 pages, and a previous DOC policy is that they did not allow curse words, but since digitization, they now allow curse words. Additional concerns that we've had are we're seeing less challenges overall throughout all four of the library, so we're concerned if the letters are actually making it through. Sometimes at Brentwood when we receive a challenge, it'll be four months later. So we're wondering why it's taking so long for the challenges to come back to us. Additionally, St. Louis County Library had an instance where a detective asked if they were smuggling drugs through the reference by mail services and if they were taking the high set for patrons. So some of the exciting aspects of the work are the feedback that we receive from patrons. We have a channel on our library slack where we share good news and every time I get a letter that praises our work or picture from a patron. I make sure to share it with the entire staff. It's exciting and I want everyone to feel the impact of the work that we do. So some of the lessons that we've learned are to reach out to other libraries, connect with other librarians who are interested in the work and ask questions. Sometimes you have to stir the pot. In addition to that, every once in a while we receive a rejection and we get a letter that says that the DOC number for a patron isn't correct. In these cases we have to look up what the information is in the DOC database. And sometimes that can show what landed that person in the system. So we like to remind ourselves that we do not think about who that person is or what led them to be incarcerated. They deserve access to information and access to information creates empathy, and it's an integral part of the human experience. Regardless of what crimes may or may not have been committed. I tell myself that I don't have insight into the legal affairs of the patrons who walk in the doors of the library. So, it shouldn't affect the service that I provide to patrons who I may have access to every patron deserves the same respect and treatment, whether they're referenced by male patrons or patrons who can just walk through our doors. And that concludes my presentation. Hello, my name is Jennifer Harmonson, and I'm a librarian with Sacramento Public Library, as well as the coordinator for our reference by mail service. In September of 2020, a proposal to begin the reference by mail service for Sacramento Public Library was approved, and responses to the letters that we had previously received began going out. By June of 2021, the service was expanded to a team of staff, and as the demand grew, so did the staff team. We now have over 20 staff members regularly researching and responding to the requests we received, though for all of us this is a function of our job. Unfortunately, at present no one is tasked specifically or primarily with this work. We receive around 125 letters each month, and our letter writers contact us from any of 10 California Department of Corrections and rehab facilities for county jails and one federal facility. We have a rules and guidelines document we include with every response we mail out, even to our regulars. You can see most of that here. It has been revised over time, and while some of the rules are flexible, others are not. If you'd like to review this more thoroughly, URL shown here will take you to the full list. I want to mention a few quick rules, a few quick notes about some of these rules. The first two are the most basic foundations of the service, which is answering two letters per sender each month with up to three questions answered her letter and up to 10 double sided pages of information with each response. There is a little flexibility on the number of questions if they are relatively easy to easily researched, or if it's for something as simple as locating photos or logos. In that case, we will answer up to five. We'll also send more than 10 double sided pages. If it means a thorough response. We don't want to cut off a 12 double sided page article by limiting it to 10 when that gives more accurate information so we will be flexible in that way. Rule number five about legal and medical advice or opinions is set in stone, unless the requester specify something by name, we cannot send it. Rule number six was updated recently and I'll point out the part about qualifiers, because these specifications began to get unwieldy, and we're making staff uncomfortable. Rule number 10 does not preclude what might be considered a true crime information. It's decided based on the specifics of the request and who the information is about. Pictured is the physical stacks of requests I keep at my desk until they find their way to the shred then because our staff team is scattered around a 28 location library system. I have shared folders in Google Drive to which only active team members have access. I'm the only one who actually handles physical letters. There's two sides of the general process, how the physical and scan copies are managed, and then the staff side, including statistics keeping. We'll go back to the statistics soon, but first let's start with how the letters are managed. I moved the physical letters through this series of three trays, which you can see are marked as unprocessed, unclaimed and claim, and the virtual trays in Google Drive are very similar. And just to reassure you, each bin has a little privacy shield. Those are pages that were taken from a discarded oversize book about the Orient Express. Everything that is received but has not been opened is held in the first tray marked unprocessed. Once I process these and put them into our shared Google Drive folder, I moved them to the middle tray marked unclaimed. And at least once a week, I compare the stack of unclaimed physical letters to the scanned version in the unclaimed scans folder, which is highlighted here. Those that have not been claimed stay in this tray and in this folder. Those no longer found in either are set aside. Next, I open this claimed scans folder and compare those to the physical letters in the last tray also labeled claimed. The ones that are still in the claimed scans folder are returned to the physical tray. Those no longer appearing there are set aside. Finally, I take the ones that were set aside last and compare them to those in the completed scans folder. Upon verification that each has been completed, my final step is to compare each physical letter to the statistics spreadsheet. If there are any that have not been fully updated, I contact the staff person who worked on that request and ask them to fill in the missing information. Once that has been done, the original letter is put in the shred bin and the scan version is moved into the highlighted marked for deletion folder. Regarding the staff side and statistics keeping part of the process, it goes as follows. Letters are opened and given a file name, which is noted in column A, the double digit month and the double digit day, and then they're sequentially number 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, etc. They're scanned and uploaded to the Google Drive folder that I showed you a moment ago called scan requests and claimed. Information is then added to this spreadsheet. My information that I add is the file name in column A, the sender's first name and last initial in column B, and the date it was received in column C. That may seem a bit redundant. It's just for housekeeping purposes on the back end of things. Staff will claim a request by renaming the PDF with their initials, their branch or department code, and the double digit month and double digit day that they claimed them. You'll be able to see this in a future slide. They then move the PDF into the next folder, claim requests, and upon completion of reply, they will update the remainder of statistical information, move the scan into the completed requests folder, and mail the letter. The information that staff update is their name in the staff column, the number of questions they answered, inquiry keywords, the date they mailed the reply. If there's any internal notes that need to be made and whether a warning was sent. The internal notes column can be something from me that is meant to be information to update staff, such as if the bottom line of a scan cut off the letter, or can be information from staff for me and is also internal housekeeping. The warning sent is something we added this year that helps me know if a warning has been issued to a patron based on rule number three from the rules and guidelines. Once the response to the letter has been sent, the original letter is shredded and the scan copy is held for a period of three months after which it is deleted. Among other things that are covered in the training process, this is very important, deciding how to handle questions and or the resulting information that could land in gray area. How would I respond to this in person? If a patron approached you at a service point and asked the same question, would it be a topic you would help them research? Would you let them know they can search for it on a public computer but staff can't do it for them? Or could it potentially trigger a disciplinary scenario? How would you handle this interaction if it happened in person? Would it be something that simply outside of the scope of what we can or will do? Versus expecting the patron to handle it on their own? So example photos of a celebrity scantily clad. Would it be construed as harassment of the employee in the way it is presented over the context of the request? Could it potentially be something that one staff person is not comfortable with but someone else is okay with researching? So for example, images of a surgical procedure? Or is it clearly in violation of common sense, good taste, or even the law? These questions are presented in both the introductory training and the final training and both offer the following context. Our goal is to answer all questions to the best of our ability with the most thorough current and accurate information possible. This is not to be at the expense of our staff feeling comfortable with the subject matter of the request or the content of the search and response. Staff are empowered to decide for themselves what can be returned to the group to let someone else respond to and what has crossed a line and should be responded to with a warning. They can involve me if they choose to, but they don't have to. Helping someone get the resources they want and need, whether for educational purposes or entertainment, is always a great thing in the libraries. Knowing you were doing this for someone who would otherwise not have access is a whole other level of fulfillment. It's especially great to see letters that come in that begin with thank yous for previous information sent out and we even get gifts now and then artwork and holiday cards and things of the like and those are really great. I'd like to offer my responses to some of the questions that are asked regarding this process. First, what's working the way we manage the process around our system has worked really well. There's no need to have the original documents floating around all over the place. There's no concerns of accidentally sharing confidential information with anyone outside the team. Or anything like this. What's been a challenge keeping tabs on excess requests and repeated requests. This is where we shifted to being more intentional in the choice of keywords that we track. Rather than just celebrity photos, we now include the name. Instead of racing pigeons and we get a lot of questions about racing pigeons. We note what breed of bird was requested. This allows us to do a quick control of search to determine if the same content has been requested by the same person in the past. It's not something we actively track, but it is good to have it there when we know that it has become a repeat and unnecessary. What are some lessons we learned. In addition to starting with existing content documents and structures being open to finding what worked for us can be that can be changed or added to that foundation has been great. We definitely needed a better way to keep up with the times patrons were sent former learnings. I realized in mid January of this year that three patrons had received more than three warnings in mid to late 2022 and I had not noticed this pattern changing how we track this has been a huge help. What resources do we have. I created a handbook that has all our internal processes, guidelines, rules, expectations, etc. That is meant as both a training tool and a quick reference guide for the reference by male staff team. The handbook includes a variety of resource links through which we can find information on topics likely to be of more interest, such as education, finances, health care, the rights of incarcerated people and other topics. We also have a group email that we can use to reach out to one another, and we have occasional although not routine meetings that usually happen after several new staff have joined, or when major changes have been implemented. We get asked a lot about the types of requests that we received, while we anticipated more legally focused questions and things more related to the judicial process, much of what we get instead is personal interest and entertainment. In addition, what just happened. To my screen just change. I get asked what types of requests we received, and while we anticipated more legally focused questions and things related to the judicial process. A lot of what we get instead is personal interest and entertainment. This is in addition to people who are planning for post release employment, housing support services, and education. I'll leave you with this one major takeaway that I was stressed for anyone looking at introducing this type of service at their library is do not hesitate to reach out to others who are already doing this. Much of the documentation we began with came from reviewing what New York Public Library and San Francisco Public Library had already developed. When possible, create a team and work together to develop your library's rules, guidelines, processes and procedures. Stay in regular contact with one another and never hesitate to circle back to the library or libraries that supported you when you got started. I once heard that in libraries are and D means rip off and duplicate. And I think this is a perfect example of how true and useful that is. I start with a blank page when you can take existing resources and make them fit your institution, your service population, your needs. Thank you. Hi, welcome and thank you for your interest in learning about research by mail, a prison correspondent service provided by the Harris County Public Library system based in Harris County and Houston, Texas area. My name is Hannah Norman reference librarian and member of the branch administrative services division within the HCPL administration. It is so wonderful to virtually meet you all. I am so excited and thankful to be a part of the melon foundation funded expanded information access for incarcerated people project with the San Francisco Public Library. I also wanted to thank Sally Durgan and Genie Austin, and the rest of the advisory committee that is that was made to make this training series happen. And with that, let's begin. I like to virtually introduce you to the duo that manages our VM. That is me on the left. I have worked in different capacities as a public librarian in Texas for about eight years and joined HCPL in April 2022. My previous manager Shane Harris had laid a lot of the groundwork for RBM for the system. He organized the process for what it is today. And during my arrival, Shane handed over RBM duties to me. So I began managing all the tasks in the training. A few months later, Manny Sundar, she's on the right there. She joined our team as a part-time librarian. She is a previous reference librarian who's worked for the Houston Public Library for 24 years and now helps with managing RBM. As the RBM administrative team, we both log letters received in our RBM Microsoft SharePoint site. We distribute letters to branches to be answered by many, many staff. We edit, we print and we mail the letters back to correspondence. Manny also assists with the troubleshooting issues and training as needed. We have about 79 participating staff across 26 branches and other divisions within our library system. We could not do this without their volunteerism. So a little bit about us and our history. RBM was created because an HCPL staff member responded to a letter from a person in prison a very long time ago. HCPL has never openly promoted the mailing reference service and it has strictly been through word of mouth communication that our service has helped people in prison from across the United States. We respond to letter requests from anyone who writes us, not just to those who are incarcerated. Some past names that we were once called and no longer use anymore are prison reference and reference by mail in order to be more inclusive. Our main mission is to never give advice, only the best information that we can. We are not in a place to pass judgment. We should approach all requests with professionalism, respect and dignity. Okay, and here are some of our latest numbers for our program. We primarily service about 88 state jails and prisons in Texas alone, but we also service federal prisons, county jails and out of state correctional facilities. We do not have any limits to who we are able to respond to yet. We have rarely received requests from mail-only prisons, but occasionally will receive mail from female incarcerated patrons or juvenile correctional facilities. Luckily, we haven't experienced any barriers to corresponding other than a rarely rejected letter response from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Correspondents Mail Team or TDCJ. We're very good about updating their search engine with statuses about people we serve, so it's been a smooth process in our experience. There is a problem sometimes with the sheriff's office jails or smaller holding centers because they may not have a public database for us to check, so we do have to telephone them to find out if the person is still in holding or has been released. Branch of administrative services, we've received about 230 letters on average per month in 2021 and currently distribute 172 letters on a monthly basis to 20 out of 26 branches. Those numbers fluctuate depending on the month, programming, staffing, retraining. We do have a backlog of letters that await the weekly distribution, and we've also seen a decrease in letters over the past year. One of those reasons could be attributed to our three letter for patron rule that was established in August 2021. From March 2021 to February 2023, HCPL has received 5,506 letters. With the help of many library staff from various departments and branches, we have been able to answer 15,351 questions since March 2021. So here are some of our operational costs. This is an estimation of the annual costs because orders are sent, or sorry, because we order various supplies, the main supplies that we have to order come through different departments for the library system. So that could include financial services, the IT department, that could include our circulation department, but I kind of gathered some numbers here for you. We definitely print out all of our responses, so we do have to purchase paper per box, and that can contain eight reams of paper. We probably go through about two and a half boxes per year, but it can vary depending on letters. We have purchased two printers, each of them totaling out to be about $1,000. That was a one-time purchase, and until they could put, we don't have to purchase another one yet. We do order black ink cartridges. We try and get the highest ink counts, so that way we don't have to replace them as often. That is one of the most expensive expenses that we have to pay for for this service. We also order privacy envelopes. Those would be the envelopes that have like a sealed outside and inside look to them so that way you cannot see what is inside. So for those that can come out to like $72.95 annually. For the library system as a whole, we do have a license with Microsoft Office 365 Pro because we have an educational license. We kind of get a discount on that, so that can come out to $40,000 annually for the library system as an entity. There is about 475 employees, so we all share the license. For us and for this program, for Research by Mail, we do have a SharePoint page, and for that specific line item, if you wanted to know the cost on that, you can definitely reach out to me and then I can find that information for you. Our estimated average postage can total out to be almost $2,000, and that was for last year, and that really can attribute to the weight of each envelope. For us and this program, we send about 20 pages per response or up to 20 pages, but sometimes the responses can be shorter or longer. It just depends. And you can see the postage cost there right on the presentation. The cost will attribute it to, again, that wait time. Okay, next we'll go over guidelines. So these guidelines are going to be mentioned on our cover letter. So for every response that we send, it is listed plain and simple right in a numbered format, and I'll show you what that looks like next. For the guidelines, we don't offer any legal financial or medical service, sorry, advice. The library limits requests to no more than five questions per letter. And as of August 2021, we only respond to three letters per person per month. So we have members print up to 20 pages of material per letter that includes images as well. The library will not accept requests for photocopies by mail, just due to printing an ink cost. We do not provide multiple copies of the same document. There is some exceptions to that it can come down to like maybe tax service time. We can definitely print out a couple of pages but when people are asking for about 20 copies of the same thing, that's when it gets a little tricky. We don't respond to personal questions or sign letters using our own name, and we try to use humanizing terms for instance, referring to individuals as a patron or incarcerated patron. With the topic inappropriate, graphic and explicit requests, they will still receive a courteous reply. We emphasize our guidelines as well as redirect the writer to TDCJ's correspondence mailing policy, and we explain that our service is primarily for educational research purposes. And by limiting the number of letters again down to three, that's helped us manage the turnaround time for letter correspondence. So 20 pages has been a good number for us to provide printing services. So now we're about to get into the technical aspects of RBM. This is a workflow of the research by mail service from the point of receiving a letter, distribution, responding, and printing the response. So as you can see the letters are going to always arrive here at the branch administrative services department within admin for the library. The letters are then entered into our online database or log. And we are then distributed to participating employees of the program. And once the letters arrive at the branches, they're going to be answered by the participants. We would hope that at each branch that they have a leader of RBM or the person who's been doing the being a being a part of the service the longest, they can proofread the letters and just make corrections as needed. And if they do submit them and upload them to the log and let's say something does need an edit. We, we as in me and Manny will look over each letter and if there's an edit that needs to be made. We're going to correct it will contact that individual let them know hey we need to fix this or maybe this information might be out of date, for instance, they'll correct the reply again resubmit it. For us, once we've already approved a final letter is the letter it's ready to go ready to print. We're going to print that reply and then we're going to go ahead and mail it out. Now the original letter is going to be shredded at the branch there is no need for us at this time that we've seen that we need to keep older letters or correspondence letters from patrons. There's no need. So that kind of saves us a little bit of space as well. We never shred them until the actual final responses for me. So now we're on to responding to a letter staff responses are going to become prized of three different parts. So cover letter template, the cover letter is going to be that first page of the response saying hello, you know thank you so much for using our service is going to go over our service guidelines. The back of that of cover letter is really just going to repeat the request that we're asked in the letter. We're going to include that because we want to make sure just in case. If they want to write to us back or if they don't even remember the question that they asked us, they kind of remember once we return that back to them or, you know just in case they requested for something that we couldn't print more than 20 pages of material. We can say hey please request pages 21 through 39 or in your next response, something of that nature. The rest of the response is going to be the information that the staff were able to provide. So that'll be the remaining that 20 pages. So we want to treat letter requests alike and reference interview at a branch. It's the same thing. If something is not clear in the letter or we need more detail more clarification we're going to ask that in the response back, we will do our best to answer the question as much as we can. Because sometimes we need just a little bit more detail such as like name or background information or or maybe even a website. For the most part, all of our patrons are very good about giving us even a link to find the information they're looking for. That helps us a bit. So next right here we have to kind of verify the identity for each correspondent because we have to make sure we know who we're sending that letter to right. It's very important because we receive a lot of letters at a time. We usually use the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in the information search database. So with this information search log, we're able to search by their number. We can search by first name last name. That's usually what we only use, just in case maybe if we can't read handwriting that that happens quite a lot. So with the search database and also the Federal Bureau of Prisons inmate locator, that's also a separate website and it looks very similar to this but they do have a different unit number that we have to write down and enter into the search engine. So we have to kind of figure out where they're coming from and where we need to look up, look them up. So here I found that again, as I kind of previously mentioned, small town jails have a database, may not have a database like I recently mentioned. So we must contact jails by phone and provide enough identifying information about the person to find them. So here I've kind of circled there really the most important information that we're going to include in that cover letter is going to be the first name their last name, their sign number, what unit they're from and then that corresponding mailing address. And this is what a completed cover letter would look like the template itself has the hcpl letterhead guidelines signature and administration address that way they know who they can write back to. And the staff don't have to edit this template every single time. It's already incorporated which is nice. They do need to add the person, the person's name, all of the address information, and definitely on that second cover page, the request. They should be a list of them we like to do them in numerical order so it keeps your research a little bit more organized. But our team will open every single attachment before it's printed from that SharePoint log that I mentioned, and before we mail it so we do make sure each letter corresponds to the right person. Okay, occasionally we do come across grammatical errors reformatting issues and old addresses. We do ask staff to help us save time by checking their work before uploading, and to have another librarian or branch manager review their work. Here's our RBM SharePoint site. So this is kind of a website that we've created to help participating staff find what they need, whether that's helpful resources training information, the templates, and a lot of other examples that will help them write their letters. If staff are interested in participating in our program, we always ask if they can ask for approval from their supervisor, because this is a long process. This isn't something that you can just do when you have spare time. It's kind of something that takes a little bit more time. It's time intensive. And the staff do it at a voluntary like service, they don't actually have to do this and it's not a part of like their work plans for the county. Because our system operates on Microsoft Office 365, we do have an internet for the library system and Bass created this site, you know, specifically for those services. And we do recommend that most of the staff navigate to the frequently asked tab there on the left hand side to find answers to commonly asked questions. And within the log. This is when we get to the point where we find a letter. So for the letters for statistical purposes we organize logs by the county's fiscal year. Staff respond to letters after receiving them through branch delivery. And on each letters envelope. Bass will write the log number. So for this instance, it was the short fiscal year for 2022 because the county just recently changed that and a unique ID number unique ID numbers are assigned to every single letter to identify them. And we also include the branch abbreviation on the letter to indicate which branch it was sent to. This does help with misplaced letters. For example, it would normally be written right above that SFY to 22 part. And so as you can see, that's right there circled, and they would need that information in order to search up the right letter in the corresponding log. And they can find it there. And we have many logs which is also another thing that we have to balance sometimes. Especially when we're starting a new fiscal year and we might be behind on the last fiscal years law letters. So they can search up any of the letters with that ID number or the unique personal ID number. And even by unit and branch, which is helpful. So moving on, this is our editing record entries. So every single letter is going to have its own record entry. What you'll see right here is actually just one letter, but it's the process that it's going to take from the time we get the letter to the time that we print it. So that's going to create each entry. We do that work on our own. We enter the personal ID number unit the branch. We're going to assign it a status usually it's sent to branch. And then we're going to enter the postmark date that way we know when that letter arrived to us and it's time sensitive. And I've circled that there for you see can see. And then next, once that staff member is going to receive their letter, they're going to update the following changes in the log. They're going to update that status to complete. That way it lets me and Manny know that it's ready to print. And then they're also going to enter how many questions they answered that's for statistical purposes. And then they're also going to upload any attachments. And for us, we don't have any limits on how many attachments they can add on to that list item. Under the status field staff can use the under branch review option to indicate to the manager that they need to review the letter before marking it completed. The needs attention option is helpful if we need more information from the staff member on a letter. Like me and Manny are finding out that this letter is missing information or maybe even a resource that the patron can go back and look for more information on. We're finally going to update the attachments we're going to delete any existing attachments just like we shred those letters. It's the same difference we don't keep anything. We're also going to update that date that we sent it in post so that way we kind of had an idea that letters done complete. We responded to the individual and the status we going to change it to shred record closed. Next we're updating that record and I wanted to show you guys what this looks like because this is technically a form of sorts. Because we use Microsoft list like a submission form, we're going to break this down here. As you can see, there is a section for the staff to fill out arm sorry best to fill out. It's the personal ID number that unit the branch information. We have to make sure that information is accurate because there can be duplicates. Many people can send multiple letters at a time right. And then next we update that status just like they update the status staff and then we'll see those attachments at the bottom. We do mark out a section under there where we don't want the staff to fill out and that's going to be that postmark section. How many pages we ended up printing because from time to time when we edit will actually reduce the amount of pages that they initially thought they were going to be printed. The file types that we do accept with the Microsoft list or at least what this type of format uses is Microsoft Word documents Excel sheets and PDF files and images images. We always recommend that the staff paste any images like let's say pictures of celebrities into a Word document then upload many, many pictures all at one time. One is going to use a lot of ink, but it also may not be the size that the individual wanted. So we want to make sure that we cut things to the right size and kind of reduce waste as much as possible. And then we check that comments function on the top right hand corner as you can see tiny right there. I made a note to Manny for instance to not print certain pages of this survey. And then especially with tax forms that's also a note that we sometimes have to make in there. So the goal is to have the responses saved into one Word document but sometimes that can't happen because we have different formats for working with. But we always want the template and cover letter slash summary and explanation always as a Word document that way we can make the edits and the printing is a breeze. Okay. So here are some additional details that we wanted to share with you here. I'm adding again we do black and white double sided printing 20 pages of material per letter response and page limit does not include our cover letter we don't count that. What we incorporate some of these details into our training and we handle some of these requests on a case by case basis when a question is oddly specific. We do have a common reference and copyright practices as well because some of our library staff may not be as well first in library reference work or maybe they're new to libraries. We're not sure. We received many common requests such as housing reentry programs, legal aid and records access. As you can see there we get cards board games. We get a lot of different kinds of requests and we kind of have to take all of them. We don't know what we're going to get because we never know what we're going to get right. And for legal and reference help, if our system and our staff cannot answer the question or we don't have the same resources. We're going to redirect them to reach out to the Harris County Law Library and the Texas State Law Library that's based in Austin, Texas. And we provide them the address phone number anything that they need. We have teams channel many staff and you can see on the right there in that little picture. A lot of our staff share resources that they have found over the years to help new staff to RBM with the program with answering and responses. So here are some obstacles and opportunities that we are facing at the moment. Turn around times that is a big one for us. We are only about two months away from the recently just reviewed letters. We would like to be at a point where as soon as we receive a letter we can return a response within one to two weeks. But sometimes that changes depending on staffing and turnover, all of that. We would love to collaborate with other libraries. We're reaching out to some of the Texas libraries nearby to see if maybe they are already doing a service that's just like ours and maybe we can unite and make this one cohesive service. So we can work with some other locations with that. Maybe in that can lessen the burden of so many requests in a way. We are also going to get a new HCPL web page. So we're so excited. This is the first time that research by mail is going to have its own web page and service. We've never actually openly promoted this service. So this is going to be the first time that we'll actually have a page dedicated to what we do talking a little bit about our stats. And then also offering that address. So just in case loved ones want to share our reference mail address to others, they can. So that's exactly what we want out of this new site. So I'm hoping that's going to happen. We're hoping that that web page, this recorded training, it's going to advocate for our service, maybe bring about some unexpected partnerships along the way. And this is some of my favorite pictures. And these are thanking messages and heartfelt compliments. The help remind us to continue providing this life changing service and the work that we do in our libraries and outside of them. And as our saying goes with Harris County Public Library, we open a pathway to knowledge. So we are hoping that research by mail and service and work that we do also helps underserved communities. And at this time, I'd like to sincerely thank the San Francisco Public Library, jail and reentry services and the Mellon Foundation for the opportunity to share what Harris County Public Library Administration and branch staff do for the underserved prison population and its community. If you have any questions about research by mail or any of our other library services, please contact me at the email address or phone number that you see on the screen. With that, I want to wish you a wonderful rest of your day and thank you so much.