 Oh, okay. Hello everyone and welcome to Encompass Live. This is the Library Commission's weekly show at 10 a.m. Central Time or roughly 10 a.m. I'm Sally Snyder and I'm your host this morning and I'm really excited because we're hosting Natalie Bazan, director of the River Valley District Library in Port Byron, Illinois and she's going to talk about what is your library worth and this looks like a great topic. I'm looking forward to hearing what you have to say, Natalie, and when you're ready we'll get started with your slides and I'll take mine down. Okay, go right ahead anytime. Okay, let's see. Where are you? Oh, here you are. Okay, now I just have my screensaver up there. You have to go back into the go-to webinar and click Change Presenter. Oh, yeah, okay. Although I love the diver. I'm so jealous. It's so cold here right now. Take control. Oh, that's it. Life is fun. I'm in there and I'm trying to click on you and say take control. I've made you a presenter. There we go. There's a little window. Hello everyone. You should see my screen now I'm guessing. I believe so. Alright, so if anybody can chime in in the chat window and let me know if you're seeing a screen that says what is your what is a library worth? We're using the questions window, not the chat window. Questions window. Yep. Okay, we're seeing your screens. Fantastic. Alright, so I often get, especially at the library that I'm at now, the River Valley District Library, I get a lot of questions from my board and the community. What does our money go towards? You know, what is the library actually worth? Why should we bother to fund this? What's the point? I get a lot less of these questions in Michigan. So quite honestly, I was kind of surprised to get these questions when I was working at a library. How does everyone not know what a library is worth? How do they not understand what good we do for the community and what comes out of their money? But apparently they don't. I actually have a couple of board members who had run to make sure that the taxes to the library never increased because they didn't think that the library ever needed any more money or anything else. Oh my. Yes. Thankfully, they have gone from we really shouldn't be funding the library to yeah, you're right, the library really does need more space in the matter of about six months of me working there, which I am extremely proud of. I realize it's just the start, but it's a good start. That's amazing. It was it was definitely something. Unfortunately, today is actually my last day at the River Valley District Library, but on the plus side, I set it up for the next person. So they should have a little bit easier time than I did. So I kind of started coming up with ideas on how do I quantify something that how do I break down what we do into numbers? How do I make this so they can understand it so they can see what we're actually worth in the dollars and cents? And how do I make sure that they understand and our community understand what we offer? What makes this special and unique? You know, library marketing has been a big topic for a couple of years, and we're not we're going to touch on library marketing a little bit, but that's not really where I'm going. I'm more interested in let's talk about the dollars and cents. So everything that you're going to see here is based on the River Valley District Library. So let me tell you a little bit about it. We serve a population of 5176 people. Port Byron, Illinois is a village about well, the village of Point Byron is about 1500 people, give or take. And then we have surrounding farmland and small towns and communities right in that area. We're not a huge district in Michigan. I served it was 100 square miles and I had 4600 people, so it was more rural than this. But we are in a picturesque right on the Mississippi River, a little town right across from Leclerc, Iowa, which is where the American Pickers are. So it's really cute. It's really fun. They do a bunch of neat things. And the library is right on Main Street. Main Street in Port Byron is on our side of the street. We have the library, our parking lot, the road, the railroad and the Mississippi River. So we have a fantastic view of the river and everything that goes on in it. But our library wasn't really built to take advantage of that. So that was something that we couldn't do a whole lot about. So we did add some outdoor seating and some nice little outdoor areas that people can hang out and watch the river and watch everything that goes on there. But that doesn't really give us a dollar value. So our annual budget is just under half a million. Really with what I have to play for, it's more like 4 or what I have to play with, it's more like 480,000. But we pro in 498,000 every year. And some of that goes to the state of Illinois has an I am a rough plan. So we have a retirement plan for our full-time employees and various other things that I can't change. But there are a lot of things that we could change. And we found out just taking our rough numbers, our raw data that everybody collects, right? You all know how many of you keep track of how many books you check out and DVDs and reference questions, all of those things that PLA and IMLF always want to know from us. If you could respond, either raise your hand or respond in the chat window, what you keep track of. We took that and we took that data, we put it into the ALA, well, it's the ALA's value calculator, the return on investment calculator. And I produced the first annual report for River Valley. And it showed that we had a return on investment of about $1.4 million. And I got a huge amount of flak for that. I thought everybody would be excited. You know, they're getting lots of lots of return on investment. But they didn't understand how I got that number. They didn't understand where that came from. They wanted to know exactly how many people are using the library, what was going into that and break it down for them. They wanted a breakdown. I could do a breakdown. That's easy enough. We have one responder who says we keep track of all these reports. I think she's talking about the ones you have listed here. Fantastic. Sorry to interrupt. No, you're good. That's great. If you're not keeping track of these things, these are really important statistics that you can use. I mean, not just for yourself to understand, okay, how are trends going? Are more books being checked out? Are more DVDs being checked out? Should we invest more in different things? Are people using our databases more? Or are they using the library itself? Are they coming in more? We keep track of a lot of those statistics. And I'll show you more on the next slide. But we took our book. All of our numbers are from last year, the 16, 17, fifth of the year. And I had been there one month when that fifth of the year ended. So a lot of these were all of these numbers are before the I came. And I took those and I plugged them into the value calculator and let people know, okay, so this the 41,000 books that people checked out would have cost them over a million dollars if they had purchased them. And you need to know if those are adult books, if those are teen books, if those are kids books, so that you can put them in and get the correct values for them. The DVDs, the value calculator for some fun reason decides that they, and I understand why, but they give you a value based on if you had rented those DVDs. I don't know a whole lot of places you can go to rent DVDs anymore. Most of those have shut down. So if you are checking out DVDs, you may want to change that number or you may want to explain that number to people better because they're looking at it's a whole lot more than $4 to buy a DVD. Reference questions get a value. People attending your programs get a value. People coming in and reading magazines and checking out a movie. I don't know if you have museum passes. Do any of you rent out museum passes or loan out museum passes? Oh, that's a nice idea. I didn't think of that. We partner up with a botanical center, a zoo. We have an art museum and up until this past year there was a zoo zium pass. So we had the museum and the children's or the zoo and the children's museum had gotten together and had a pass that we could get and we could loan it out to people. We only loaned it out for a couple of days and they have to bring it back otherwise they say they have to be fine but it has been really really helpful for us. And people just love it. You know it gives them something where they can take their kids and still be learning and still be experiencing new things and then they come back and their kids are curious and interested and they want to know more about all of the animals that they saw or the plants they saw or the things they experience. And that increases our circulation too. And that can work for the zoo or the museum because the family might decide to get a membership after they've been there and the kids have been all excited. So they they have that possibility too. Now the downside that we found with our museum well our zoo actually the museum is okay but the zoo the zoo now charges for parking so this doesn't cover parking it just covers entrance fees. So you know you're if your families are borrowing something like this they're not having to pay for entrance fees so maybe they're more likely to take that money and use it for concession or yes getting their own membership. So it's a really good way to bargain with museums to get them to do things like this. Great idea. You can see that you know the Massachusetts Library Association put this together and ALA has it on their website. I actually have it pulled off if we want to play with it a little bit later if people want to give me some numbers. But the link is right there for you. If you put in your numbers and you keep track of your number you keep track of what you do you can put these numbers together and in seconds you have what your library is worth. I've done this I started doing this on a monthly basis for my board members. It helped I have several business people on who like I said they got on the board because they wanted taxes for the library to either go down stop entirely or they wanted a really good reason why we wanted money to fund a library. So being able to provide them with those numbers really helped. Being able to show them that they are getting three dollars back for every dollar they spend at the library is huge. I don't know if any of you have board members or community members who are very much tea party members or are watching well any of the many different political parties that are really curious and starting to get back involved in civics and trying to understand what this money is going towards and how it's benefiting the community. But this gives them concrete information. And so you know when we save this presentation to be viewed in the future by other people we also will have these these slides for people to refer to and then we pull out things like that URL that you saw there so you don't have to write it down and then you can we'll put that in another box for people to click on to go see how that calculator works so don't worry about writing down all those words in the url and most importantly it's free. I don't know about you. Yes I might have a half a million dollar budget but in michigan when I was director of libraries they're at a hundred thousand dollars and I was using this to its fullest extent because I didn't have money to buy any of the many softwares out there that will do things like this for you and keep track of things like this for you. So let's go to the value calculator. Is there anybody out there who would be willing to throw out some numbers so we can give you an idea using your numbers of what you would be worth? If you have a microphone just type in there I have a microphone and I'll I'll make your microphone active or type it into the question slot. They can be rough numbers they don't have to be your exact numbers but I'd love to be able to show you what you guys are worth and just in case your board members or anybody else are interested in where you know how much money is being is being allocated for one adult book instead of just putting one in each category to see what comes up you can click on the value of your youth and it will come up and it will tell you and it will tell you why so you'll know that the average price for adult books is 17 kids books is around 17 young adult audible is doing a download for 9.95 and these are the amounts that they tend to put on there. Oh that's great to be able to see that and know then you can tell your board well here's how they determined that because I would ask that question. Right and that is a big question that comes up a lot you know they're curious okay so the museum passes that I talked about I know to get into say the Brookfield Zoo in Illinois I know that I can get passes at my local library it's going to cost a whole heck of a lot more than $20 to get in there but that's what they're estimating it and averaging it out to be because the museum denies you over by Port Byron where we have our zoo pass is a lot less than $20 to get in well it's actually probably just a little bit less and I think our yeah our museum pass actually covers four but it gives you a good basis and you can tell people okay so it might say that it'd be about $15 to go to one of your programs what if you're doing how to make cheese or how to make soap at your library I've done both of these soap making if I went to a class elsewhere could cost upwards of $100 per person so yeah that should average out with something like we're doing a talk on homeschooling at the library that didn't cost library anything and may have just been community members getting together to discuss things that would average out nicely so no not every program is going to be that much or not getting any numbers yet or any volunteers yet all right well if you guys want to try this on your own feel free it is fun I really enjoy doing it I think it my circulation staff actually really like that program because and this next one I'm going to show you because it gives them a reason why they're keeping track of some of the statistics that they do so the PLA every year sends out an email asking for people to put in their statistics so that they can keep track of things so that they know how things are going and in return for doing that they send you a link to a tri-fold brochure that you can use I didn't do any edits whatsoever this is exactly what they sent me and it shows you this is the well this would be the front cover and this is the back cover and then this is the inside flap and it gives you just the general information so here's my population that's how many books I have that's how many of my 5100 people are actually registered with the library card and then it adds everything up so physical circulation that's everything that I physically let people check out we let them check out about 78,000 items last year and it continues on down obviously we need to work on our electronic circulation because that's kind of low but I didn't put database numbers in there that was only books that were checked out in library use is something that my circulation staff keeps track of so if you happen to come in the library I don't know how many of you keep track of this but do you notice do you note down how many people are reading newspapers at your library if you don't check them out it's really nice to know the statistics on that reference questions that is these numbers are actually all based on this year so far and I estimated out what it's going to be for the rest of the year program attendance or website visits this gives them a little bit of everything that I could think of and that's a PLA asked for on the inside is more detailed information and this is where you may want to make some edits to help people understand what's going on so number the percentage of full-time employees with a librarian title FTEs doesn't mean a whole lot to most people so I realized that I need to change that if I'm going to be handing that out to people because otherwise it's not going to make sense your circulation per staff member that's a huge number letting people know that yeah although you may have walked in and seen our staff chatting or didn't seem to be working on a thing or playing on the computer it really weren't maybe they had a little bit of downtime but in reality our staff are working really hard and this is one of the ways that you can prove that so circulation per capita is a great number to watch if your non-library using people are curious about why why are they paying for this thing that they're not using which comes up so much who has heard that question if you could raise your hand please do I'm not using the library so why should I pay for it that's just like I'm not using school systems so why should I pay for it that's just what I was thinking of yes people say that too isn't that frustrating so you can tell them this is per capita this is not per registered library user this is per your entire population there are 16 items going to every single person in my district if every single person had a library card every time one person walks in they're likely to walk out with two items or having done two having taken out two things circulation per borrower sure you know what you should all be registered library users but the ones of you that are not this is what those the rest of them are using this is what they're saving multiply that out that's what they're saving every year and you're not so this is a good way to be able to tell people who are not using these features pat if you were using these features you could be saving this much every year talk about new year's resolutions there you go there is something that you know there's an easy one forget this whole weight loss thing and everything I can save money by getting a library card that's free yeah i'm all over that so you get the idea we have a collection turnover is always a little bit iffy we have a very high collection turnover unfortunately because we have no space it is really really tight in there forget the whole your shelves are only supposed to be filled to about 70 percent because if everything came back you'd be overwhelmed yeah ours are about 90 all the time because otherwise we would just be weaving well every I think our our weaving is up to every two years now um anything that's been that we've had for more than two years that hasn't checked out is gone because we just honestly can't keep it wow it's sad um but you can see you know holdings per capita we have nine and a half books per or nine and a half materials per person in our district so if they're coming in saying well I don't think you'd have enough books for all of you or for all of us you don't have what I'm looking for so it's fine we might not have what you're looking for but did you know that although we only have nine books per person we're also part of a co-op how many of you are part of co-ops or do interlibrary loan or work with other libraries cooperatively like that I'm not sure what Nebraska has but Illinois has a couple of co-ops that reach across the state and do a fantastic job of providing access to books that I could be ordering I'm on the Mississippi River I could be ordering books from the University of Chicago and have them shipped over not a problem which is a huge thing for us I was I am taking classes at our local Catholic Church and they came in and they said yeah we have this great book it's a text book but it's like 160 dollars if you want to buy it but if any of you want to look at it you know I have one here before you want to buy it and I said well why don't you just interlibrary loan it at the library oh yeah we could do that yeah you could get this at the library and see if you like it before you want to buy it like yes yes you could seriously people I'm a librarian how do you not know this it's a surprise I know you don't know this because obviously we haven't done a good enough job of telling people this and that's kind of humbling and that's kind of worrying because if people if we don't go out there and tell them they don't know it's there that's true so we started printing these out and we print them out for we have a pile of them at our circulation desk our like I said our circulation staff is really happy to know that the numbers that they're putting together matter you know they're not just going on a spreadsheet that no one is ever going to see in their life these numbers actually matter and they can point this out to our patrons who come in and say hey look did you want did you ever wonder how many things are checked out how this actually goes it has actually led to every time I print these out they're gone in like an instant it's it's kind of humbling and it has led to a lot of people coming in and saying hey I know you have some programs coming up do you need volunteers for that do you need donations for that I've got some stuff I think you could use for that or I got a little extra money for Christmas and I would like it to go towards this that's great it has been fantastic so we all know about books and shushing and for some reason my library board still thought we were all books and shushing that was honestly what they thought the library was for the last I've been there almost eight months actually um for the last eight months I have been working on convincing them that we are a very active library we have a focus on learning and connecting people making sure they can connect with each other and making sure they connect with different groups in the community and just bringing everybody together we've been providing meeting spaces for community groups we were talking about um our second story is about half the size of our main story and we've been talking about expanding that out so it's the same size and the board keeps asking me well well they don't keep asking me they don't ask me anymore um but they did they asked us why do we need that extra space what are you going to use it for and I said we need meeting rooms we have our upper story is one big meeting room and that's it we don't have study rooms we don't have quiet nooks we don't have anything else that is the only states we have and they said no no no you don't need that that's silly that's pointless until I pointed out to them on a board meeting night we had the junior rams which is the junior high football group coming in to do a talk with parents and we had to put them at a table downstairs which is in a little tiny nook in our front window so some people got the nice cushy window seat and some people got the hardwood chairs all pulled up from a tiny little eight foot table with all these football player parents and we also had a group that had come in a writer's group that wanted to chat and do some things with their members this was a special board meeting so this was the night that they normally would have had the upstairs and we had to put them in the other bay window so we had three things going on at the same time and they I made them come downstairs and said hey walk around and they were shocked they were very surprised um it's also been a push to teach the library board that creative programming it does allow our patrons to learn new skills you know I don't know about you guys but Port Byron does not have a community center if people want to go and take some classes they're going to have to hike it over to one of the colleges one of the universities if they're lucky maybe some of the high schools do some easing classes but nobody in my area does um I don't know about your communities but we just we're too small we don't do that we don't have enough people to do that we don't have the money laying around to be able to do something like that so the library is the community center we are providing skills for people places for people to learn new skills and that doesn't just translate then to them coming into programs but I've had to make sure my library board understands that also translates into circulation that that brings us in the hard numbers they come to learn a program say they came to learn the soap making program okay they learned soap making now all the sudden they want to check out a whole bunch of soap making books and oh yeah can you teach me a class on learning how to do Etsy because I've been making soap at home and now I kind of want to sell it and do you have any classes on oh I don't know accounting oh good point yeah so we all right I I'm going to admit I am not an accounting major so we uh we subscribe to gale courses and they have accounting classes and small business classes so I can teach them a class on how to use our databases which again it helps people learn what we have to offer it helps our numbers it gets people more involved and then they start talking so we are in the process right now of doing some community betterment projects but this is something that I had done back in Michigan before I moved to Illinois which was only a year ago and brings a whole lot of attention to the library it's not necessarily a marketing thing it is but in some ways it is because it's bringing attention to us how many of you have gardening programs or something spring type related where you do we used to do flowers in February yeah I'm definitely not doing that today knowing as I look out the window but you know it was one of those partner up with a greenhouse let the little kids plant some flowers and take them home to mom that type of thing or you know in the spring we did let's learn how to make let's learn about gardening or let's learn about small gardening or let's do our seed library or various other things like that do any of you do something like that or I know Nebraska has a number of libraries that have gardens outside the building that they either have a group that works with them or the kids come and help plant different libraries have different programs but there are a number of libraries in the state that that have a garden where the community is involved in working on it and being involved with that garden that is great so we did we did um pots around our library back in Michigan because we had a very small area and the library here we've plotted off an area next to the library which well I'm not going to plant for a couple months but that's going to be our our community garden area where we can do classes but in addition to that we teamed up with a local greenhouse a wholesaler actually a perennial wholesaler and every year there's a lot of waste we know this right we hear about it all the time in conjunction with grocery stores and with well pretty much every industry but grocery stores have been on the hit list for a little while because food won't be absolutely perfectly pretty or anything like that it gets tossed well plants are the same way if they're not pretty and gorgeous and flowering they're in the clearance section right well if you're a wholesaler you need to produce these plants for the people who are going to grow them up to make them pretty and blah blah blah if those people either cancel an order or maybe the flat of I don't know lavender came up and half of it died and the other half is okay it's a little stunted you know something like that or the Easter lilies went to flower way too early or hydrangeas are looking pretty spindly they can't sell them they can't give them out to their retailers and if they're not they're just not going to make money out of them so generally they toss them so we partnered up with a wholesaler in our area and we ended up with something around $10,000 worth of perennial and yes they weren't absolutely a perfect condition but they were free so yeah no kidding it was really exciting so we put it all over that the library wants to beautify the community this is our summer project and we want you to help come to the library on this particular Sunday and it was in it was late May early June come to the library and pick up some perennials and all we ask is that if anybody asks you tell them where you got it and you send us a picture when you plant them we got great idea we got people who were asking if we could make signs that they could put up in their nice little garden that they just planted let's say from the library which of course we didn't think about at the time and then we were beating our head against the wall why oh why did we not have signs for people but that's one of those next time things right indeed and that brought us a lot more people who were excited who were coming in who might not usually come in but it's a community betterment project and they all want to get behind it especially the three the next one that I hear all the time the library is inconvenient how many people I'm sure everyone has heard this at one point in time or another I can't make it there your hours are inconvenient I just don't feel like going back out after I get home the having to return the book just takes so much time and I always forget and it's always late and and and and right so I don't have the money to open up a branch I know that most small libraries there's no way in the world you're going to afford being able to open up a branch just maintaining a physical location is not realistic maintaining a digital location is and I know especially in smaller rural areas that a lot of our people don't have access to the internet but a lot of them do and this might be more geared towards the ones who do than the ones who don't the ones who don't can always use it when they come into the library or when they go to someplace that has wi-fi but running and creating a digital branch which for us is our website was really important to us it gave us the opportunity to start reaching out to people we put things on there like our databases hey did you know that you can learn how to play a guitar on the library's website you can take a six-week class on how to play a guitar on the library's website you can learn mango languages you're sitting at a restaurant you can learn some pirates before your food comes you can learn that accounting class that you always wanted to do you can check out those ebooks you can check out the audiobooks you can get free music downloads again it's an advertising thing that yeah we still need to work harder on two because we just started doing this so we've just started pushing it but it's out there and it's available and that gives us a good start but when we broached it with our library board they got a website that was actually realistically usable and had information on it maybe six months before i got there so about a year and a half ago give or take they got a usable website that actually has tabs and they can actually put information on there but prior to that it was the one page here's our info click here to get on to our shared library catalog and that was it so this has been a huge change for the library board and again they're looking at it where prove it to me prove that the money that we're spending is actually making a difference so we have them again it's it's keep track of statistics be able to tell them hey this number of people are going to use our gill courses and that brings us to doing classes in the library to show people how to use gill courses that's all well and good if you see it on the library website but if i don't know how to use that eh it's cool but it's it's just out there and i can't do anything with it so come in we'll teach you how to download a book we'll show you how to use it that has been really helpful for us we just replaced our computers and the previous library the previous time that they replaced computers for patrons they had purchased for laptops and we had them hooked up they weren't ones that you could check out and just take around they were actually hooked up and people could work on those instead of a desktop and the idea was you know eventually maybe we could let people walk around with them or different things but that had never happened so we switched out computers and we sold off all the old desktops and the laptops we kept and they're not in the greatest shape they've been beat on for a couple years patrons are not necessarily the nicest to our computers i don't know about you but ours are not um but we threw a sticker on them and let people check them out there we already put the money into it we already got the money back out of it this is nothing for us and if you've got a computer store near you maybe not a best buy but just like a local computer store you might want to talk to them and see if they get trade-ins or they get used laptops that are still decent but are not what the people wanted anymore and then you can do this too and it's not going to cost you anything but you can check those things out to patrons and then they can use computers at home or they can use them around the library and if you do that with mobile hotspots all of a sudden you just gave your patrons a computer and the internet all at once and that's a huge add value add for them it gives them access to your digital branch so you know that they can use more of the things that you have and that has helped us a lot it's still a work in progress it's still a marketing issue but we're working on it we have also been working on expanding our collection and this is something that i have had fun with ever since i started being a library director we've done the e-collection i talked about the website of the branch we've done binge boxes have any of you done this or heard about this not so much okay this idea came up a couple of years ago from a gentleman who worked at a library in i want to say north carolina but i might be crazy this is a distinct possibility today who knows it's a little plastic box with a handle and it has you can put five six dvds in there so if you're say you're home sick or you know it's snowing outside you don't want to go anywhere you go to the library and you check out um let's say my box has star wars and the first six movies right four five and six and then they added in one two and three so now i check them all out i'm just gonna sit home and watch those make some popcorn hopefully i've got a pizza because takeout's not going to make it today and besides that it won't make it to my house because i'm too far away um i don't have to check out movie four and then realize five and six are checked out by somebody else so then i got one and three and i'm waiting for everybody else to return their dvd you can do any topic you like any grouping you like um we stayed away from doing tv series because if you're checking out six seasons of big bang theory and watching those in the week that we let you check this out i'm really worried about you really worried but if you're checking out maybe oh Jurassic park one through i think they're up to four now or if we want to do lord of the rings and the hobbit throw all those together or um maybe i just want to do hallmark christmas movies one of my most popular was always um disney princess movies ah yeah for marble comic yes the disney princess movies are just crazy those go out constantly and you can do classic disney princesses new disney princesses you can do barbie you can do anything you like um that has been really helpful for us maker space kits uh i certainly don't have the room to put in one of those absolutely gorgeous maker spaces that let people you know set out whole sewing tables i have a dozen people doing this at once yeah no um but i do have room for little kits and i put them in little plastic you know those plastic boxes that are heavy duty enough to where they're not going to break immediately um i'll list all the pieces everything that you're putting in there that you want back if you're putting um we have a fidget spinner making kit if you're putting a fidget spinner in there and you want that one back then you better make sure that it's listed on that list but we check those out for about a month and they will take a book they'll have a book in there to tell you how to do whatever you're checking out plus all the tools to make whatever it is and maybe we get some raw materials donated like um we have a fly tying kit in hopkins back in michigan and we did a fly tying class to pick up the tools to do fly tying is about 50 bucks give or take you can find them cheaper if you get them on sale but realistically if you just took a class and you don't really know if you want to try it if you want to do this at home yeah don't know if i want to spend 50 bucks on it but i can check out the tools it's got a book on telling me how to use it how to do things and somebody had donated some yarn and random fishing hooks and stuff because we get weird stuff donated at the library why we had fishing hooks let's not go there but we can throw those in there and on the list i'm going to make sure that my circulation staff knows that there's a book that there's tools and that it includes these tools i don't care about the yarn i don't care about the hooks if they come back great if they don't somebody use them that's also great the library of things i have a great picture here from the american library magazine if you check out stuff you've got a collection of stuff at your library maybe you've got santa suits like louisiana does or i don't know the fondue is kind of hurry me the taxidermy animals i think is kind of cool but a little bit weird too but anything that you've got that you think that your patrons would like if you have an art collection that rotates out and you check those out it's something that's fun that is something that they would never expected the library and it's going to bring you more people and then they're going to see what else you've got to offer games we've been checking out games everywhere i go it is really easy to convince my library board to go that direction by telling them hey these are multi-generational events that were encouraging even when they're not at the library so we checked out yeah we check out monopoly okay yes there are a million pieces of monopoly you're probably not going to get all that money back i'm just telling you right now but on the flow side copying monopoly money totally legal legal is good um but you know that it's not just kids who are playing that right parents are going to sit down with their kids grandparents are going to sit down with their grandkids or the whole family is going to sit down together and somebody's going to be the shoe and somebody's going to lose it's going to happen but they're learning lots of stuff they're playing together as a family they're getting together and we're encouraging that and we need to be visible um you know it's great we've got all of our staff together we've got all our numbers put together we've got all of our things all of our little trifle brochures that i was talking about we put our value add info on our website on our facebook you know what you're getting but if we're not getting that info to our people doesn't really make any difference what we do this brings up a little bit of the marketing i've gone through a whole bunch of marketing classes and talked to a whole bunch of people and they always say well don't bother to do posters don't do mailings to your people that's silly it's just a waste of money nobody looks at it honestly that depends on your your demographic it depends on your people it depends on your area my area people love posters people love to see our posters up in the bar they like to see our stuff up in the post office they like to see it up in the bank and they stop and they read it and then they ask us about it we get called from that we did our first mailing to everybody in our district that i think it's the first one in maybe 10 years a couple months ago every class every program that we had on there was full within like two weeks it was i i had stuff on there for February and March and we mailed this out in October and they were full wow it was crazy to the point where we started having to add additional programs and let people know hey um yeah it maybe you're going to have to come into the library more often and check out what we've got or watch our website or watch our facebook and we'll let you know if we add additional classes for that program um that has been huge that i am crediting with increasing our online numbers a huge amount because we did big focus features on what types of databases we have about learning how to play the guitar about learning how to use how to learn pirate or hey you're going on a trip and you want to learn some new language just a little bit of it there you go you want to be able to download audio books hey you don't have to go to audible and pay your 10 bucks a piece you can do it on the library of website for free that was all on our mailings along with our museum passes the fact that we check out puppets all different things like that but that's my community i don't know if your community likes mailings or if they're the people who just take them and toss them they see it as junk mail and they're never going to look at it um partner with some businesses and groups and organizations that gets you an immediate uh audience you know they are going to talk to their people and you're not going to have to they're going to do some of the advertising for you they know that they're doing this program for you hey they want it to be successful because their names on it too and it comes down to be focused on your community if your community hates posters nobody ever looks at posters it's way too expensive to print them out or produce them or you don't want to do i don't know maybe you like to cut out the shapes and put them on the poster board and everything else i use canva because it's free and it's pretty and i have no artistic talent either that or publisher i use that one a lot too but you you know maybe your community hates those things and couldn't care less then do something different do the coaster or the trivia night at a bar where people see you out there do different programs outside of your your space or start talking to people and presenting at schools or make sure that you can get in maybe you can get into the school newsletter once in a while or different things like that where people actually do care about those things even if they're not looking at your mailings because they're just junk mail try different things you're going to get it wrong at some point in time but at least if you're trying you're getting out there and i'm just going to end with i found this lovely infographic of the 21st century library um that i showed it to my board members and they stared at it and read it and said oh my gosh i can't believe the library is doing these things why does nobody know about that i don't know you're doing these things granted my library is not doing all of this like i said we don't have a maker space i don't have place for that but i do have kits i may not be helping well i might actually be helping people publish stuff a little bit but i may not be actively publishing content on our website but we do have a writers group that meets and they do work on things like that you know it's it's trying to make sure that we are a little bit of everything for everyone does anyone have any questions i should have brought water that's a pretty amazing graphic there isn't it i love it while we wait to see if there are any questions i just want to mention that you can go to the library commission web page and click on calendar and look down on wednesdays to see what different programs are coming we have quite a few lined up now i think it's through april if i remember right or you can search encompass live in the search box and go to the page that has more information and about how to register if you want to register for it if you register then you'll get an email and even if you can't attend you'll still get an email that says we have this now on our archives and so you can watch it at your convenience so that's another reason to to sign up we have a couple of people who say thank you so much thanks for the webinar great information people are saying well thank you guys all for being here and listening thank you so much natalie this was great information and i love the idea of of using some of the web pages you mentioned that are helpful the one that ala has about the value of your library i had heard of it before but i hadn't really looked at how it operated so wendy says great info i will use many of these ideas so thanks wendy and at the um you said today's your last day at the library so today is my last day yes if people have questions for you is there a way we could get in touch with you or maybe you can send us a link let me see here i know christa has my escape there we go um i know christa has my email address but okay right here i did not um i will give me a second because i think i sent you guys a link to this so if anybody has any um questions feel free to email me um that's my personal email you can email anytime i will definitely find it eventually sorry switching jobs like i said today is my last day at river valley and on monday i start up at north riverside public library district so wow well best wishes for you and in your in your new endeavor and sounds like things are going great oh beth says best best wishes for your future and thank you very much and thank you for spending the time putting this together this was terrific information and you get a star because you took exactly an hour how'd you do that i am uh well i've got my phone right here that i kept staring at for the time i may have cheated well thank you so much and um we invite everyone to come back next week when we'll have another program which if i just looked on our web page here a minute i can tell you what that is um encompass live it's um more than a library a positive change agent so that's something to think about for next week and susan mclellan from pennsylvania will be presenting that for us so sometimes we have local people and sometimes have people from other states and it's terrific so thank you again and i'm going to stop recording now and