 Thank you all for coming out tonight, and thank you to the Meade Library and its foundation for helping us to hold these events. These are terrific. Should I introduce you both ahead of time, or should? OK, I'll do it that way. Neyama Reid has 20 years of experience as a librarian, is the president of the Wisconsin Library Association, has led the Whitefish Bay Public Library, and she loves and has become an expert in the history of Wisconsin libraries. She'll be talking to you later. Laura Souser is the executive director of the Wisconsin Library Association. She comes to us with 25 years of cross-disciplinary experience in philanthropy, marketing, PR, community relations, and more recently, librarianship. Laura? Thank you, Zach. Well, again, I've told everyone that I've met tonight how happy I am to be here in Sheboygan. This is my first visit here, and I'm so happy to be part of the anniversary celebrations for the Meade Public Library. Congratulations to everyone. So this evening, we're going to walk through a timeline, sharing highlights of Wisconsin Public Library history, and overlay them with some of the significant events that I've read about in your library's history. And then we'll also throw in a smattering of things happening at the national level, because I think together all of it gives you a picture of what was going on at the time and how this whole idea of making reading materials available to people that was started very early on in our history has become public libraries today. So we've saved a little time at the end for questions, and I will preface our presentation that Nyama and I are both very passionate about history, but we are not historians. So let's get started. So before we can talk about what happened with libraries in Wisconsin, we need to talk a little bit about where did this whole idea of public libraries even come from. So if you go back to the time of the Enlightenment, there were these things called salons. They were very popular in France and Italy, and they were basically spaces where people could have conversations about books, and about art, and politics, and things like that. Over time, the wealthier in communities across Europe started to create their own private book clubs, which then turned into subscription libraries, or sort of a membership sort of agreement where you would pay dues basically to have access to a collection. So in pre-revolutionary war America, books were really hard to come by unless you were wealthy or a part of the clergy, and so people in the lower and middle class really didn't have access to reading materials. Benjamin Franklin is known for a lot of things, but you may not have known that Benjamin Franklin was actually the one who brought membership libraries to the United States. So from the late 1700s to the mid-1800s, membership libraries started to pop up all around the United States, including here in Wisconsin, which we'll talk about later. So in 1790, Benjamin Franklin had not only brought membership libraries to Wisconsin, but he also donated a collection of books to a town in Massachusetts that was named after him, Franklin, Massachusetts, and the residents there voted that they would take those donated books and make them freely available to all their residents. So creating that first idea of a public library, but the first totally tax-supported library was established in Peterborough, New Hampshire in 1833. Okay, so 1833. So, there we go. Go forward just a couple years. 1836, Wisconsin becomes a territory, and the act establishing the territory of Wisconsin provided for a library that eventually became the state library, and it was Wisconsin's first organized library. And so this is sort of compelling if you think about the fact that our very early founders in this state, before it was even a territory, thought libraries were important enough that they wrote them into the act. So 1840, territorial legislation authorized formation of private corporations to establish and operate public libraries. In 1846, some of you may know that the city of Sheboygan was incorporated, so before Wisconsin was a state, there was Sheboygan. In 1848, a few years later, the state of Wisconsin was formed and the state constitution established school libraries. Now, during the time that Wisconsin was becoming the state, there were all these settlers that were moving into the Midwest, and they were bringing all these ideas from New England with them, so things like liberal arts colleges, literary societies, and this whole idea of a membership or social library. So in fact, over time, while the public library movement was starting in Wisconsin, there were more than 150 social libraries established, mostly around ethnic and cultural groups, so there's sort of these two kinds of libraries in the state about that time. Now in 1872, a bill called the Graham Bill authorized cities to establish tax-supported free public libraries. And the Black River Falls Public Library was the first public library created under this new law. Now in 1876, the American Library Association was formed, so a national something happened. So things are happening in Wisconsin and things are happening nationally. And I think that it's significant to think about the formation of the American Library Association because it helped elevate this idea of people working in libraries and having these entities around the country that there was now an association that they collectively could have a voice together. So kind of an interesting idea is you think about the evolution very early on of libraries. At the same time, there was lots of effort being made to get reading materials out to people. So if you think about the fundamental purpose of a library, it's to push and make things available for people, right? Make things accessible for people. So in the 1870s, the US Lighthouse establishment actually created their own lighthouse libraries to make reading materials available for the lighthouse, or the people working in the lighthouses. And there was even some here in Wisconsin. So if you think about this idea again of making materials accessible, they kind of had little free libraries like we see in neighborhoods today in the lighthouses. So by 1890s, there were 12 public libraries established in Wisconsin. So in the period between 1872 and 1892, there were only 12 public libraries established, but there were 53 social libraries established. So the idea of the public library hadn't maybe taken off right away. And as you think about it, early public libraries were not like the libraries of today. The collections were small. They were mostly donated materials. Staff wasn't trained. And only at that time in 1890, only the La Crosse Public Library had its own building. Now keep in mind that date as we go along. So La Crosse Public Library was the only library to have its own building in 1890, but that's about to change. So also in 1890, the New York State Library Association was founded. So when I was interviewing for this position to be the head of the Wisconsin Library Association, the consultant that was doing the hiring said, it's the first library association in the country would be leading the first, this monumental organization. Well, then I started working and I realized, well, actually we weren't the first, but we were one of the earliest. And I think it says a lot about how forward thinking the people of Wisconsin were. So in 1891 was when the Wisconsin Library Association was established. And it really helped formalize and add some professionalism into the libraries that were working in our state. And it also at a very early, in the very early onset of the organization, its purpose was around advocacy, which is something that we continue to focus on today. In 1895, the Wisconsin Free Library Commission, which I'll refer to as the WFLC, was established by state statute. And it really became the driving force between public library development over the years. And it was important because it showed that the state had accepted responsibility for promoting and establishing the development of libraries, which was really a tipping point, I think, in the establishment of public libraries around the state. And almost right away, WLA and WFLC started working together to formally institute library instruction in Wisconsin. So we went from libraries without trained staff to a group of people saying, we really need to be training these people. There needs to be professional standards. So you see very quickly that this sector is starting to become much more formal and more best practices are being discovered. So, let's see. Now we can't talk about libraries in Wisconsin with talking about Ludy Stearns. So, have any of you ever heard of Ludy Stearns? She's sort of a celebrity in the library world, at least in Wisconsin. So around 1892, the state of New York started doing state-funded traveling libraries. They were these small, rotating collections. And in New York, what they would do is every six months, this collection would go to a rural area and it would be maybe at the post office or at some volunteer's home or in a shop or something. And it would stay there for six months and there would be a volunteer that would manage that collection and the people in that community could have access to a library collection and then it would move on to the next area. So, Ludy Stearns was a librarian who became the first paid staff member of the Wisconsin Free Library Commission. And in that capacity, she started up traveling libraries all around the state of Wisconsin. In fact, she wrote, from 1895 through October, 1914, I traveled thousands of miles in Wisconsin by stage, sleigh, buggy, wagon, passenger coach, and caboose. Wearing out five fur coats and succession in my efforts to reach all parts of the state. I would get a three-seated sleigh, remove the last two seats, and fill the space with books which I would locate in farmers' homes, rural post offices, schools, and other available stations. She became known as the Johnny Apple seat of books around the state. And today, she's listed in the National Advocacy Honor Roll by the American Library Association for her contribution as an advocate for library services in the 20th century. And she was also one of the first inductees into the Wisconsin Library Heritage Center's Library Hall of Fame when it was established back in 2008. So that was sort of our, that's our library celebrity. So again, still in the 1800s, as you may know, 1897 was an important year for the city of Sheboygan, if you're familiar with the library's history at all. So early in the year in February, the Sheboygan Common Council passed an orderance which established a public library for the city of Sheboygan. And James Mead had left the city $20,000 in a trust for the establishment of a library. So the ordinance established the library, authorized the appointment of a library board, and appropriated $1,416 for the operations of the library. I would suspect that's quite a far cry from the budget that you have in place now. And they were able to raise $14,000 by a public fund drive for the purchase of books for this new library. So the new library opened in November of that year, and it was located in a rented space on somewhere on A Street, which I've been up and down A Street, I'm not sure where it was. The first book that was checked out was Jack and Jill by Louisa Mayalka. And just 10 days later, more things changed the more they stay the same. Problems were developing as large groups of children. We're taking over the space available for young men, and so the space had to be rearranged. Most of you that work at the library here today probably have dealt with similar issues. So again, the more things change, the more they stay the same. And it was not an uncommon problem. In fact, that same year, the first designated children's area in a public library was established in Poddeck at Rhode Island. So it was a problem everywhere, I think. So again, at this same time, Andrew Carnegie Library started providing grants to communities around the country to build libraries. And they were built on the condition that once a building was donated, the community would pay for the library maintenance and supported impratuity. And so this created tax support for libraries and a sense of community ownership. They had skin in the game of building that library. So in the early 1900, Cheboygan Mayor, a Dennett, contacted Andrew Carnegie and he made a request for $25,000 for a library building and making the argument that the city is growing, we have hardworking citizens that will furnish a good site and provide maintenance and really maintain this library. So Carnegie came back and said, if you feel furnished a site and agree to spend $2,500 a year on the library, he'd give $25,000. Now later, that amount ended up increasing to $35,000 and the city allotted the huge sum of $3,500 for maintenance and books. So in 1904, the Carnegie Library in Cheboygan was completed. And during this time, the library began providing service outside of the city and places around the country, which aligned with what was happening around the state. Now funding for those services was problematic and this is not, this is a problem that still exists today. So they were providing services for citizens of other cities or other units of government which had their own budgets and were providing little support to libraries in their own areas or for the libraries with which they were actually using. And so local taxpayers were paying to provide service to other political entities and those costs then attracted from the library's ability to provide service to the residents of their own community. So that's kind of a theme that we'll talk about because it evolved into some state statutes later but this idea of if your local community is gonna have a library, your citizens come first, but you also wanna serve the people in your county. So how do you rectify that with funding? So that was really when that kind of that started and it was an area of tension for many years. Now at this time, also the first Cheboygan branch library opened up in a local drug store. And so just to give context to where we are, so 1904, we had 126 public libraries by now. So we had 12 just a few years ago. Now we have 126 and 55 with their own buildings. So 15 years earlier La Crosse was the only city with a library building and now suddenly 15 years later, there's 55 and a lot of it's because of Andrew Carnegie. So it was a time of great growth for libraries in the state. 1905, the first horse drawn book wagon was used by the Washington County Free Library in Hagerstown, Maryland. This library was also the first chartered county wide library in the US. And a few years later, it launched the first motorized bookmobile in 1912. So there's a lot going on in Hagerstown, Maryland. So the continuous, the county life of services continue. And in fact, they elevated to the level of the WLA's conference. So these conversations were happening locally. People were wondering about how do we manage this problem of providing services outside of our community when those folks aren't helping to pay for it. And that you see the value of an association, they start bringing people together to talk about it as a group to try to problem solve and advocate for solutions. And in fact, WLA established a committee to study this question of county library services. And to prepare also a plan for the certification of librarians and at that same time in the city of New York, a librarian did the first children's story hour. So in 1922, WLA did its first lobbying activity where they advocated for legislation that would establish certification for librarians. And it was successful. So it was the first certification law for librarians enacted by any state. So in that way, we were at the forefront of professionalizing the librarian world. We also became a chapter of the American Library Association, which is important because we were a state association working with the local communities around our state. Suddenly we're now connected at the federal level. So we're talking about state funding and county funding and local funding. Now we're also talking at the federal level about what's happening in other states. And later that will also translate into getting federal funding for public libraries around the state. So in 1924, the Wisconsin Conference of Social Work introduced a contest called Wisconsin, a Better Citizen Contest. And it included libraries among the factors on which competing cities were to be judged. So it's significant in that that time there weren't really any standards for the effectiveness of libraries in place nationally or even at the state level. So Sheboygan entered the contest. And you did poorly in the library area, unfortunately. That wouldn't be true today, of course. But the committee said that the library lacked a trained staff. And of course, funding was always an issue. There wasn't enough significant enough funding. And of course, it raised then, at the time, an issue that still comes up in libraries today. The library board was happy with the level of service that the staff were able to provide the community in spite of the fact that they didn't have a lot of money. And the Common Council felt that the library was overfunded. So there was always that tension, which if you've been through library budget meetings probably still exists today. So this is kind of a lofty one because there's some, I think, some pivotal things that happened in the 1930s. So in 1931, a librarian from India wrote the Five Laws of Library Science. And it was a seminal work because it really set the foundation for the philosophy of operating a library. And it was done through the American Library Association. So suddenly you had kind of this common language or this common philosophy about how libraries are to be operated. It's written here. The idea is that books are for use. Books are for all or every reader his book, every book it's reader. Save the time of the reader and the library is a growing organism. So that sort of, as you think about how this library approaches its work, these are kind of the fundamental principles that operate and set their strategy. And these laws are still in place today. It's one of the first things that you learn in library school. And again, it was a pivotal moment in this, in the profession in that it helped nationally libraries coalesced around these principles. Also at this time, ALA started to move toward figuring out a way to secure federal aid for libraries. So in 1931, they asked Congress to appropriate $100 million for the purpose of promoting rural library services. And they asked states to begin formulating plans to use this money. The money's gonna come, how will you use it? So WLA, we were very good at appointing committees. So we appointed a planning committee to figure out what we would do if federal money came to the state for rural library services. About that same time, public libraries around the state started organizing into regional associations. And it was really a way for them to come together to share best practices. There was a lot of isolation in public libraries at that time. If you think about they didn't have the communication vehicles in place that we have now. It's amazing to me when I think about the fact that they didn't have telephones, they didn't necessarily, some places they didn't cars, they didn't have ready transportation. And yet they're active in a state association and in some places in a national association and coalescing around a list of practices. So they started to form these associations and they were sort of these groups that they just came together and did face-to-face communication with each other. And it was a way for the free library commission to meet with the libraries in the state as well. So in 1937, WLA and the WFLC started talking together about what would, okay, so we're planning for federal money, what would it look like if we got some state funding? So they started to put some plans together and worked with the lobbyists on a bill which did not pass, but in the research I wrote, they said the effort was important in educating the public and the legislature about libraries and the importance of libraries. So 1937 early effort to get some state funding for public libraries. In 1939, the library board here in Sheboygan worked with ALA to do a survey of the library, which I think is really interesting when you think again about where we were at that point in time and they were working with this national group to do a survey on the library. So the library, or the ALA recommended a complete reorganization of the library and staff. They wanted to add a retirement plan, they suggested you develop a Westside branch, more outreach and of course advocate for more funding. And really this work I think set the direction for the library for the next 25 or so years. Also in 1939 nationally, the ALA released the Library Bill of Rights which is based on the First Amendment and it's designed to speak out against the growing intolerance of free speech and censorship affecting the rights of minorities and individuals. It promotes intellectual freedom and it's sense of all to include topics such as book banning, race and gender discrimination and exhibit spaces. And it really guides libraries and serving their communities today and protecting the rights of all patrons. We hear a lot about intellectual freedom today but they were talking about it back in 1939. So again, the more things change, the more they stay the same. In 1940, finally the Meade Library, there was an addition and a renovation and the library changed its name to the Meade Library and used some of the funding that they had been, that had been established in the trust by James Meade so many years ago. I don't know if you know this but in 1942 the Meade Library received a publicity word from ALAs. You got some national recognition. I don't know if you're familiar with that but. So that's interesting, you were sort of on the forefront of publicity here and here in Wisconsin. At that time the Common Council appointed $1,000 for a branch library in one of the schools, Lyman School here in Sheboygan. And eventually this library started to contract with other cities around the area that was establishing their own libraries. I'm not sure you're aware of this but you were doing processing and cataloging for other libraries very early on. I mentioned earlier that public libraries around the state had started to organize into associations and at that time the Meade Public Library joined the Fox River Valley Association. In 1945 there is a connection with the Sheboygan Library and WLA in that Marie Barkman, has her name ever come up in any of your history studies. So Marie Barkman was a librarian here and she became WLA president. And 30 years later the library director, Coonert, E.R. Coonert was president from 1975 to 1976. Oops. Let's see, in 1948 WLA worked with the free library commission on a plan to formulate some standards around state library service. So they're starting to work toward this idea of state funding for libraries and they put together a plan that put together standards that if you were gonna get state funding what criteria would you need to meet in terms of staff levels, funding, best practices, things like that. And they got some funding from the legislature to do kind of a study, a three-year study in a couple of areas. Hired a lobbyist to lobby for this idea in the late 1940s. Early 1950s this library built two branch libraries for the first time they were constructed for the purpose of being branch libraries. That was also the time that the first drive-through window was established at a library in Cincinnati which I think after the pandemic there's a lot of libraries that wish they had put in a drive-through window. In 1952 one of your trustees, a gentleman named Charles Broughton was one of the first to receive the trustee citation of merit from WLA. He was a newspaper owner and he did a lot of work to promote libraries. And he was especially noted for his awareness of the social usefulness of the library. So Charles Broughton in 1952. In 1956 this was an important year for libraries. The Federal Library Services Acts which provided funding for rule library services is passed. So that means that the federal government was going to allocate $7 million annually for 10 years to extend library services in rural areas around the country. It was the first action by the federal government to invest in public libraries and to acknowledge the issue of equity and access to information. Something that libraries have been promoting for a long, long time. In 1961, WLA's Committee on Intellectual Freedom, so way back in 1961 we had a committee. We made it a standing committee. The roots of this committee actually date back to 1948. Again, the more things change the more they stay the same. And in 1965, the free library commission became a division in the Department of Public Instruction. Okay, so in the 70s there maybe wasn't as much big landmark things happening, but in the state of Wisconsin, the WLA and now the Division of Public Instruction worked to create state statute around the creation of public library systems in Wisconsin. And in 1973, the first four public library systems under this new law began operation. And there's someone in this room that I could tell a lot more about the systems in Iowa or in Wisconsin. There's several around the state they're organized by regionally today. And the idea behind the regional systems is that there's cost sharing, there's cooperative purchasing available, they process continuing education, and they create networks of libraries so libraries are no longer working in isolation. I came here from Iowa and we don't have the system approach in Iowa so there's a lot of small public libraries in small towns across the state that are really very isolated from each other. And I would say that having access to a system that has people on staff that do training and continuing education is really important for really elevating the professionalism of libraries in the state and access to resources around the state. So in 1980, there was a bill passed that established state funding for public library systems and over the years that the percentage of funding that goes to public library systems has increased. And in fact, in 1986, there was a law passed that it was 13% of local funding for public libraries. 1997, again, another bill was passed that created some statutory provisions related to public libraries around certification of staff, services through counties. So lots of things to help bring the state together around equity and access to information. So with that, I'm gonna turn things over to my colleague, Nyama Reed, who is gonna talk a little bit more about kind of contemporary libraries, what she sees happening as a library director today, and maybe talk about some future trends as well. Yeah, thank you. So I'm Nyama Reed, I am currently president of the Wisconsin Library Association. And so we each get to be president for one year. Laura is the long-term employee, though she's been there now about a year and four months. So it's been great. I moved to Wisconsin from Michigan about 11 years ago. So similar to Laura, I could kind of see how Michigan does things different than Wisconsin. And the across-the-state systems that every library, every community's covered, whether they have their own library or their service, and then that everybody cooperates together. And being in Milwaukee County as a smaller suburban library, my patrons can still get things for research from Milwaukee Public. Up here, I know Meade is the resource library for your system and those smaller libraries where they can't have everything forever. They can have it delivered within a few days, depending on what's happening. So just to highlight to you that in my opinion, in my experience, having done this for 20 years, Wisconsin really has an excellent system of libraries and all of this that came to it and the history within Wisconsin of the Wisconsin idea and really elevating education at all levels in Wisconsin has informed how libraries are supported. What I want to talk about here in the 90s and then coming forward here into the 2000s, as Laura has mentioned, we've been doing story times a long time and whatnot, but even to this evening upstairs at the reception, a couple of the ladies I sat and talked with and asked, well, how are libraries doing? Are people still checking out books? Are they going away? And I always say, we're not going anywhere. We've been around since Alexandria. Still upset that they burned it down. What might have been in there? But there is a human nature for the need and desire for education and entertainment. Look at Shakespeare. Shakespeare was entertaining people while educating at the same time. People were coming into the libraries in the 1800s, the 1930s, the 1960s for both of those. How we do it changes the nuances of what we offer may change. We're doing even more now things a little different, but we're not going anywhere. It might be downloadable. Maybe someday it's gonna be a hologram or something plugged into my head that just downloads the book to my brain, but we're not going anywhere. So I wrote a couple of things here. If you think back, they used to have tablets and then scrolls and finally printed books, but they were expensive. Gutenberg made the movable type. I still keep hoping for one of those at the Goodwill, knowing what they are worth. You get to mass market books where then all of a sudden you can have a bazillion copies and Nancy Drew or the Westerns. The paper's not gonna last long and it's gonna fall apart because it wasn't made as well, but then everybody could read it. And now we have digital books. So there's a transition from the print books to digital and libraries are meeting both of those needs and demands. When I was talking with the ladies this evening, some research has shown that the younger generations actually read just as much or more and they prefer print books and it's actually senior citizens and retired folks who like digital. On your Kindle, any book is a large print book. So I had two cornea transplants this year, plus a cataract, I can now see an HD, all the dog fur in my house, much to my chagrin, but reading books, I realized I hadn't been reading much and I realized that was why even in my late 40s now, hitting 50, you can get your Kindle, you can put 100 books on it, make it all large print, take it with you as you go off to travel Italy and you don't have to have a bunch of little paperbacks that you can't read. So it's actually digital has been very heavily adopted by the Gen X and the Boomer generations, more so than the younger ones. They're still reading print, but we're not going anywhere. If you think about storytelling, the old days people might sit around the house and read the Bible together or tell funny stories or sit around the campfire, then you had the radio programs come out and my grandma had the story years ago that she and her mom were at home and War of the Worlds came on, where people freaked out and thought it was ending and her mom said, well, that's just crazy and turned it off. Oh, so, but people love that storytelling. Then we had TVs and movies, you know, Andy Griffith and all of a sudden I remember in the 80s you could go to the library and get, you know, the latest E.T. on VHS. Some librarians are still not over that they invested in the beta machine instead of the VHS machine and they wasted that money. So 40 years later, hopefully they've retired and someone else now is doing it. But then DVDs, so for a long time, oh my gosh, when are we finally gonna, and finally in Milwaukee County, I think there's one library left with a couple of VHS. They won't get rid of, because they have one patron that checks out those VHS and once they're finally done, they'll be gone. And then DVD, Blu-ray, and now downloadable movies. So we're still offering it in multiple formats. A lot of people, you know, in the old days you went in, you couldn't talk. It was, I walked around the library, I got here about an hour early with my husband to walk around and see all the great changes I was reading about as I was planning for this to see the teen space and the cafe here and all that. And I saw like, where was the collaboration space? You can have your conversation and talk a little more versus the sh, quiet space. I've heard of other libraries, there's actually a light we can buy where it looks like a stoplight. And so red is the quiet study, yellow is, you can chat a little, green is, you know, laugh it up by the new book stand. And stuff, whereas a lot of libraries now, you know, they're not just for quiet contemplation or studying, and there can be some tension in there if you're in a smaller library in one of the smaller communities where you don't have three floors and you can put, you know, put some space over here and put up extra walls where people, we'll hear the kids giggling or two neighbors running into each other and chatting by the checkout desk. And so we try to manage that transition, but for 20 years as a librarian when people said that libraries are supposed to be quiet, I'm like, no, not anymore, I'm sorry. You know, over here we have a quiet study room or at the far end, that's where you'll get more quiet study. But right here, you know, not all of the spaces are quiet. And part of that is the people are coming in to the kids after school doing their collaborative work. At my library, we have in Whitefish Bay a lot of professors, they might be coming in and writing a research paper, things like that during COVID because people were working from home a lot more while their kid was, my son had school and for band, because they couldn't all practice on their instruments together. They all got Home Depot buckets and drumsticks. So I'm trying to do work and he's practicing his rhythm on the bucket drum. And two days later, the teacher said, so I heard some of you have other parents and students at home. So put a pillow on top of the bucket. So a lot of people have been coming in for the quiet and some libraries, it looks like a phone booth. We have one called a booth, but there's different names. We're literally, it's a little one person study about the size of your shower stall and it has electricity and its own fan and it's soundproofed and you can come in and get that quiet respite you want. So instead of putting up walls and getting permits, our friends group supports us in getting this booth for a few thousand. So, and that happens across the state at different levels. Coming back here, I'm gonna switch back to the 2000s. So that's sort of the broader overall, what has happened trends. As Laura was saying, the more things change, the more they stay the same, they change a lot more quickly now. I mean, how long did we have printed books before we had digital, right? The hundreds of years and now if you have an app, they're changing it every other month. They're coming out with a new app. They're the model for paying for it is changing kind of thing. So it can be frustrating for you as the user and also for staff to have to constantly update when it was a print book, it was here's your book and you know how to use it. As a librarian, we have to constantly stay up on what's the new tech, how's it's being, using this one's now gonna replace this one and stuff. So it's much more active behind the scenes to offer you all those materials and be able to show you how to use them. Or if someone comes in, I remember years ago, someone taking the mouse on the computer and putting it on the screen or one put it on the floor like a sewing treddle and stuff. So I'm going to look here. So in 2003, I had the first National Library Workers' Day and then here in 2010, you opened your drone mass teen learning center. I saw that upstairs. It is a gorgeous space and your teens are very lucky to have that. You also have more of the playroom with the games as we walked around to be able to be in there and have those doors closed and the children's center on the, so you're not having to shush anyone. At my library, I like to say we let the kids go to seven, not 11, and I can see that in that space, in particular with the gaming, they can go to 11. And in my experience, none of the kids hanging out in the library are the bad kids. And they'll allow the kids outside of our aren't bad either, but they're not coming in here to get in trouble. They're probably using the library as a safe space to come after school, hang out before going home, whether they're blowing off steam after school, but they're not out there maybe getting pulled into trouble or alone or lonely, and they can come in and play video games and they're with their friends and they're enjoying themselves. It might be shooting games. We get those complaints, but they're in there connecting with each other. Some of the games, they're collaborative where they get on and they design a pizza studio together and they make pizza from four different computers yelling at each other. So when you see that and you think, oh, they're not reading books, that's okay, because libraries aren't just about books anymore, it's also community and they're having community with the librarians and with their classmates or their friends and they're safe in the library, whereas they may not be safe at home alone or out doing things around town. I watched Opie a lot with him and Opie got in a lot of trouble, so did Beaver. So, certainly over the last 22 years, the impact of the internet. Libraries years ago, the reference room, they would call and only the trained librarian could do it and you had all the stack of books and it was all vetted and you had to cite your source. And now a lot of those rooms have gone away, people look it up online. I remember reading to people the German potato salad recipe out of the Joy of Cooking as they wrote it down. And we get very few of those questions now, but what happens is people are looking the answers up themselves and it's not vetted. Is it Joe Bob's website versus is it Wikipedia or CNN or PBS or Fox News and how do you know if it's accurate or things like that? So libraries hold classes now to teach people how whether it's students or adults, how do you analyze it and see if it is a objective website that you're getting your information from and stuff. Before we got to vet it before you got the information and now that's not there. So a lot of people are coming in for help, but not as much the reference and research questions because you can just say, hey, Alexa, how many miles is it to the sun? In, excuse me, 2011, it was the beginning of e-content downloads at Meade Library and that was right when I moved to Wisconsin. I was at the Mequon Library and I was on the committee for helping buy those books and looking at them and what was this gonna be? And even just 11, it's hard to believe 11 years later, how much it has exploded and expanded. One of the things people don't realize about that as you're, if you buy a book and you donate it to the library, we can sell it. If you buy a digital book, you cannot donate it to us. We have to buy it through a specific vendor. The copyright doesn't cover it and while you might pay $20 for that book, we pay 85 and we can only check it out 20 times. So a music CD that costs me $20, I can check out 300 times and keep resurfacing it. If it's a downloadable one, depending on the platform, I may pay $2.50 every single time someone downloads it to listen to it. So that transition to digital is much more expensive. We can't do one-to-one as we're making that transition and one of the impacts of the pandemic in my experience was it accelerated that transition. We signed up for Canopy, which is sort of art films and things like that, right before the pandemic and they said, and it's a per cost instead of per year. So every time someone watches the same movie, we pay for it again. They said, don't worry, people aren't sitting at home all day watching movies. And then all of a sudden it was $1,000 a month, which was 10% of our budget for collections at my library. So we had to keep like, okay, you can have three checkouts instead of five a month, you know, in order to get it. And now it's kind of leveled off as people are back at work and whatnot. But those services for those who use them are extremely popular if you're in a community where people are comfortable with technology. Some even within Milwaukee County, some of the other suburban libraries, they barely get used. And in the northern part of the state, if you think about, do you have dial-up? Do you have fiber available? Even within Whitefish Bay, there's parts of the community, the homes don't have fiber, much less if you get up into the fingers in the northern part. So during COVID to be able to do homework, people would go sit in the library's parking lot to use the free wifi. So they're not gonna be downloading books typically as much. So if we look at equity across the state for the state of Wisconsin, that digital divide, there is a big difference between the rural areas and then the urban centers. And even with the urban centers, it's not always equal and distributed for everyone. So that's a big issue as we look at it. You have been doing it since 2011. Wisconsin is very lucky. I believe we now have the only statewide, if you use the Wisconsin Public Library Consortium, the downloadable books, the only statewide system. They quit doing that because the overdrive doesn't make as much money and stuff. But from that, we have a huge millions of books in there. You can check out. Usually the big ones have big hold lists because it's everyone in the state putting holds on the same books. But we are still very lucky. When I talk to colleagues in Michigan, it's still each library purchasing their own set of books. And at that price, you just can't offer as many. So we're very lucky here. Library's a big transition in the 2000s and still today is talking about the library's a third space. So you have home, you have work. Where's that fun space? You go hang out on TV. It was Cheers and everybody knows your name. For some people, that's the library. And a lot of times we get people who come in, whether it's the stay at home mom who in February needs to get out of the house with the two-year-old and can come to the library for a story time or just to play. Or maybe we have our regulars where they almost fisty cuffs over the fresh paper in the morning who's in the door first to grab the Milwaukee Journal or the Chicago Times. But they come in and we know their names and we say hello, we have a Kurg machine. They can make their own coffee for a dollar or bring their own cup and pod, we don't care, we'll give them the water. And so it's the place where people can come for comfort and to be known and to hang out and have conversations. So that's something that's been going on for 20 years. And as libraries have moved into that, maybe the collection isn't as big. There's more comfortable seating space. And Mead is a prime example of that as I walked around and seeing the cafe and knowing how you moved where the periodicals and newspapers were, where the different collections were. Upstairs, the children's room is just fantabulous in my opinion and stuff. I wanna come up here with my staff and look at it. But they have those various spaces not just to read books, but they have the engaging books, the touch things, the toys. For a little child, play is very important. And sometimes people think of libraries as just a study, but play for little children is how they learn. And having that incorporated into the library as part of that space gives people a chance to come out. And if they come in to get the DVD, maybe eventually they'll get a book too. And research has shown for kids it doesn't matter what they're reading as long as they're reading. Back of the cereal box, graphic novels, Captain Underpants. Yes, my son who is a struggling reader when he finally had Captain Underpants at nine and he's walking like this. I was ready to just send Dave Pilke a thank you note. So some people sometimes don't like those topics. They're a little irreverent, but if it gets a nine year old boy who doesn't like to read, to read a book instead of playing a game, I'm all for it. And that's libraries like this, what they offer. There's something for everyone, not everything for everyone. During these times as Laura was talking about intellectual freedom and you all see those stories in the newspaper right now, I'm not gonna go into the details. But every book in the library may not appeal to you, but it will appeal to someone. And for those people who don't have as much or maybe they're more niche or they're going through a divorce or something's happening and they don't wanna talk about it, they can at least find that book and they can go to a self-check machine and check it out confidentially. So it's not about providing, we're not providing as many staff to check out, it actually increases privacy for people when they're taking out uncomfortable topics. So in 2014, 2013, Wisconsin Act 157, relating to consolidated county library funding and non-resident library use. This gets into the weeds and I'm not an expert on these weeds. But what happens in Wisconsin because you can go across county borders and you can check out books from the other libraries, you get into these funding issues of, well, they have a library, they should use their library, why are we paying them money? However, they decided it at the state level, they worked out these laws that are what we are currently using in almost every year or every other year. It kinda comes up again at the state level or with the association, someone says we don't like paying this money. And thankfully, WLA has a committee called Library Development and Legislative Committee that specifically works with the legislators for lobbying and they have ready to go question and answer in a chart. And they have the rapid response team that can go in and talk with a legislator or a local mayor or something and explain, okay, this is what's happening and if you change this, this is how it will negatively impact you and all your neighbors. And so this is sort of the best option we have right now. And it provides really good funding across the state so that all the libraries can offer services. I will say in looking at, I'm really into statistics, I do my grocery list in Excel and I sort it by aisle. So if pick and save rearranges, I'm gonna be very upset. But we do the state annual report every year in the first quarter, library directors such as Garrett and myself, how many circulations? How many patrons do you have? How many programs? Everything, your budget. And it comes out in a spreadsheet and then I crunch it to look at different things. There are 381 public libraries in the state of Wisconsin. Half of those have a director without the masters in library science. It's a smaller community. If you think in terms of budget, if you're in one of those smaller communities and the total budget is $250,000, then there are different levels, whether it's high school, some college, college. And then at the state level through the Department of Public Instruction, they do excellent training classes for those non-trained directors to teach them about ethics and how to do a budget and how to work with your local administrator and things like that to really turn them into library directors and librarians without them having to go get a master's degree. Because what fits in the different communities is different for everyone. And to me, they're all librarians, they're all library staff. And I've seen a pair of professional staff who were absolutely amazing and I would work with any time of the day. The smallest library in the state has a budget of $20,000 for the year, for staff, for the books. And that's the basics, but they can put it on hold and have it brought over from the neighboring ones so they're not limited to just theirs. And I'm sure for that small community, that is a lifeline that people can get to instead of having to drive an hour away to get books from somewhere. On up to multiple million dollar budgets at libraries such as TOSA, Mead, Milwaukee, Racine, Madison, that were able to access all of those things. So what you see here, you are all very lucky and blessed the quality of library that you have in Sheboygan. There are others that are much smaller and then are able to utilize the libraries like this. But overall, the system that's been set up in Wisconsin is very supportive so that everyone has that chance at success. In 2015, WLA celebrated their 125th. So congratulations on yours. My library in Whitefish Bay just celebrated our 85th. And we had a big party. So similar to what you're all doing here, it's nice to celebrate that the library has been around that long. 2015 to today. So how are things a little different? As we say, we're doing similar things, but the nuances are different. The specifics are a little different. There's been book clubs forever and we still do book clubs. But now post pandemic, I'm hosting my book club, Hybrid Still. So there's two people that still zoom in or maybe six one day if the weather's bad or they're having chemo that they don't wanna have the risk. Others who weren't comfortable with Zoom, they're happy to be back in person, but we're doing it together at the same time with them on their screen and we have a special camera where we can all hear each other and they get to see their friends. They may have, maybe haven't seen in a couple years because of the pandemic. Storytimes during the pandemic across the state, all of a sudden, as you know, everything shut down. And what did that mean for small libraries if they didn't have the tech to be able to do Zoom? Maybe they did Storytime out in the park where people could space apart. Or a lot of them did the story gardens where they set up the story in the window fronts of the stores along the main street or in the local garden. So almost you have bookworm garden, bookworm gardens here, which is amazing in Sheboygan. A lot of libraries did something similar on a smaller scale, maybe just on their own lawn or in their neighborhood park. I heard of libraries where they took out the front window and put in a little tiny like to-go window like at McDonald's so you could walk up and say, I'm picking up my hold, but you weren't coming in the library until things got better. And we kind of joke within libraries that when you're new and you're, why has it done this way? I don't know, we've always done it that way. We're really good at living in our ruts and good or bad. And the pandemic just made us get out of them. That rut was flooding and we had to get out of it. And all of a sudden we started finding new ways to do things and as we're coming back, we're not just going back to those old ways. We're retaining some of the new ones. We have a brown paper bag take and make craft, take it home, make it, take a picture, share it with us on Instagram, all sorts of fun things like that. We were doing ones with literally a technology camera as the staff member sewed to teach the kids at home how to sew and they had picked up all the supplies from the library. And then a mom emailed and said, oh, they loved it so much. We bought more felt and more string and here's the little things we made at home. Libraries are checking out all sorts of different materials. I saw you had some cool backpacks here and the experience kits. Some libraries check out cake pans or tools. So if you're at home and you need to do it, you're not gonna go buy a hammer drill if you don't need to use it again. If the library doesn't have room for an amazing makerspace like you have, some might just have the 3D printer on the counter. And I heard of one library where they used it for people to train in how to do CAD design to design what they were gonna print and then they could get a job because they had experience in CAD. And so they were actually using their 3D printer and it was a little tiny library. They said they had the checkout machine and the regular printer and the 3D printer. And they were just like, oh, go over there. Here's the book. We'll help you figure out how to do CAD. And then the people in their community could get jobs. So a lot of libraries now are checking out museum passes. So you can go to a library and get a pass to the zoo or the art museum. There's a brand new pilot. It just rolled out in the last couple of weeks with the state park system and the public libraries. There are 20 libraries starting. So it's not the whole thing yet. They're kind of working out the workflows and then the cost of it where you can come in and get a one day day pass at one of the participating libraries to go to a state park. So for those who normally wouldn't have the money or may not have the wherewithal, come in and see that and go, oh, what are we gonna do today? The art museum passes out, but we could go to a state park and stuff. So working on doing those things across the state. It was really amazing. I did a talk on the radio about a month ago and I emailed across the state on the list server and said, what are your special collections? And it was amazing. Everything people had, robots, training things. We have a metal detector and a mom said before her son and his friends went out, she threw a bunch of pennies in the yard. So they would have immediate success and then stick with it for a couple hours. But during the pandemic, people were stuck at home and they couldn't go to the art museum. And so we just started with, oh, we've got puzzles. Check out the puzzles. And it was so popular. We said, well, we have a button maker and we're not doing programs. Let them check out the button maker. And now we've expanded to this huge, you can get a sewing machine. You can learn how to do coding. We have the little robots for that. I just took home a big green screen so my kids could do pictures and then you add in the picture behind it. That's how they do it with the technology in the movies and stuff. So the libraries are meeting that across the state. And a lot of times you might just have an extra printer at home and you donate it to your library and they go, oh, that's in good condition. And they add it into the circulation. So if you have something like that, think about it and see. You might not realize it, but they might want to have that there. A lot of libraries have started checking out laptops or Chromebooks. Right now with the federal government money, there's quite a bit of grant money to be able to do that. And hotspots, well, if you have the laptop but you can't get online, libraries check out the hotspots too. And then you don't have to go to Starbucks and pay five bucks to be able to sit there and use their email. You can do it from home. If there's still connection, I will say having gone camping around Monacoa at a campground and I had to do something right at the campground. There was, if I went to the end of the road, I could check my work email, but in the campsite I couldn't. So it can vary there. On the plus side, if you check out an e-book and you're in a hole, when it expires, it won't delete off. You still have time to finish reading it. So if you don't have time to finish the book on your Kindle, go up to your cottage really quick because you probably won't have enough wifi there. I know someone else who hid in her cinder block basement until she finished it, so it wouldn't delete off. So as we're coming out of the pandemic, where will we be 11 years ago even? Or 20 years ago when the internet first came out and you're like, well, what is this thing? This is kind of a hassle. I still got a call. How much has changed in 20 years in the services? I can't even predict where we'll be in five years. Aside from, we will have books and we will be do story times and we will serve you, but we will keep changing how we serve you to meet the current needs and demands and technology and budgets. So I wanna give a shout out to the foundation and if you're in a local friends group. My library, we just started a foundation, I hope someday we're as successful as yours. Our friends group gives us the equivalent of 5% of our budget a year and that covers 97% of our programming. It put again a nice projector like this that's having to roll out a cart and remember which cords to put in. It covers, we got all new furniture. And so there's the tax dollar and it's hard to go in and say, hey, can we have another 25% because we wanna do these great things. Having the people who are passionate about learning and the arts and the libraries who donate their time to sort through donated books and sell them at the book sale or post them on eBay and sell them, whatever it might be and donating funds to go to whatever it might be makes a huge difference whether it's the small $20,000 library or the $20 million library in the big city. So thank you to you all for supporting your library by coming to programs like this and however you give by coming in and checking out or buying books, those books at the little free book sale that dollar each, it makes a big difference. So thank you.