 Welcome, and thank you for joining us for today's TechSoup for Libraries webinar. You can do IT, how to empower library staff with basic tech management skills. My name is Crystal, and I'll be your host. In just a minute we'll be joined by our guests for today who will share their curriculum and examples of how it can be used to build your own IT skills, to build the skills of your staff, and to better serve library users as a result. But before we begin, I have just a few announcements to share. We will be using the ReadyTalk platform for our meeting today. Please use the chat in the lower left corner to send questions and comments to the presenters. We will be tracking your questions throughout the webinar and will answer them at the designated Q&A section at the end. All of your chat comments will only come to the presenters, but if you have comments or ideas to share, we will forward them back out with the entire group. You do not need to raise your hand to ask a question, simply type it into the chat box. You should be hearing the conference audio through your computer speakers, but if your audio connection is unclear, you can dial in using the phone number in your confirmation email that we've also shared here in the chat. If you're having technical issues, please send us a chat message and we will try to assist you. This webinar is being recorded and will be archived on the TechSoup website. If you're called away from the webinar or if you have connection issues, you can watch a full recording of this webinar later. You will receive an archived email within a few days that will include a link to the recording, the PowerPoint slides, and any additional links or resources shared during the session. If you're tweeting this webinar, please use the hashtag TS4LIBS. You can join us in the conversation there. TechSoup Global is dedicated to serving the world's nonprofit organizations and libraries. TechSoup was founded in 1987 with a global network of partners. We connect libraries and nonprofits to technology, resources, and support so that you can operate at your full potential to more effectively deliver your programs and services and better achieve your missions. TechSoup has helped to distribute over 14 million software and hardware donations to date through our product donation program. We offer a wide range of software, hardware, and services including products like Symantec which provides enhanced security for individual devices and networked computers. Symantec donations include products that can be used in small, medium, and large enterprise environments. For more information about TechSoup product donations or services, please visit techsoup.org and click on Get Products and Services. And today we have three guests joining us to talk about IT tech management skills and building tech management skills in libraries. Carson Block has led, managed, and supported library technology efforts for more than 17 years. He has been called a geek who speaks English and enjoys acting as a bridge between the worlds of librarians and hardcore technologists. As a consultant, Carson is often brought in to help align the library's public service mission with its technology efforts to serve the needs of patrons and staff. Cindy is a library technology consultant for the Texas State Library and Archives Commission where she travels around the state to serve the needs of small and rural libraries with the You Can Do IT program. As a former learning technologies librarian, Cindy loves teaching technology and believes that empathy is the heart of teaching along with equal doses of patience and curiosity. Henry is also a library technology consultant at the Texas State Library and Archives Commission and is also the state E-rate coordinator. He provides training and consulting for library staff across the state with a focus on emerging technology trends and broadband connectivity. My name is Crystal Schimpf and I'll be your host for today's webinar. Assisting us with chat, we have Susan Hope Bard from the TechSoup team. And again, if you're on Twitter, we hope to see you there using the TS4Libs hashtag. Just a reminder, we'll have time for questions at the end of the webinar and you can send in your questions as they arise. We'll keep track of them and address as many as we are able to. Now this webinar is being recorded and again all of the slides, resources, and materials will be included in the archive at the end of this webinar which you will receive by email as soon as it is available. Now we're ready to begin today's topic and just to give a refresh on what we're covering today. The library field relies heavily on technology but few frontline staff receive training and basic IT concepts that can build the confidence we need when managing public access computers and in working with patrons. The Texas State Library faced this challenge in more than 400 small public libraries in rural areas and they responded with the You Can Do IT program, a friendly, approachable hardware, software, and networking skills training program. Now today, Carson, Cindy, and Henry are going to share their approaches to IT training to engage different learning styles, to free and adaptable resources, and their lessons learned from hands-on experience in the field. So now I'm going to hand things over to Henry who will start things off. Henry? Hi everybody. Hi, this is Henry Stokes. I'm the Library Technology Consultant at the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, and I'm excited to be here today. So without further ado, we wanted to learn a little bit more about you. So we launched a couple of polls here for you. This first poll is asked the question, in what type of library do you work? We've got public library, school library, academic library, special library, and other, and in that case just go ahead and type the other into the chat. When you've finished your selection you can click the submit button and go and sort of observe the results as they happen in real time. Or if you don't want to put in a selection just click the skip to results button and go straight to the results. So we'll give people a chance to fill that in. And I'll go ahead and close the poll in 3, 2, 1. Okay. So let's see here. Okay, we've got three-quarters of you are from public libraries. Most are from academic libraries. And then we've got some from other and some from school libraries. Great. Glad to see you all here. All right, for our second poll we ask, what size community does your library serve? And this is, you know, you can report on how you fill your library, which one best fits your library, tiny, small, medium, large, or very large. And the results are coming in. Thank you. Go ahead and click those buttons. Let's see here. Great. All right, seeing results back to slow down, I'll go ahead and close the poll in 3, 2, 1. Great. All right, here we go. Looks like we've got 39% in medium, 32% small, the majority in small mediums, with also good portion consider themselves large, and then next is tiny and very large. All right. So that looks good. All right, one more poll. This one is asking for how you feel like you relate to technology. So what's your geek factor? How comfortable are you feel with technology? Are you a super geek? Do you live and breathe the tech? Are you an aspiring geek? You want to learn more? Are you a reluctant geek? I wish I didn't have to learn it at all. Or are you mentally about something else? Go ahead and type those into the chat if you've got something else as far as how you'd like to describe yourself. Okay. Folks are putting in their responses. All right, very good. And we're closing down the poll to check out the results. No. All right. So the vast majority of you consider yourselves aspiring geeks. Makes sense. And then a good 19% or so of you are super geeks. So we still got those folks that are reluctant about it, 9% or so. So welcome, everybody. Welcome all tech comfort levels to our webinar today. So let's get started. So again, I'm Henry Stokes and I'm really excited to be here. I wanted to tell you about our You Can Do IT program. But before we get started, let's go over some of our outcomes that we hope to get from this very webinar. First off, identify some IT concepts that can help frontline staff troubleshoot tech. Also, learn approaches to Gage and Taylor Tech Learning to different skill and knowledge levels. And finally, to obtain resources to share with your colleagues and IT staff. So that's what we hope to accomplish today. So let's start off with a little history. Again, we here at the Texas State Library serve the state of Texas's libraries. And we used to have 10 regional systems for the public libraries. And each one had a dedicated IT staff. Well, most of them had a dedicated IT staff that could help the libraries out with their IT. But in 2011, our budget was cut and we had to close all the libraries for the regional library systems down. Now, we all know that maintaining public access computers is an essential task for all library staff. It's become more than just a building of books. We've got to keep maintaining these public access computers. And basic IT skills become necessary for all the staff trying to maintain them. So we knew we had quite a loss on our hands when we had taken away this major support system for our libraries. We had to figure out what to do. In 2013, we conducted a survey to all the public libraries in the state to ask them how they would rate both their IT skill level, but also their level of support that they were currently getting. We had a suspicion that the small and rural libraries were less likely to have the reliable IT support. So we put that survey out there and we determined that yes, indeed it was true. Small and rural libraries did in fact report that they had less reliable IT support. And we also found in that survey that the more knowledgeable the staff were about basic, this fundamental IT skills, the better they felt like their support was, which makes sense. So it seemed necessary to try to figure out a way to help those folks who have maybe less IT skills build on those foundations, sort of the whole idea of teaching someone to fish so that they can have fish for a lifetime. So what we decided to do was create a whole program, a training program, called You Can Do IT, where we could focus on these foundational tech skills to help out particularly small rural libraries so that they could really feel empowered, confident, and able to tackle those IT skills and really own them. So we put in an RFP to find an instructor and Carson Block was selected. And we started developing a whole curriculum. We came up with two different face-to-face workshops which we are converting to online. The first would tackle the topics of networking, so covering things like broadband, speed test, cables, Wi-Fi, everything to bring in the Internet into the library. And then we get into nitty-gritty hardware software in the second workshop which actually goes into getting into a computer itself, talking about the parts, talking about the software you use, and learning how you might make purchases for that software purchases for the hardware. So we've actually been conducting these two face-to-face workshops over the last couple years. In 2015 was the network workshops which we've since converted to an online course. And in 2016 we've been doing face-to-face workshops on the hardware software topics. The whole idea of these workshops is to really focus on empowerment. So we call them You Can Do IT, which is of course a nod to Rosie the Riveter, but we can do it posters from World War II. We kind of made up our own character, IT Heidi. She holds an Ethernet cord with pride and strength. And so the whole idea was to really push that for our participants so that they could feel like they could really own the topic. And here you can see some pictures of our participants striking the rosy pose or Heidi pose for photos and really get people on board with that and sort of change the way they maybe think about IT and their own role with it. You can check out what we've got so far. We've put up a website with most of our content at this address, www.tsl.texas.gov/. You can do IT. You can actually check out the first course networking with videos and exercises and quizzes, and everyone can have access to that curriculum. And then we're working on the second one for hardware software, so stay tuned for that. We've also hired Cindy Fisher, a new library technology consultant to spearhead the whole project. So without further ado, here's Cindy. All right. Thanks, Henry. Now we're going to take a look at four common library technology issues that the You Can Do IT curriculum can help you resolve. Think of it as a little preview and there's much more information contained on the website that Henry was just talking about. So something to consider, this is just sort of our – the four bullets you see here are the four points that we're going to go through. All right, so the first problem that maybe some of you have encountered before, the public computers at your library load at a snail's pace, but your Internet service provider claims that you've got 50 megabytes per second. What gives? Okay, so here we go. Think of your library's Internet capability like you would a car traveling on a highway. At rush hour, the highway is jam-packed with other cars trying to get home and everyone is slowly creeping along at 25 miles an hour. A few hours later, however, when rush hour has ended, fewer cars are on the road and you'll be able to reach that 75-mile-an-hour speed. The same is true for your Internet network. When there are a lot of people on your Internet, you'll never reach the advertised speed. But what's really important to know is the speed you're getting when no one else is on the network. You can find this out by testing your library's Internet connection speed using a tool called a speed test. If you're not getting the advertised speed when no one else is on the network, you can use the data that you get from your speed test to communicate to your Internet service provider that there's an issue. If you are getting the advertised speed when no one else is on the network, you can still use the data to make a case to purchase additional bandwidth. And having this data is a very effective communication tool, especially if you are not the decision maker at your library. It helps to speak the same language to convey your need. And this is just one step towards bridging that IT library divide. The You Can Do IT curriculum provides explanations of broadband, network traffic, a demonstration of a speed test, and links to multiple free speed test providers. On to the next problem. Staff computers access the Internet much more slowly when your library is full. According to your speed test that you've just done now that you know that the tool is there, you're receiving the full capacity that the ISP provides. Okay, so how can we resolve this issue? So much of the technology that we rely upon in our libraries can literally be hidden behind the scenes in closets and ceiling tiles or in the stacks. So drawing an actual map of your library's network can really help visualize your library's infrastructure and forces you to investigate the cabling and devices that connect your library to the Internet. Not only does it make you more knowledgeable about your technology, this exercise is a great communication tool for you to converse with your library's IT person or IT service provider. And maybe you don't have an IT service, IT person for your library and it's you, well then it makes you more capable of conversing with the people that do provide this library service. Maybe they're contractors, city staff, or volunteers. The material in the curriculum will help you to find new networking vocabulary and break down some of their anxiety inducing technology barriers like those acronyms that we never seem to know what to stop using. But getting back to our example, there are a number of solutions we might find to our you-can-do-IT problem of the slow Internet connection. As you're mapping your library's network, you might find you're using outdated hub technology or cabling that can easily be replaced as part of the library's technology budget or with e-rate funds. And that will resolve your staff's connection speed issues. Okay, you can do IT problem number three. You just want funds to build a new technology lab, but you're unsure which computers will perform best. How should you start? Okay, before we get to the answer, first let's celebrate that you got the award, hooray, champagne, etc. Yay for you getting your grant. All right, now moving on, it's time to get to work. With so many options out there and a dazzling array of features and prices, it can be overwhelming to try to find the best fit for your library's programming and needs. An important step which often gets overlooked in the rush to purchase technology is to gain an understanding of what your users' needs are and compare them with the characteristics of specific hardware and software that can meet those needs. For instance, using our technology lab example, maybe you want to provide workshops on documentary filmmaking or using photo editing software to digitize old family scrapbooks. In either scenario, you'll want to select computers with fast processors, a good amount of RAM or random access memory, and a great video card. All three components work together to process instructions that you're providing to the computer while also processing instructions for the application software. So to completely oversimplify this, the more robust these components are, the faster you'll be able to work. If you were to decide to purchase computers for your new tech lab using price as the only consideration, you could end up purchasing equipment that is too slow for your users' needs and has the unintended result of frustrating your users where you could have built their technology confidence. Since we definitely don't want that to happen, you'll find a list of technology review sites and resources to evaluate technology within the YouCanDoIT materials. Remember, purchasing technology is very similar to doing collection development. All it takes is having the right resources to guide you and awareness of what's out there and an understanding of your users' needs. And I just want to say as a quick side note, though our example states that you're doing the investigation of your tech after you've been awarded the grant, it's probably more likely that you've had time to do some preliminary technology sleuthing in advance to assemble a budget. So it just goes to show no matter where you are in this process, having a working knowledge of the basic components of the hardware and software are incredibly useful in our technology-powered library. Okay, final problem. Public computers keep coming down with viruses, but you're not sure what the problem is because you know that you run anti-virus software. This situation is critical. So what can you do? So I promise we're not trying to scare you with this scenario, but it's such an important aspect of keeping our busy and well-loved public computers happy and healthy. And we know that those are the characteristics that we also want to apply to our patrons, of course. So there are a number of ways that we can protect our technology, our library data, and our users' data. It's unfortunately not a one-size, set-it-and-forget-it deal. On the contrary, it's more like an onion where new layers provide an additional area of protection. So while you may have things like anti-virus and anti-malware software running, Adam's system Restore software like Deep Freeze can ensure that the way you've configured your computer can easily be reset if someone downloads unwanted applications or makes unwanted changes. But don't stop there. There are a number of other steps that you can use to implement and use to strengthen your public and staff computer security. Using the Computer 101 resources in the You Can Do IT program, you can ensure that you're covering all of your bases. And finally, what's also included is a sort of background on how to back up your data and construct a data recovery plan in the event of a security breach. So it may sound intimidating and I promise you it sounds, well we all promise you, it's a lot easier than it sounds. But we just want you to be prepared for it all. I'm going to hand it off to Carson and he's going to talk a little bit about what it's like to be the IT teacher in the classroom. Cindy, thank you. And Henry, thank you so much. And it's amazing. That's what it's like to be. It's so much fun to be in front of people in a live situation, people with problems to solve by golly, people who are curious enough to come to a class to have that bravery. Is that a word used properly in this context? Brave yes. And to come and learn something brand new. And so that's something that we, designing the class, and especially as we practiced it as we went across Texas over two years. It's something that we wanted to make sure happened really, really, really well. So I'm going to actually come back to this concept as I'm talking about it because creating the right environment for learning, especially something like technology in libraries, especially for folks who are mostly lay people or sometimes people who don't like technology doing this reluctantly, that's such an important step to do. One of the things that we had, a question that I had when I responded to this opportunity, to me the big question, is it possible to teach complex technology concepts to lay people because, frankly, much technology information we see can be gobbledygook. There's all sorts of requirements for people to learn all sorts of terminology and concepts. And especially if you've been with a bad IT person and they've used language to keep meaning away from you. I think all of us have been through that including me. I've had that experience with folks. Of course, it's a little bit easier for me to call BS on somebody when that happens. And so realizing that that was important, we wanted to make sure that everyone had that opportunity. The answer to that big question, is it possible to teach complex tech concepts to lay folks? Yes. And that's a yes with lots of exclamation points behind it because that is what we found in training opportunity after training opportunity. And I wanted to be clear too, this is not a case of don't make me think, which is a famous book on user experience design. And it's a good idea for web design to not make people think. In this case, we wanted to teach people how to think about tech, the sort of ways to bridge things that they're familiar with with things that might be brand new. So this was, like I say, a super, super interesting way to go about this. I'm sorry to say technology can seem intangible. It can also seem invisible. And so we really wanted to be sure that we took things from the invisible to the visible. Answering questions like what are inside these black boxes anyway? What's happening? I see big lights. I see wires unplugging stuff in. But what's actually happening? What is the function of this? And that's really, really important to having an understanding of not just how to work with it, but to understand things when they're going through. So walking through these things together step by step was key. And you saw exercises on the previous page, and I've got to say my absolute favorite was the massive speed test. We did something a little cheeky. As the instructor, I would test the library's Internet connection just by my little old self. And of course it got pretty good results. Right? I'm the only one on. And then to illustrate what happens after school lets out, for instance, when everyone's data network's kind of bogged down, we had everyone perform the same test that I performed, and then we compared numbers. Doing a test like that makes it instantly all the things that might be esoteric or mystifying, it makes it really clear to everyone's involved. It's like now I know why we are having this sort of issue. So that was super, super, super powerful. Technology makes some people nervous and anxious. A lot of it is around the I'm afraid to break it, right? People are afraid to touch something because they might break it. But we didn't want folks to be afraid of that. So especially for around two, the second year of the training, we brought computers that could not be broken because they would never be turned on again. My wonderful friends in Colorado donated computers that were formerly in great service as public computers, and we took those out and we allowed everyone to get their hands on. So this photograph that you see, we've got many more online. This is an actual photograph of librarians happily tearing apart the guts of a computer. And that barrier was really, really good, especially knowing that it's like, wait a minute, I could do anything I want to this. And I said, yes, of course you can. Of course, we need to put it back together for the next class. So keep the blow torches and the pickaxes in your purse or in your bag. Don't take them out here. We've got to put them back together. But anything short of that, yes. In fact, we want you to take things apart and ask these why questions, like what are these different components in the circuit board, et cetera. These are really, really, really important. Some folks really got surprised by some of the hands-on and they became alive because they felt like these are people who were former technologists in a different age when there was more different types of computing devices, especially mainframe things. And they would remember things from their past like punch cards, right, or working in different factories where things were made, computer aided in early days. And this was really, really great because that would allow us to bridge past experiences from class members with our current environment and to think about the future. And so through this and some other methods, we built in lots of opportunities for community time, hands-on, but also we wanted people to be able to talk with each other. An important part of making the classroom safe, I think, is not telling people how they can use their time when it's free time and allowing them freedom in exploring things, and especially in pushing back. Much to my difficulty sometimes because you can't handle every situation perfectly, I encourage people to push back and to ask questions, especially tough ones because a lot of people came to class with tough questions and we wanted to at least have a chance to address those. The other wonderful thing about bringing the community together in the classroom is we need to illustrate a truth about technology, and that's that no one knows everything. Smartphones have leveled the playing field a bit, but we need to show that IT and technology problem-solving is actually not one person knowing everything. It is really a bunch of us knowing parts of the puzzle and coming together and talking about it. That is the healthiest part of the technology troubleshooting we can do. Everyone has an opportunity to share. Everyone has an opportunity to learn, and that's really, really, really good. So digging in like this really inspired confidence. That's a takeaway I want you to have from this. This may be the most important thing to steal, again, with the steal of this curriculum sort of thing. Start by connecting and building trust, and so I'm speaking to those of you who might be teaching if you're in the situation when you're teaching. Don't feel like you have to know everything. The important thing, again, is more on that guide on the side part of the teaching question rather than the stage on the stage. Now there has to be some set up formal type of instruction just so that we can talk about definitions and get grounded, but the best and most energetic parts of the class actually came and we were working side by side, and people took that basic knowledge that they had from the earlier parts of the class and then applied it and started asking questions and asking really, really good question. The other thing that I had to be very careful to do was modeling good tech behavior. This may be an apopropical story, but I've heard that the way that some bank tellers learn to spot counterfeit bills, and I don't care if it's a lie or not, that they learn to spot counterfeit bills as they just handle real money all day, and then when something that doesn't quite feel right comes across their hands and they know that there's something up with that. Now I don't know if that's true or not, but I do know it's true that if I'm a technologist and I'm coming in to teach, that I will have to walk my talk. In other words, respond to questions in a way that is positive and a way that's healthy so that students can understand if they're being treated well and they have a good technologist in their life, or perhaps they're not, and then strategies on how to deal with that. Another thing too is we didn't really want to make experts here, and we made that really, really clear, but we did want everyone to know that we wanted everyone to have a basis of the lingo, some of the terms that are used, and the concepts that are used to communicate with technology, people especially. And we know that that was eye-opening for a lot of folks, and I'll tell you a couple of stories in just a moment. Another thing that's very, very important is if you've been in a small area you may not realize that there's more than one way to solve a technology problem. In fact, if you've been in a large area you might not realize that there is more than one way to solve a technology problem. There's generally multiple ways. In fact, on the chat a little bit earlier that came up we had asked, someone had asked for a link for the speed test, and a couple of us entered a link, and then we had another person enter an alternate link that could be used with requiring fewer resources from the computer to be able to test the speed. That is exactly what I'm talking about. There's always more than one way to solve a problem, but depending on someone's technology experience they may not know that, especially by not knowing that, that may inhibit their own ideas. The other thing that was probably the biggest challenge as an instructor is tailoring the class content to meet needs of all attendees from novice to advanced. When I say novice to advanced, I mean in my first class, in the first where we were just trying everything out, on one hand I had a class participant who had programmed a Cisco router and was doing that actively for her library, on the other hand I had a person in charge of a library, a very small library in rural Texas who had said that she had never held a book before she had gotten this job. She was an over-the-road trucker for her professional life and had kind of retired and was taking care of the community library. That's quite a gap, right? So I thought, this is awesome. It's never going to be this wide. So part of that is building the camaraderie in the class and being very clear that we expect people who know more to share what they know and to help teach their neighbors and to share ideas. We also expect our people who have less experience to speak up and tell us all what their needs are. That's really, really good. And a big way of doing that too is inviting people to discuss their actual problems no matter how waterfall or how difficult those problems were. Some of them got it tough. Some of them were enlightening though, or all of them were enlightening for all of the class. And of course that's the instructor's job is to make sure that everything's relevant to everyone there as best as they can. And I also want to give a shout out to Holly Gordon who was involved in year one of the training. And she was invaluable especially in terms of some of these class activities and encouraging wonderful participation from our classes. The double click is supposed to advance to the next slide. I must not be doing something correctly here. It's not clicking up but I'm just going to go ahead and talk anyway. If someone else could get in there and advance that next slide that would be wonderful. That would be wonderful but it's not showing up I wonder if I have a connectivity problem. Okay, I'm also going to tell you that we had gotten some wonderful, wonderful success stories as we've been out in the field. And after the fact, if you could see the postcard and perhaps you can, we had a wonderful postcard from Gwen who's in a small town in West Texas talking about the actions that she took. Now key to success that we feel is basically having a basic understanding, having some vocabulary to be able to communicate with others or even to form your own thoughts and solutions. And then finally feeling empowered to do something. So I've just a brief story I wanted to tell you about and that is we had a student who was having some problems with their Wi-Fi router and their technology professional who they were working with. Thank you for advancing the slides whoever got in there and saved me. Their technology professional told them that I wasn't being very helpful and they were having kind of a communications gap. After taking the class she was able to communicate effectively to her IT pro and said hey, I've learned about signal strengths of my router and it seems to me having our router back in the back of the library where there are no patrons might be, we might be out of its effective range and perhaps we should move the router or even the antenna or access point, the AP part of our router to the public area so that we have a stronger signal. So of course her IT professional took her very seriously and moved the AP into the public area and improved the performance just like that. So just by going to the class learning a few basics she felt confident enough that she could do a diagnosis of what a problem was that she was having and then seek the solution that she was looking for. And I was so proud of her. I've got more of those stories asked me about them anytime because they were one of the best parts of teaching this class. All right, I'm going to hand this right back to Cindy. Thanks Carson. Knowing from the teacher's perspective how important it is and how empowering it is and just how fun. I'm so glad that you brought up fun again because I mean we really did have a great time with these workshops and sure it was scary at first but I think overall everyone left not only feeling a lot more confident they also left knowing people in their area who they could talk to you about other questions. So with a state like Texas as there are many Texas participants now I recognize some of the names in the participant list. We have a big state so knowing your local folks that have the expertise is so helpful but also when you are going through an experience like this and learning this technology which can be anxiety inducing learning it in a comfortable situation with other people you can then you know people you can call upon to oh what was that thing that we did in order to unlock the router it's like you can call upon that local expertise so that's really wonderful. Let's see. Audio is fine. Okay, so let's go ahead I'm going to just go back over and I just want to reinforce that you really can do IT and I really as Carson was saying that Gwen who sent this postcard to us out from West Texas she does not have a lot of library staff but she felt empowered by this curriculum and I really do and Henry and I know does too really feel like you can do this we made along with Carson of course made this curriculum so that you can feel empowered to do that. So again we highly encourage you to go to this website and download the exercises and the handouts as Henry mentioned earlier we have turned one of the workshops into an online course and are working on getting the second one up and I did see a question earlier in the chat box about resources for knowing how to take apart computers and one of the videos that will soon be up online is actually a dissection of an actual PC so you'll see that as well. I also wanted to give a huge shout out though to the Colorado State Library as well a few years ago and I'm pretty sure your webinar host Crystal was a large part of this created the online tech training for staff materials that you can also find at this website. Okay, so that is what we have on our end I just want to say thank you all so much for your attention and you can contact us at any of the any of our emails or Twitter handles our Twitter feeds et cetera but we are really excited to answer any of the questions that you have and I know that there's been some good ones coming in. Well Cindy, thank you and also thanks to Carson and Henry for giving us this presentation so far and really for developing this curriculum and delivering it and then making it available and I just have to say it is a tremendous body of work and from what I've seen in the curriculum itself it must be very helpful for libraries and judging from those success stories you've heard from libraries in Texas it certainly is so far. We've been getting a lot of questions and so we're going to get to as many as we can right now and fortunately we have a good amount of time until the top of the hour. Before I dive into those questions though I just want to mention a couple of things. One is that you will receive an archive recording of this webinar and all of the links and resources that we've shared today and that will come out later this week and it will come to your email the same email that you registered for coming and also we will get to as many questions as we have but we know that there are a lot of questions and if we don't happen to answer your questions today we'll follow up with you later via email so I just wanted to make sure that you know that. And so now I think we'll maybe start off the questions. I just want to bounce back to this slide because I love this header steal this curriculum and you've got this link to the curriculum but I think it may have actually caused a slight bit of confusion and I just want to ask you what is the cost of accessing this curriculum and sharing it with your library or your nonprofit, your organization staff? So in my attempt to be cheeky I'm sorry I was a little I'm clear this is free. This is funded in part from the Institute for Museum and Library Services and from the Texas State Library this is all free, freely available. It all has a Creative Commons license attached to it. We want you to take this, adapt it, use it and of course if you'd like to use it we would love to hear from how you're using it. So if you have additions to make or different versions that you'd love to share please let us know. We want to make this a useful resource we can see by the number of questions and also by the number of participants that this is at least of interest to a lot of people and so this is free. Short answer, it's free. Excellent. I think that you did say that but of course sometimes it's hard to believe that something that this well put together is in fact freely available. So thank you to the Texas State Library for doing this and I know that the Colorado State Library resource you shared is also freely available and of course in libraries we like to say feel this really just mean use it of course so that was a fun way of saying that. Another question that we got about the curriculum itself and just to kind of clarify a few things because of course we're in a webinar today that's a form of professional development and I got the question if we do certificates for this webinar and the answer to that is that TechSoup doesn't provide certificates but you will get an email that says that you attended so it's kind of confirmation that you attended but we also got the question about you can do IT program. Is there a certificate and is that available only to Texas libraries or is that available to library staff from anywhere? Anyone can, this is Henry, anyone can actually go if they are willing to log in set up an account with our Moodle which is our online learning management system. If they set up an account which is free and they make sure to enroll in that course that you can do IT course then they can actually get generated a certificate for taking the course which they can use if it's honored where they are they can use it across in Texas if it's honored. So yes, but you may have to make sure to enroll first. Excellent. And I assume that means it's also possible to view the resources without enrolling. You can just go to the site and view some of those resources. That's right, it's open for folks just to access without having to enroll or log in. Excellent. Thank you for clarifying that. There's also an interesting question that came up and we've been talking about how these course materials this curriculum is used for library staff but is there any adaptation here for use with library patrons or library users? Have you heard of that happening? Might that work? And I think maybe Cindy or Henry you might be the first to take that one. Sure. I haven't heard of anyone using it with their library or with their patrons or their users but I could see this certainly being you could, this is a number of options but maybe they're helpful or not but you could start with a children's programming with people that are interested in taking apart a computer. I think there's some potential examples that you'll see online and certainly on the YouTube videos that could be really engaging for people to do hands-on work. Taking apart a computer, working inside a router, doing the speed test, doing like a little 101 class where you can mix and match some of the curriculum for your users. That could be really neat and that could be maybe a career day or something like that for people that might be interested in getting into IT. This could certainly be one toe in that water but I haven't heard of anyone doing that yet but if you want to do that would be great and let us know if you do. Excellent. Just a clarification on the URL. Of course we've really been careful with this acronym of You Can Do IT but if it's not coming through clearly we will share the direct link in the archive and we've shared it in the chat but I just want to make sure you know that in the URL it's You Can Do IT. Of course in the first part of the URL it's PSL for the Texas State Library so if you are trying to jot that down by hand it will come to you an email and you don't have to but just want to clarify the characters that you're seeing there in those long URLs so we'll share those out later. Now I just wanted to go back and just share a nice example somebody shared. Maria shared this example about this shows why learning IT can be helpful even if you aren't necessarily an IT person yourself. And Maria says that her IT person always encouraged her to get hands on with any software or hardware upgrades and this early exposure to the ins and outs of how a computer functions has helped to keep libraries running since their regional library system disbanded so they were able to basically take that knowledge and move forward with it. And of course we have many different types of libraries here in different configurations but I know sometimes we find ourselves being accidental technologists and having to keep things running so that's one good selling point for why it's good to learn these IT skills. Now another example and a question and I think that Cindy I might pitch this one to you first but I think Carson might have something to add to it is about, let me just track down the question here getting staff on board and this question comes from Julia. She says, I'm a tech-heavy person in a mid-size library. We wanted to get our non-techy staff up to speed but they're not making purchase decisions or fixing computers or setting up computer security. So how can you help staff who use the computers but don't set up or maintain the computers and perhaps how does the you can do IP curriculum tie into this? That's a really great question. Sort of a question about motivation, right? Like how do you get someone motivated to learn a topic that seems like there might not be relevant for it? Even if you're not creating, making purchasing decisions or necessarily updating the computers I think one way which maybe this is a simple out but we all use technology in our life that's just how things go. And as librarians and library staff I think it's really important that we have a breath of knowledge about technology. It not only makes us better at our job but helps us help our users. So I've heard in some situations where there's maybe one person that always seems to get the technology questions and wouldn't it be nice if we could spread that out to an entire staff of librarians that could answer those questions. So I think one way to kind of engage people if they aren't the sort of decision makers or IT staff people is to think about some sort of example and I would recommend looking through some of the resources that we have online and picking out something that might just be fun. And I think one of the great ways to do that is doing the speed test because I think we've all probably experienced some sort of network slowness whether at our home watching Netflix or something like that. And talking about that and then maybe working through some of those resources. It can be a difficult sell. I think Carson knows that for sure that there's a little bit of trepidation when approaching this if there's not relevance. And so finding that hook can be hard but I think since we use it every day it might maybe finding something along those lines would help. Carson, what do you think? Absolutely. I agree. And I think maybe the key in your situation is as Cindy pointed out there's a real danger in letting somebody hold the bag for all things technology in a library. And I see that over and over and over. It's like, hey, that's so-and-so's problem, not mine. I don't have to think about it anymore. And that's really super dangerous and it's a dead end because increasingly we use technology to do our jobs to serve patrons. And so we have to understand how these tools work even in the basic sense. So if you can help with understanding the person's job first and then looking at what sort of jobs that they need to, they rely on technology to perform that might be your foothold. And as a kind of a blunt analogy when we're thinking about tools we have like a toolkit, right? And so when we're working in the physical world if we need to pound a nail in some wood then we're going to use a hammer. We're probably not going to use a knife. Conversely, if we've got bread to slice unless we want to make a terrible mess we're not going to use a hammer to slice bread. We're going to use a knife and slice it up nice and fine. So that's why it's very, very important, I think, to understand each staff member's work that they're doing and how technology applies and use that as kind of your gateway to perhaps bring these things up and teach. Great. And Carson, you're making this transition to the next comment and a couple of comments and questions that I want to share very easy because I think for frontline staff in particular those who are engaging with the public there are certainly applications of IT knowledge and we've had a few people share them so I'm going to kind of bring these up now and then see if there's any other comment that either you or Cindy have. Leanne says, you know, we have issues, problems when people bring in their computers and the example given here is that they don't know how to access their USB. It may not be an older computer and it may not have pop-up windows when the USB is plugged in. So that's a very specific example of patrons needing help with technology that crosses over into IT. And then Molly says, you know, how do you deal with members of the public who get upset because they may not know how to use the public computers and expect you to know how to fix what they've messed up or what maybe has gone wrong on the computer. What do we say to explain how to fix it? And then also I would add to that how does a greater knowledge of IT perhaps put us in a better position to help those patrons troubleshoot those situations. So Carson, do you have anything to add after those comments and questions? Yeah, well those are good tough questions because especially the patron who comes in with no knowledge of technology has come to the library because this is a place of trust and a place of knowledge for them. They do something that doesn't go as expected or is not desired like lose data, right? That can happen. And then of course they look at the librarian or the library worker and say, hey it's your fault, fix the impossible, right? That's really, really an untenable position to be in but it's one that many folks are in and indirect customer service. And I know that the example that was given that's on one end of the extreme of that experience with folks. Some libraries handle it through if there's a lot of people, if it's a 1D2Z that's a whole story altogether but if there's a lot of people in the community who need more education then if the library has the resources then they will put together training classes for folks. I have seen though that overall throughout the country kind of those basic computer classes are kind of going away. That doesn't mean that there's still not a need there. And so the only strategy suggestion that I would give is number one, of course, having as much knowledge as you can about how the computing environment works and then understanding your boundaries as well when you don't know something and feeling okay about saying, I don't know how to do that, we need to stop here. The other is going through, you know, appreciative inquiry with the patron starting with what it is that they're trying to do. So one thing that I found that's been super successful for me and it's been a long time since I've been in direct public service this way but especially when someone's really, really hot acknowledge that something bad happened. That's a really good way to start. You're not trying to pretend like something horrible didn't just happen but then backtrack and ask what problem it is that they're actually trying to solve. And sometimes they've just taken the wrong, they've applied the wrong tool to the wrong problem or there's a different way to help them perhaps depending on what they have to do. And can I just jump in there real fast too? I also sort of tandem to what Carson was just saying which is such great advice, especially the part about trying to be calm in those situations which are always fun, is there a number of questions too about like what other resources are there available to librarians in this situation that like, okay well what are the reference sites that we need to know about just like we need to know about what other places online we might answer another kind of reference question. And I just wanted to say that there are a number of resources out there like how to geek is a great fantastic resource that can talk you through a lot of these tech questions, a new site that I was investigating yesterday from about.com called LifeWire. I know it's under the about.com headline so it's a great assault but so far it looks really helpful. Look at things like Instructables, search YouTube videos if you're looking at stuff or hardware. I mean these are alternate sites that I think we sometimes forget about exist that can actually have a really, really great impact when trying to augment our knowledge about technology. And so I just wanted to mention those and also just searching forums. It might take a little while and in that moment with that hot patron might not be the best result but these are sort of alternate ways that folks that are troubleshooting tech often will go to in order to resolve some of those issues. Excellent. Very, thank you for sharing your perspective on that angle with working with patrons and I think the advice you've both given right now is just very helpful and very true to that experience of being a frontline staff and working with patrons in the library. So very good advice there. Thank you for sharing it. We have time for just one more question right now and I will say I know we have a lot of questions we haven't had time to answer so if you've been hanging on the line and we haven't gotten to your question we will follow up by email and especially with some of these questions that are a bit more detailed we'll be able to get you a better response so we will follow up within about a week or so with those responses. But the last question that I want to ask is really about working with IT departments that maybe are outside of the library or are not library focused and maybe don't always understand some of the things we might be asking are those needs for public access technology, public access computers and really just a general question around this. Do you have advice from your experience or from your knowledge of working in and with libraries on how library staff can more effectively work with IT departments from outside of the library or outside of the library world? Any tips, just a quick tip or two before we leave and maybe Cindy I'll start with you and then we'll go over to Carson. If you don't mind I think I'm actually going to kick that one over to Carson because I think – Absolutely. Yeah. That's a tough one and an ongoing question. The first thing is to try food as an entry point. And I know that sounds cheeky right but it's actually just to show that you're bearing a nice gift and there's no Trojan horse in that gift and to create a relationship in any way that you can at any level in that IT department it's helpful to do it with the department head. It's even more helpful to do it with whoever is assigned to the library. And the idea is to show them something that they may not have seen before and that is the purpose of technology in the library is probably way different than any of the other customers that they serve in the municipality, the city, the county. Show them the effectiveness that you have when you're able to help somebody fill out a job application for instance or some of the struggles that happen. Show them how kids are learning because there's bandwidth and there's access to the internet, how they're coming in after school and they're relying on these tools and machines to make things happen. By building that understanding first that's how you get off of square one into more complex issues like so we have to err on the side of access instead of security. How do you feel about that? Well you don't want to start with that conversation even though I have, many times. But the way to do that is to actually show them the purpose of computing in a library and allow them to draw their own conclusions. Some people don't care and you don't waste your time on them. Just find the ones that actually understand and get what we do and give them cookies and show them the wonderful world that we have. Great. Carson, thanks for that advice for those of you who might be out there working with a city or county IT department or from a college. Maybe that will help you out in working with those situations. We'll follow up on the questions we didn't have time to answer again via email. But I have just a few things to share before we wrap up. So stay on the line. We have just a brief survey where you can tell us what you thought about today's webinar. But one more time I just want to thank Carson and Cindy and Henry. Henry had to step away a few minutes ago so couldn't answer as many questions. But thanks to all of them for sharing this curriculum and for being a part of this webinar today. So thank you all. Just a few quick announcements. Excellent, excellent. Just a few quick announcements. One is that TechSoup has training courses in addition to what you've seen today from the Texas State Library and Colorado State Library and the materials they've put together. Check out the TechSoup training courses. The topics include tech planning, tech training, web design, and Adobe Design products. So those are available at TechSoup.course.tc and we'll share that link in the archives. We also have some upcoming webinars, one on tech planning on Thursday, February 16th with Ideal. One on March 16th with Protecting Patron Privacy in Public Libraries. That's a library-focused webinar. And of course Protecting Patron Privacy is a top issue right now that we want to be talking about. So we'll see you on March 16th for that one. Save the date. And just a reminder that TechSoup for Libraries is a website that exists to serve the specific technology needs of public libraries and we have a blog and library spotlights and other bits there. So please visit our site. Alright, thanks for hanging around. We want to give thanks to ReadyTalk, our webinar sponsor for today. And just ask you to stay on the line for a brief survey to tell us what you thought of today's webinar. Thanks so much and have a great day. Bye-bye.