 In Compass Live, I'm Emily Nimsakant, filling in for your regular host, Krista Burns. In Compass Live is the Library Commission's weekly online event. Our sessions cover NLC activities and other library topics, and they're presented by NLC staff or special guests. The one-hour sessions are free and offered every Wednesday at 10 a.m. central time, and they include a mixture of presentations, interviews, group reviews, web tours, and Q&A sessions. Today, our title is Reflections on PLA, and we have several special guests with us. We have joining us over the web Mary Jo Mack, the director of John A. Stahl Library in West Point, and we also have four librarians here from Lincoln City Libraries, Carol Swanson, Mary Luckner, Kerry Simpson, and Tammy Teesley, and they will all be talking about their experiences attending the Public Library Association Conference. We're going to start off with a guest from here at the Commission, Laura Johnson, our Continuing Education Coordinator, who will tell us a little bit about the grants that made it possible for all of these librarians to attend PLA. Laura? Thanks. Hi, this is Laura. I just wanted to say two words. We do give continuing education and training grants every year. We're hoping to be able to continue this even though we may have kind of a straightened budget situation next year, but we think that continuing education and training grants are very important because they help librarians improve their library service by getting them out of their normal, I don't want to say rights, I don't think we're in lots, I really don't. But by helping them go to do things that they wouldn't ordinarily be able to do, we were happy to be able to send five people to the PLA meeting this year, and as part of the grant, they agreed to share what they saw at PLA with us. So, we're thrilled to have to hear them today. All right. Thank you, Laura. We're going to start off with Mary Jo Mack. Mary Jo, would you like to go ahead and talk about your experiences at PLA? Well, I'd be happy to. I was lucky enough to go to PLA, and I thought it was a fantastic experience, and I do want to thank the library commission for helping to make that possible for me to go there, because I just came back energized, and I really did get a lot of good ideas that I could have tried to implement into our library. I went to two sessions that I thought were spectacular. The first one was called From Not to Hot, Turning Your Unknown, our mediocre library. It happened in place in the community, and that was given by Victoria Ashford, and she is the director of training and consulting, and she just really did. I thought a fantastic job. I was scribbling notes the whole time during this session, and of course, a lot of that ended up being about customer service and how that truly is what libraries are all about is customer service and getting the services to your customers that they need and that they want. The second program I went to that I thought was fantastic was Shortcuts to Greatness, or 10 things that great libraries know, and maybe you don't, and this was given by Karen Hyman, and one statement that she made that I just thought was profound to me and really made me stop and think was, your library is as friendly as your least friendly employee, and I really got thinking about that, and I decided to do a lot of, or at least some, looking at the staff and maybe do some training and have them relook at the way that they greet customers and about customer service. She also said, Karen also said, take a look at your website, at the homepage on your website, and she gave, she was really pleased with Houston Public Library's website, so if you get a chance, pull that up, take a look at that. Another one that she liked was Vancouver Public Library, and she said also take a look at your vision statement, and those are things that I intend to do and work on more throughout the year. Another thing I got to do, and I was really thrilled about this, was I was invited to an author's breakfast, and at this breakfast, Kristen Hannah was there, Mary Alice Monroe, Philip Markoen, and Leila Meekum who wrote roses, and it was fun hearing them talk about their end of the book writing. I had never encountered or read any of Mary Alice Monroe's books before, but after hearing her talk, I went and got all of her books for our library and also placed her on to Overdrive. So I just had a great experience. I also thought Portland was very tourist-friendly, the train there was so easy to get around, and people in Portland I thought were very, very nice, and I thought the conference was very well run. Do you have more to add? Nope, I can add more at the end if you want more, but that's the basic point I wanted to make, but I did for sure want to thank the library commission for making this happen for me. Welcome. And I do want to just make sure our attendees know as we're going along, feel free to ask questions if you have questions of any of these individuals. You can either raise your hand, there's a little raise your hand icon next to your name, and that will let us know that you want to ask a question using your microphone. I'll go ahead and unmute you, or we have the question box where you can go ahead and type in your questions and I'll be monitoring those and jumping in to interrupt our presenters as those come in. Does anybody have any questions for Mary Jo so far? Well, then we'll move along to our guests here in the commission. We'll start with Carol Slotson and tell us about your experience. Okay, well I had a very busy time and I had an agenda when I went, I had gone through. My focus was basically looking at facility space usage, how to rework library space sort of from the inside out. I have a library that no longer really serves necessarily the best use of the customers that come in and use it. We have different formats, we have different niche users that need to be using the space. So I was looking for inspiration as to how other libraries were dealing with this problem and I had a hard time choosing which session to focus on for you all today. I certainly, I went to a session called So You Want a Revolution which was all about the transformation of the range view system library in Colorado. And that is is certainly an inspiration for all of us. I won't take a lot of time to talk about it now but they are known as the anything library and they have so many innovative ideas that they have put to use that work for them. So I would encourage you to take some time to visit range view or anything. They now have an anything tank so that people can also chat about ideas they have for innovation. I went to a session presented by the Paco Underhill and viral cell representative. Again, excellent, excellent information that really stresses looking at our building space and usage by the customer. How are they using it? How can we implement new ways for buildings based on that? How can we better serve our customers? But the one that I think I decided to focus on was presented by Sandra Nelson and many people know of her because she has done the famous books on strategic planning and implementation of planning. And this was actually an on-core presentation at TLA. They presented it twice because I believe they thought it was really addressing core values and core visions, the way that we need to look at our service, our profession, and our relationship with the people we serve. This was called re-imagine, reinvent, and reallocate. And she emphasized that change has become just the byword that we all live by. And I would have to say I came away very much impressed with the fact that change has to be not just something we put our hands between our heads and say, oh, we have to change. We really do not to not to overuse the cliche. We do have to embrace change. We have to realize that change is ongoing. It is not something that necessarily just takes jumps. We stay static, and then we take a jump and we change. It's ongoing. Everything is changing around us every day, and we have to be alert to this. We have to be alert to this as to how our customers are responding to change, what's working for them, what's not, and then how we can apply that to our own profession, our own facilities. One thing she mentioned was that recession is having a real transformational effect on the way that we do business. There's no going back to the way things used to be. Things will never go back to the way they used to be. Social networking, access to the internet, all of that, and that's kind of obvious that we're seeing that. But more and more, and not just in Sandra's session, but in others, stress was placed on being very user-centered. We're no longer the gatekeepers of the information. What we need to be doing is to encourage content that's generated not only by us or acquired by us, but also by our users. That is very important. The fact that we're having increasing diversity in all areas of our life, and this is only going to increase, and we have to be looking at how we can address that. Each individual library will have a different mix of diversity, and so it's not going to be one size fits all. It's really a matter of getting to know your community and learning what is the best service to give to them. She had a lot of really interesting individual sites that she mentioned. One, and I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it right, was Arhoof's in Denmark, and they took a space in the front of their lobby, and over a series of months, they just used it for various purposes. They had to be a transformation lab, then they had it be an exhibition lab, then they made it into a public square where people could come and talk about issues. One time they made it into a huge floor chessboard. It was a way of seeing how people interacted and reacted to different space use in a library, but the outcome was very positive. The people really enjoyed having that space where they actually had co-ownership. They were integral to the use of that space. The outcome was simply that users need to have a more visible role in library use. She went on to contrast and compare different ways that libraries have addressed different user needs in their particular communities. She talked about the use of library parks in Medellin, Colombia. She talked about Maginon here in the Charlotte Mecklenburg, and how if you tried to create a library park in Charlotte, that would not be the best solution for their needs, nor would an Maginon be the best use in the country of Colombia. I think another thing that she mentioned is we're very good at doing and succeeding and succeeding and saying this works and not moving on. We have to learn when to move on, when to say we've had a successful use of the space or a successful program, but we need to re-examine and see where else we can go, what else we can do, and this all has to do with what she tied into the fact that we need to be transformational rather than transactional. I don't think this is new either. We've all heard that, but again, when you see people actually take that attitude or that philosophy and apply it to the services they're providing, you can see that it comes out with some very different results because of the interaction between the community and the library. Quickly, she said, as far as we invent, she said every two years, look very carefully at what you're doing. Every five years, look very suspiciously at what you're doing, and every 10 years, throw things away and start over. I don't know if that is necessarily, but she needs some very good points to support that. How out of that process, we come to define new uses for spaces, find new users, and that's all about the way we present ourselves to our users so that they know we are there for them. We're not there for us, we are there for them, because again, it's not about us. It is not about us, it's about our customers. Most of the successful ideas, she said, incorporate ideas from outside the library. We need to look outside at what's going on in our community and what's going on with our customers. Her last point was about reallocation. Naturally, none of us are looking to get a lot more resources, so there are some tough decisions to be made out there as far as smart reallocation of those resources, and each community will have to make those decisions based on their community needs. The last thing she left us with was a quote, and I hope I got it right, from Peter Drucker, which is very good. It says, don't use yesterday's logic to solve today's situation, and so I think that that applies to us. We need to look and see where we are today and how we move forward from today to help our customers and remain part of their lives. It was an excellent conference. I learned so much, and I could keep talking. Thank you, Carol. It was a really interesting session. Does anybody have any questions about Carol's discussion? Let me check if you're here. Okay, then move on to Tammy Teasley and tell us about your experience. When I was approached at work about whether I would be interested in going to PLA, I started looking at the program, and I didn't get past the pre-conferences, and I knew, yes, I wanted to go. The pre-conference I was wanting to attend was called Putting the Puzzle Together, Managing a Floating Collection, and the reason I wanted to attend is I worked in the support services area at the library, and we had started already testing the waters with floating with a couple of our smaller collections, and I thought if this is something that Lincoln City Libraries is going to pursue further, someone probably should know some of the things to plan for, some of the problem areas, and some suggestions to have before we will take this on full, full speed ahead. And I think it's always great to actually hear from people who have come through the process, who have worked with it for a while, and can share their expertise. The presenters were from Jefferson County Public Library in Wheaton Ridge, Colorado, and from Charlotte, Nipponburg, Charlotte, North Carolina. The Colorado Library actually has started floating their collections in 1994, so this is not something that's just the latest fad in the library land. The Colorado system has 10 libraries, a super population of 548,000, and their circulation has 7 million items. Charlotte Nipponburg had 24 libraries, I know they're going through closings. The population is 850,000, and they circulate 7,300,000 items. The main point when you're thinking about starting a floating collection, you, the staff really has to make a mind shift. You have to go from thinking in terms of this is my branch, and this is my collection, to know we are one system and we have one collection. So we need to get away from that ownership of your individual branch collection and think system-wide. They call that system thinking. So that's your major hurdle you have to get over, is getting the staff to shift their thinking. Why would you consider floating collections? Your first thought would be, oh, you're going to save so much delivery time. That's not necessarily true. You may be still delivering the same amount items possibly even more, but the point is you are only going to be delivering items that someone has requested. You're not going to be wasting an item's time just going from point A to point B because that's where it lives, point B. So some systems did see a decrease in the amount of items delivered, but others didn't. The point to keep in mind is your items that are being delivered are the ones that customers have requested. You will increase the availability of materials and you'll increase circulation because the items that aren't in delivery just to get from point A to point B are now immediately available after you've checked them in. You can put them on display. You can put them on a shelf so that your customers can find them. And from the customer's point of view, it's like they are constantly seeing new things in a lot of the right because of the way the collection is being used in a floating situation. Of course you're saving staff time and that's important to us as managers. Save time as far as you're not having to sort into bins after check-in and here's the bin that's gone here and here and you can track all that stuff. It saves a lot of time in the behind the scenes part because you no longer have to tag things for specific locations. It simplifies labeling. You have to come up with a consistent labeling system throughout. You can't know more individual. This is what we do at this library with this sticker on it and that sticker on it. You can't do that anymore because it's one collection. Those books are going to be in and everywhere. Some of the concerns, what happens when all the horse books end up at one branch. Instead of seeing that as, oh my goodness, the collection is out of balance, again, you're thinking one collection. You still have all those horse books. And if all of those horse books are at one location, that's because that's where people want them. Those are the people who want to read your horse books. And so if you have a shelf full of horse books, that's not a problem. That's a good thing because the customers at that location want those books. You need to have a plan when you get to the point where you do have to look at redistributing materials. And they suggested you appoint a redistribution Zaw. So everything is going through one person. The request for, hey, I need more materials on X or hey, I need to give someone else these X items. So one person is coordinating. And they said we need to impose a strict no dumping policy. There will be no just putting some books to a tab to send them away without asking the people at the branch that those items are headed to. Weeding is essential. They said to do a very deep read before you even start this process to read with a vengeance. You need to get rid of all your ugly or condition items and all your dated materials. And you need to constantly check in for the condition and check in. Be sure to keep your collection looking good. So lucky things aren't floating. They suggested you have reading teams and that they constantly read. You need to set up an approach for how to deal extra copies when your best sellers, the use of your best sellers have died down. You need to come up with a plan for pulling in those extra copies. And you need to create a rebalancing plan so that you have an idea of what you're going to do if things do need to be looked at again. Again, the biggest obstacle is getting that shift in mindset that you're looking at one collection. And the thing that really hit me is our web users are already doing that. They look at our catalog. They are looking at our entire collection. So if you think of it in those terms, I think it kind of makes a clearer. The customers are going to be involved with creating their own collection because of the way they are calling in materials to location. They essentially are creating their collection that they want at that branch. And from their point of view, they are going to be continually seeing new and varied materials. So I think this is a very customer-centered approach to a library system. And Scott will increase your circulation, which is very important to everybody. And I think I've covered most of the high points if there are any questions. And I see that we do have a hand raised. I'm going to go ahead and unmute the microphone. Okay, go ahead. I have a question. I have a question for Carol. For Carol, okay. Okay, the question is, do we have the websites of the places that you were referring to? Will those be in the delicious list? That's actually a good idea. If you were like, pass those along to me, I can make sure those get up and I can mail those out for you. Yes, absolutely. Thank you. That's a great suggestion. And that goes for any of you. If you mentioned any interesting links during your presentation, you can self-evaluate those to me afterwards. I can make sure those get up and available to everybody along with the recording. Okay, so I guess it's Gary's turn. Okay, this is my first national conference I got to go to, and it was pretty exciting. And as a youth librarian, I tried to go to a lot of things on teen advocacy, teen programming, new books for kids, things like that. But there are two presentations I went to that I'm most excited about coming back and actually attempting to do here. One was a lady who talked from the Denver Public Library who talked about a display database that she had created. And she used these tech elements, and I have no technology awareness, so I don't know what these are, but my SQL and cold fusion. And so I need to talk to RTi about getting those, and I don't know what to do for them or how that works exactly. But those are what her tech person used to set up this database that the Denver Public Library uses. And what they do is once they have a display, they tag it, they upload a photo of the display, they upload their sign they made for the display, like advertising what the books are. They might upload a list of books they included in the display, and then they actually rate how well the display circulated. And so by doing this, it saves them a lot of time in their display creation. And she had a whole bunch of philosophies about displays. These are some that I liked. Each customer should feel like the first person who sees the display, which means that you need to fluff it, she calls it, every time you walk by. So the display should look brand new. And you need to keep it updated. You know, the same customers come back probably every three weeks, so make sure there's a new display each time they come in. Why I really like this idea is because, say, when I go back to my branch this afternoon, and I'm trying to think of something to put up for a new display, all I have to do is go to this database, type in something like spring, or rain, or whatever I'm thinking of the good display, and all of a sudden I'll get a photo of someone else's display they've already made, the sign they used, so I don't need to create a new sign, except to print it out, and also a list of books they used, which might not work if you have a system with different books at each branch, but there might be some key non-looking picture books for my children's display, so it might be some key spring books I want to include in that display. And I think it would be a real time saver if I plan on talking to our 10th person about that. Um, the second program I went to was presented by a panel of two libraries. One was Portland, Oregon Public Library System, and then another library in California, and they both have programs where they train volunteers to go out to their schools and do book talks during the school year, and the Oregon program is called Books to You, and they have two goals with their program. They want to get kids to do more recreational reading, and they want to make more families aware of the library. So they started with low-income schools, and they have some guidelines for that. I think it was like 70% of the students had to be on free or reduced lunch or something like that. That's how they identified their low-income schools, and they have trained approximately 20 volunteers, and they visit these schools four times a year, and when they go and they talk about five or six books each time, and then they leave two copies of the books in the classroom so the kids can read them on their own. They're not checking them out, they just get to use them, and they pick them up when they come back. They have a lot of good handouts on the website, which we're going to talk about next, and so if you go to, if you look at these handouts, they have a lot of, they have all their volunteer requirements, they have applications for volunteers, they talk about all the training they do with volunteers, they make sure these volunteers feel very confident in the classroom. They have a huge list of books that the volunteers choose from, they teach them how to write book talks, they make them practice book talks. It seems very intensive, but yet it seems very rewarding that someone taking one staff to train all these volunteers, and these volunteers are making so many contacts in the schools, they had a volunteer there who talked about how the kids recognize them at the grocery store, and they know that they're, they're volunteer for that classroom, and they stay with that classroom, some for 15, 20 years, so. Can you do that one more time, I think you want to come out, okay? Okay, handouts, um, yeah, an information, right under there, it says pushing handouts, and those are all the handouts, um, the one I just talked about, I think it's quite a way down, maybe all the way down, I just, I was just going to comment, I looked through a lot of the handouts, I was looking for handouts for my sessions, which as I said there, they didn't seem to appear, but I looked at the session about training volunteers to go out into the schools, and that really seemed like a very, very productive, uh, too busy idea. That just gives you the information about the school to the right, you get close, close this way out, okay, so you can open up all these, those are all the handouts, great, that's wonderful, they have available just one as an example here, and there it is, some internet resources, exactly, when it goes here. Did you have anything else to add, Harry? No, I just think that we, that's something I'm excited to maybe try out. Great, yeah, that sounds fascinating, um, we just check really quick and see if we have any questions before we move on to our last participant here, and have another hand raise it this way. Okay, go ahead, your microphone is muted. Local library, and maybe those France groups is where those volunteers will be found. You mean the France groups is a place to find volunteers, that's not like a good suggestion. Yeah, they also got, um, they used a lot of retired teachers, a lot of, um, like, college students that have gotten to become teachers, or college students that are going to put in a library, or a retired librarian, said we're a good place to go. Great, sounds good, okay, let's go ahead with Mary, most about your experience. All right, I'm Mary Lockner, and I am a youth librarian at the Walt Branch Library here in Lincoln, and I want to thank the Nebraska Library Commission for sending this all. Besides having outstanding programs at the PLA event, it was a great opportunity to meet other librarians from around the country, and just kind of, just to see those thousands of people who are all kind of in the same boat as we are, all wanting to serve their communities. It's very empowering to know you're not out there in the ocean alone, and it also gave me the opportunity to get to know Harry better, who was my roommate for the four days out there, so that was wonderful. I was focusing mainly on things that affected youth, and I came up with them, just some, some general things that seemed to come up in every session I went to, and of course everyone around the country is stretched very thin with increased use and decreased funds, so how are people handling this? One way that was mentioned repeatedly was using what you already have, as far as programs and materials, and repurposing that to meet another need. Some examples of that one session I went to was on pregnant and parenting teens, and this librarian from Wauke, Iowa, has set up programs where she does outreach for pregnant and parenting teens, either through the schools or through different locations where these young people are, and instead of starting from nothing and building up a special program for them, she reuses story times that she already does for babies and takes those out, and then her every child ready to read materials that she has been using to present to other parenting groups. She kind of repurposes to use for these groups, so she's not starting from the bottom, she has materials she can already use for that. Another session I went to was doing after school outreach to after school programs, and several of the speakers from the various library systems in that program were talking about how they use programs that they already had produced to do in-house at their libraries, and then kind of refine them a bit to make them fit for these after school programs that they were going to. So repurposing what you've already got, another thing I noticed is that people who had very specialized programs, that was kind of what they did in their library system. Besides their regular offerings, you cannot do all of these special programs, you don't have the staff for that. So they would take one or two things that really were important to them and work with them. And from our library system here right now, Lincoln going through a strategic planning thing, I think that will maybe help us select what would be one or two areas that would be big for us. And the one that just really blew me away was a homeschooling program, and that was one of the main things I was interested in doing. And my first thought was, whoa baby, we cannot do this. No way, no way could I do that. And it's the Midcontinent Public Library from Kansas City, Missouri, and they do, I can't even remember what they call it now, but an outreach for homeschooling. To have homeschoolers come in twice a week, they do programs for homeschool families, hour-long programs. And these are not just training you how to use library resources, which is what I had kind of thought I would like to start out doing. It is schooling. Their focus is science. So every week, well they'll have a four-week program on the planets, the solar system, and each week have a different educational presentation and then crafts and fun stuff to go with it. But to me, that'd be a huge undertaking of time. So obviously this for them has to be a major focus. They did say that 17 of their 30 branches are participating in this program. So that was a really big deal and I think probably way more than what we would have time and energy for. But interesting that they have been able to make it work for them. The third thing that just was huge is if you're going to do anything outside the box and there requires money, you've got to write a grant for it. So I'm thinking, well maybe I need to get a little more experience and try and get grant money. In the homeschooling session I went to another presenter from Webster, New York, had set up a program of bags of materials that homeschoolers or anyone could check out on particular topics. We have a similar thing for preschool emphasis in what we call treasure bags. It's like a storytime in a bag. This was kind of a classroom unit in a bag, like perhaps the planets, books on that, maybe a model of the planet, solar system, other things they could use. But this particular library had an $80,000 grant to get these bags set up because they were rather expensive. So with those three things in mind, I thought you could look at any of the presentations and figure, okay, how could we make these work for us? And figure, okay, you've got to come up with money, you've got to come up with time, and you've got to be able to kind of repurpose things that you've already done for them. Now my favorite one was the very first session I went to was called Groove and Move, and it was about using more music in story times. And it was absolutely fabulous. If anything energized me is that program, maybe feel coming out like, yes, I want to do this and I know I can do it. The two presenters were from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and very, very engaging people. But they also both had backgrounds in early education, preschool education. So they could give you all the reasons why all these things are important to do besides how much fun it is. They were emphasizing using music in story times or other programs that you did. And you see all the reasons why the first was fun. I guess I would just have to say it just makes your story times more fun. And then of course, we are all emphasizing the every child ready to read the core things that children need to know to be ready to read and language development and such. And they're saying that using music for us helps with the phonological awareness here in the sounds and words, vocabulary building, narrative skills, and those three mainly, but also with print motivation and print awareness and letter knowledge. They have a lot of handouts that were on the website under the session handouts there. And it's one of the top ones, just down a couple. Groove and move right there. If you scroll to the right, then those are all the handouts. If you click on that number 59, top one, that is there. These presenters, top 10 songs, top 10 CDs, top websites and top props that they recommend. And I did hand that out to our youth staff already. There's a lot of good ideas. You know, when you're setting up a programmer story time, you don't have hours on end to be researching, trying to find all the good songs. If you go into print preview, it shows the whole page. For some reason that shows half of the page. I was looking at that this morning. So I right away, this week, tried their top song, Goldfish, from Lori Berkner. And I don't know how many children, people are going to be listening to this, but it was fabulous. And it was one of those things that you know, it's either going to be really great or it's going to be a total flop. And it was great. The kids absolutely loved it. And I plan to use it some more. And I hadn't used any of Lori Berkner's things before. I mean, I'd heard of her, but had used her music. And she's very energetic and positive, fun kind of things. These presenters use a lot of repetition. They not only use a lot of music, they probably use about four musical either songs or nursery rhymes with music, besides their opening and closing song in every story time. But they like to repeat a lot. And their points, you know, kids like to do things that they know and they're only coming once a week. So I as a post in preschool, where you've got three times a week, perhaps, that you need to repeat things for them to get to get used to them. So I'm going to be doing that Goldfish side of more and more. It was a lot of fun. They gave some ideas about doing rhymes. You may be doing this, if it's a spider or the two little black birds sitting on the hill. A lot of those rhymes are very short when you can do them repeatedly by doing them irregular, doing them fast, slowly, very loudly, very quietly. So you can have some repetition. The kids earn them better that way. And they're off doing that. That was a good point that they made. Another point they made, which for some reason I had never thought of before, is some of the music that you use has interlude times or singing times where there aren't motions to do with anything. Okay, now if we do, you know, just stand here and wait for the next action shot. And they said, well, you know, you know, you put in your own motion, like maybe you're tapping your shoulders, flicking your fingers, patting your legs, you know, rolling your hands, things that I thought, well, yeah, of course, why didn't I ever think of that? But it's nice to have other people present things to you and things that are really obvious that maybe haven't crossed your mind that can come up. So those were great ideas. The other thing with their presentation, they led the whole group through doing a lot of these songs. And it was all children's libraries. So of course, we are all jumping all over the place and running around the room and doing all these action songs. It was a lot of fun. But it was a good reminder to me that not only do you need a solid program set up when you're going into a program, but presentation is key, you know, and the more energy that you can show through the kids or the adults in the room, I think the more they will get out of it. You have to be upbeat and brilliant to do those things. So that was the main thing. I did hear author Kadear Nelson, author and illustrator, and that was wonderful, just a wonderful experience. And I went to that from not to hot program that Mary Jo was mentioned. And I thought that was excellent, too. And even though I'm not an administrator, I liked how this presenter talked about customer service. You're not only serving your external customers for the public, you're also serving your internal customers. Or your staff, you know, how to get them feeling good about what they're doing. And she also mentioned other city employees. That was a big thing that they reached out to. So overall, I thought that feel like it was a wonderful experience. And I would encourage anyone who has an opportunity to go to take advantage of it. Great. We do have one comment that was typed in while you were talking to Mary. There's one idea for resources for home school educational programming is to have the library set up the events and bring in someone to present them. And then can you allow the program to teach teachers to teach for science? And the students in this program will be great to them. It's a terrific internship opportunity for them and great for the library. That would be a good idea. Among those same lines, at the minute, one of the programs I went to was called Mashed Media, where libraries from around the country were all involved in this grant to teach kids how to make video games and such. They use the program called Scratch. But they, of course, got a lot of volunteers, a lot of team volunteers to help them. And we are usually thinking, okay, the teams at the local high school, the ones that need hours for their government politics class, or we're thinking of potential library science students. Well, what they went out to was computer programmers and engineering students and got them to come in and work with them. And I know, okay, this is the thinking outside the box. You know, it does not have to be librarians working on this. You can get people like that suggestion of educators or people from other fields and tap into that as a resource and get them to work with you. Your comment, Mary, in most of the sessions that I attended, they talked about collaboration, reaching out into the community as a necessity. It's no longer an option, it's a necessity. So when you talk about the comment that was sent in to us or what you were talking about, the idea of trying to find people to help us with grants, that's all part of it. And I know when I went to the Anything presentation about Range View, Colorado, they talked about having a revolution. And in the presentation that Sandra Nelson did, she said, sometimes it's not always necessarily a revolution, but an evolution can lead to that, where you might not be thinking totally outside the box, but you're tweaking your thinking and that can lead. So sometimes you take smaller steps, sometimes they are gigantic steps, but the important thing is to always look for ways to get outside of where you are at the moment to improve. Great. Well, everybody's had a chance to talk about their experiences. Does anybody, any of you, Mary Jo, if you have any final thoughts to add, your opinion of the conference overall? Well, I'd like to add, yes, we still pretty much need the library commission for making it possible in our library, making it possible for us to go. And it was a very well organized event, even though there were several thousand people there. What was nice is you could go from session to session within the same conference hall so that you didn't necessarily have to worry about missing a lot of things or missing getting to see the vendors, which is an education in itself, because you were going from hotel to hotel or location to location was very well organized. That's one tip I would have if you ever tend to plan out a strategy for the exhibits. That's good. Mary Jo, did you have something you were going to say? Oh, I just wanted to mention that I also went to Book Buzz by Nancy Perle. And if anyone else went to that, I think it's great because they had different publishers there telling about books that are upcoming that they think are going to be good. And a lot of times they gave galleys away for those. And they have a website for librarians. It's called www.earlyword.com. And you can go on there and you can discuss some of these galleys that were picked up at conference or even find out ahead of time what books are going to be coming out. Great. That sounds like a great resource. If you want to send me that thing, I'll make sure that gets up with the recording so that everybody can access that website. All right, are there any last minute questions? We've got a few more minutes here. Does anybody have any questions for our presenters? I kind of had a question and I'm sorry if this puts you on the spot but was coming here and talking about this stuff, okay? Yeah. So sharing it was kind of fun. A lot easier than I had to do. Good. The hard part is actually narrowing what you're going to focus in on. And because one topic, a lot of times we'll relate to another topic that you attended. And there are so many good ideas and then out of that you start to think about this. So I think it's more, how do I limit it? How do I pick the most voice a little more? And that's it. But do you think you could say someone else who was thinking about getting a presentation that, no, it wasn't scary? Especially no, I would say. Good. Good. All right. One last quick check for questions. All right, it looks like that is it. Well, thank you all for joining us. Mary Jo, thank you for joining us over the web and then you to my in-person guests here and Laura as well. And thank you all for attending. We hope to come back and join us for another Encompass Live.