 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. Yes, we are a webinar, a webcast, whatever terminology you want to use for us. We do it online and we do it every week. And we cover a variety of library topics and activities. Basically, anything library related will have on the show. The show is free and open to anyone to watch. We have our recordings, which are posted on our website after each week's show. You can go back and watch all of those. We do the sessions live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. So if you can't join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. All of those recordings are there on our website for you to go back and watch. We include the recordings, if there's any presentations or slides or handouts and links to any websites that may be useful that were mentioned during a session. We do all sorts of things here, presentations, mini-training sessions, book reviews, interviews. Basically, as I said, anything that's library related, that's for us. We have a Nebraska Library Commission staff that do sessions. And we bring in guest speakers. And today we have a mixture of that. Today is our monthly tech talk with Michael Sowers. Michael is the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Good morning. He's sitting here right next to me. You can't see, but he's here. And once a month he comes on and does a more techy-focused session, tech news of the month, and usually brings in some sort of a guest speaker, I think almost every single time. A couple exceptions, but usually a guest. And on the line with us this morning from just south of us is David Lee King, the Digital Services Director at the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library. Hi, David. And as you can see, he's going to talk about RFID checkout and a whole bunch of new things that they're doing at the library. So I'm going to hand over to Michael first to talk about what he's got going for us this morning. All right. Well, thanks, Krista. And I do have some tips and tricks that I'll be sharing at the end of the show that I found over the last couple of weeks. Not a lot of tech news that I thought about sharing, but today we're going to talk about at least one of the really cool things going on in Kansas. Today we have David Lee King, the Digital Services Director and friend of the show and a previous guest. So good morning, David. Hi. He's at Topeka Shawnee County Public Library, a library that I've been to several times myself and know some people live in Topeka and have yet to hear a complaint about. Well, other than when you started charging fines. But that's another presentation. Yeah, well. And also, I'll just kind of throw in that recently I was in Lawrence, Kansas for the opening of their new library. And I know they're doing some of the similar technology that Topeka has implemented recently. And so knowing David, I got him on the line to talk about some changes technology-wise that the library has made regarding RFID and checkout and things like that. So, David, a good morning to you once again. And why don't you tell us what's going on out there? Okay, well, so I've got a presentation to go through that'll explain everything. But this May, we went through, I guess the big project was an RFID conversion project. And we did a bunch of other stuff. In one week, we actually closed for a week, May 1st through 5th, and did like seven projects at the same time. Because we're crazy that way. Besides converting all of our stuff to RFID, we installed 11 self-check kiosks and placed them throughout the building. We replaced our security gates. We retrofitted our automated materials handler, the thing that we check everything into. We gutted the circulation lobby at the same time. So I'm going to explain sort of what we did to prepare for it a little bit and just sort of go through the different projects we did. Because it's interesting, because we're crazy. So like I said, RFID tagging. We tagged, we're a bigger library, so we tagged about 450,000 items, all told. New security gates because of the RFID tags, both in our main circle lobby and upstairs in our local history collection, our Topeka room. 11 self-check kiosks. We actually walled over our circulation desk, and I'll show you a picture of that. We also got rid of all of our DVD lock boxes. That was a problem we were having. Oh yeah, and we also installed some new carpet, which was tricky. So why? What in the world were we thinking? Well, originally, a few years ago even, our RFID idea and our self-check idea were two separate projects that got merged. Because it made a lot of sense with RFID, obviously a lot of libraries have been moving to that when they get the money. You get better inventory control. It's a little better theft deterrent. Works better than the little, whatever, I don't remember what the little metal strips you put in books are called, that we don't put in all the books. RFID, everything's tagged, so that works a little better. And you know, it's new technology rather than old technology, which I'm always a fan of. The self-check machines, we had two or three of them already, but we also had really long lines at the CERC desk because, I mean, sometimes it was a 10-minute wait, a busy time of the day, because none of our DVDs could be checked out through our old 3M self-check machines. We had everything in lock boxes, and we wanted those to be checked out as well. So the combination of the DVD problem and our self-check problem made the RFID project, it made a whole lot more sense, which also meant new security gates, a way to get everybody using the self-check machines, and of course retrofitting our automated materials handler. The carpet, you know, we knew we'd be closed, so hey, why not? Why not do that at the same time? Okay, so for those of you not really familiar with RFID, what is it? It stands for Radio Frequency Identification. It's basically a little sticker you put in a book, but it looks like what I have up on the slide here. It's basically a really small, low-powered antenna with a little bit of data on it. Usually that would be the barcode number for your material, for your book or whatever. And when it comes in contact with the other part, the self-check machine, the security gate of one, something that the data gets transmitted or read through, the RFID tag does its thing, which is transfer that barcode number to the other machine, and that's how you check something out. This is a Sting Ray tag. Some of our newer CDs and DVDs have those. It just lays over. It's real thin. It lays over the whole CD, and let's you check those out. So, RFID, this is a photo of one of our staff pulling books. We had to touch everything we own, basically, and put a sticker on it, put it back on the shelf in the correct order. That's a lot when we're doing 450,000 items, so we had teams of staff do this. We started with our bookmobile collection that's in a separate building, a much smaller collection, so they were sort of our pilot project, I would say, as we were doing this. We had to figure out what to do with the stuff that's getting checked in, during and especially right after. We opened back up when we were quote-unquote done tagging. We weren't really done tagging because stuff was coming in that we had to tag. We had to have a process for that. Had to figure out what staff were going to do when we were closed for five days. That was probably, honestly, the biggest, the bigger part of the project. Just figuring all the logistics out between having, I think, we had 20 or 30 tagging teams going at a time. For two hours, a team of two staff would do the tagging, and then they'd switch up to go do something else, like take DVDs out of lockboxes, that kind of thing. We had a lot of different things going on like that. Pretty detailed. Thankfully, I didn't have to plan that. They had Hartman and Stephanie Hall, I believe, that our library did. They did a really amazing job on that, too. Then, of course, before all this happened, we had to train staff on how to use the tagging machines, how to use the RFID, the self-checking, et cetera. Then we also had to have training with the security gates and to figure out what to do when a security gate goes off, because, you know, like a lot of libraries with the little tattle tape, that's what that stuff's called. The gate doesn't go off all that often because mostly, especially in a bigger library, not everything necessarily is tattle-taped. We were behind this big cirque desk with doors. When something went off, we usually, honestly, waved people through, which wasn't necessarily what we should have done, but that's what we were doing. That's just how it worked at our library. We didn't have a lot of problems with that, thankfully. But since we completely changed everything that we were doing, we had to figure out a new process, and we'll get to that in a sec. So that's what we were doing with RFID tagging. Tagging teams, we had to have them. This is an example of the conversion, the RFID conversion. Unit or machine or whatever, the Biblioteca, that's the company we went with, sent us, we had a bunch of those. You can sort of see it's got a barcode scanner and an RFID plate, and then a laptop that's showing you the conversion process, and basically it's pretty easy to do. You scan the book, put a sticker in, scan the tag, and it does its thing. It's a really fast process. We were able to, some of our faster teams, they probably did 900 to 1,000 items in an hour, so it can go pretty fast. But again, we had to have a lot of teams doing this to make this happen. So we had to train them. Some of our teams had a bit fun. They had a theme. I think this team had a football theme going, so we had fun with it. It was actually sort of a good bonding time for our staff. Being close five days, working as a whole library team on one single project was a pretty cool thing to do. Another shot of some of our tagging teams and actions is in our new media room, so tagging a lot of the DVDs and audiobooks that we have. As you can imagine, it was a lot of work. That was RFID. At the same time, we were installing self-check machines. I said, this was another really large project. These are some of the machines that are now in our youth services area in our kids' libraries. We installed 11 of these. We had to figure out where to put them because what we ended up doing, we didn't put them all just in our circulation lobby. We have six there, but we also have some spread throughout the building. Like this photo show, we have two in our youth services area. We have two in our new media room, where there's two tagging teams. That room has a service desk, all of our new videos, all of our new books. It's new media, that kind of room, so it's pretty busy. We put some there, and then also we have a room for holds. You can go pick up your holds there. We put a checkout kiosk there as well. We had to label them ourselves. They did not come with labels, so we actually did that on purpose. We wanted to see how people use them, and then we figured out labels and wording. They've since been labeled. Our goal was to get to 90% or more self-service. It's really easy to do that. Basically, the way to do that is you don't offer another option. In our case, like I said before, we walled over the search desk, so people couldn't go there anymore. We actually, in our circulation area, we had a smaller desk there that our friends of the library was using as sort of an information desk. We moved them somewhere else. We actually put them, if you've ever been in our building, we put them in our big rotunda, or sort of our main entrance there now. That's working really well for us. We use that smaller desk as our new circulation desk, and you go there if you have a fine or you're having a problem, that kind of thing. Then we walk you over to a self-check kiosk and show you how to use it instead of checking stuff out from that desk. So within two weeks, we hit 98% self-check by doing this. This is in our circulation lobby, that big orange wall. That's where the search desk used to be. We put a wall up, sort of a temporary wall, just to see how things were working. Because eventually next year, we're going to do a bigger remodel of that area. But this is working really well for now. This would be a couple of our staff members training our customers on how to use the checkout kiosks. When we opened back up May 6th, I helped with this too. We stationed staff in all of the rooms where our checkout kiosks were going to be and helped customers use them. Before that, obviously we had to train staff as well. Not only just in the checking things out, but these checkout kiosks will do everything. You can check and pay for a fine using credit, debit, cards, or cash, coin, and bills. You can do that kind of thing too. We had to show everybody how it works and walk them through the process. Security gates I mentioned, we had to do those at the same time, obviously. Just so they would work with the new stuff we got. Our automated materials handler is a pretty big one. This is a tech logic machine, and it's one of the first ones. I think it was the second one installed ever, if I remember right. We had to retrofit it. You can't see it, but way down at the top of this picture. That's where it used to read barcodes, and now it reads RFID tags. That was a big process happening at the same time during the week we were closed. The big thing with this is, of course, after we opened back up, everybody was still turning stuff in that they checked out before May 1. It didn't have an RFID tag, so things were slow right at the beginning. One interesting thing we noticed at our library, what some customers do, is they'll check out their limit of DVDs. I think you can check out six, I can't remember exactly. We'll say you can check out six DVDs, so they'll watch them, they'll come back, they'll turn them in really quickly, go get six more, and check them out. They were faster than our conversion. They would turn in some DVDs that they'd checked out before May 1, so they weren't tagged. Then they would go try to check out six more, and our new self-check kiosks were saying, now you're at your limit. We had to do some overriding and that kind of stuff to help those customers through, because they were just faster than us. That's not happening now. We've pretty much caught up with tagging, thankfully. And new carpeting. We carpeted the new media room, which meant we had to move everything out while we were tagging, then a quieter reading room and our big auditorium. And some stairs, a few different areas, but this was the biggest deal, because that's where all the DVDs were, all the new books were. We had to move them, but move them in a way that we could still access the stuff to take things out of lockboxes to put RFID tags on. This is just another photo showing some of the stuff we had to move out of the way while we were doing this project. So it was a bit of a challenge. The other challenge would have been our public relations plan for this. How are we going to tell our community what in the world we're doing? Why is the library closing for five days? So we had to figure out how to do this in the broadest sense possible, because we're a fairly large community, reach a lot of people. So we had signage in the building. This is one example of that, a smaller one. We went on television, local TV news. We were in the newspaper. We were obviously on social media, on our website. We covered everything that we could, as much as possible. And for the most part, people knew. These were some of our signs. So one just interesting thing, if you've noticed some of our signs say a new way to check out, we needed something to call the project, and we really needed to focus on customer benefit. You can't be closed for five days, make customers check out in a different way, and then say, well, your benefit is that we have better inventory control now, or that we can tell if you're trying to steal a DVD better. That's not really a customer benefit, right? They're like, what? That's not helping me. Because most of our customers don't have those issues. And we noticed as we were talking about PR and what the customer benefit was, that we were focusing on the weeds, the RFID thing, explanations of how those tags and antennas work, and all that kind of thing. And finally, somebody asked, well, from the customer's perspective, what do they get when we open back up? And I actually said this. I said, well, they get a new way to check out. And that sort of resonated with everybody. So that's what we used on the signs. Gotta say, I'm sort of pleased with that. So we called it a new way to check out, which that's what it was for the customers. Signs all over the place. And here's something that was pretty important for us. We closed our building. We didn't actually close the library. We had to have a way to say that because there was a lot of stuff you could still do. Our website wasn't down. You could still put stuff on hold, use the catalog, have our databases, use our social media, connect with us that way. Ask a reference question through phone, chat, web, email, that kind of thing. You could still go to our cafe, to our bookstore, visit our gallery. We've got computers at six community centers in town. Those were still open. Our bookmobiles were running. So we couldn't say the library was closed because it actually wasn't. It was just our big building that was closed. So we tried to explain that. Not sure everybody got it, but it was a challenge for us to say it that way. Because we couldn't just say, yeah, we're closed because we weren't. Digital branches always open, right? Okay, so one of my jobs while we were closed was making videos. We wanted a good way to show what staff were doing while we were closed. So I made videos almost every day showing what we were doing, and they actually got watched. I made about five videos, four or five videos. We missed one day. One of them was watched over 700 times. Most of them have been watched three to 500 times. So our customers that were interested were actually watching to see what we were doing, which is pretty exciting, I thought. If you think about that as a program, that's like 700 people coming to the library to see something. Wow, we connected with staff that way. Then we got a video of our first customer using our kiosk as well, so sort of a PR thing. And connected with that, we had the press here every day. So newspaper reporters, TV reporters with cameras, they were here every day filming and talking to us to see what was going on. Because this was a pretty big dog deal for our community. The library never closed this except last winter when we got dumped on with snow, right? We wanted to tell people why, and the community wanted to know why. So it wasn't just me making videos. Wow, okay, customer reaction to this. It's actually been really, really great. Got a tweet that was two tweets that was sort of funny to me. Two different people took slightly different photos of our new machines. One guy said, cool new checkout machines. The other person said, the robots have arrived. Different perspectives, right? What we did, first of all, we met our big goal of removing, I said we had a 10 minute wait in the afternoons to check things out. Those lines have disappeared pretty much because we figured out the appropriate amount of checkout kiosks that we needed. So yay, we accomplished a goal. And what we heard a lot from customers when they started using these things, I heard this myself when I was helping train customers on how to use it. They said two things. They said, wow, this is easy. And I really like the new way to check out. A few customers said, oh, I miss talking to this third desk person. But I don't like, I'm really glad that I don't have to stand in line anymore. So they saw what was going on. Most heard question we got actually was, are staff losing their jobs? Because they saw us walling over the third desk. We put up these machines. Are staff going to lose their jobs? The answer, of course, is no. We're reallocating what those people do. Right now, a few of them are, we do have a line at our small third desk with people who are blocked because they have too many fines or they're trying to get a new library card, that kind of stuff. And we have some staff still helping customers who are just starting to come in. So that's what they're doing. They're still down where automated handler is doing what they've always done. And eventually, the plan is just for our library to move more staff out of the building into the community. And this is a way for us to move those, help move those staff out because they won't have to be working at the third desk anymore. So no, nobody lost their job, yay. All right, so good. Our projects went well. Well, our project management, we did a really good job because we achieved all of our goals. We didn't have anything that wasn't working when we opened back up. Scheduling, all of the scheduling of staff and closing the building, everything worked that way. Tagging, we actually finished early. We finished about three and a half days into the project rather than five. So they gave us some time to go back and check some things, to clean up, to do all those other things we needed to do. Our staff, they're awesome. They actually had to figure out a new closing procedure on the spot on May 6 that evening. And that went well. So the camaraderie, time for staff was really good. It was a good thing for us to do. We actually, during the week we were closed, since our building was really still open in some parts, we set up a greeter desk by our main entrance to explain to people who were coming and what was going on because not everybody heard that we were closed or honestly a lot of people would come in and say, oh, this is that week, darn. And so we helped them. We could still turn in a book. You could still check out the gallery, that kind of thing. So we answered a lot of questions there. The media blitz worked well. Most customers knew what was going on. And we had media here every day, which is a good thing. And people watched our videos. So bad. What went not so well? Or what could have gone better? Well, our kiosks for our customers, good 99% of our customers, they work wonderfully. You can check out a book and leave. They are still having some issues three months later, mainly with credit cards and coins and dollar bill acceptor type stuff. Still working out some of those issues. So some days one of the kiosks will work well. The other day is not so well. So working through those issues, we still have our punch list, so to speak, with those. The biggest thing with the kiosks was delivery. We closed May 1st up at May 6th. The kiosks arrived Friday. They were deployed Monday. We opened Tuesday. It felt like a rush job to us. And I said our staff had to figure out the closing procedure sort of on the spot. That's why, because we didn't have the machines in time to figure all those things out. Our staff is not to blame for that. The vendor was. That's okay. That happens. A lot of minor techie things that have been sorted out like our security gates. They weren't doing directional tag reading at first. So whether you left the building or entered the building with a book, the beeper would go off, which is a problem. We're close enough to Michael had mentioned Lawrence Public Library. They had done their RFID tagging right before we did. And they're close enough that sometimes their customers come over here and their books were beeping in our security gates. So we had to figure out that kind of thing. We don't want that to happen. If somebody checked out something on the bookmobile and the tag didn't get turned off when they're entering the building, the gates were going off. We didn't want that to happen. That's been fixed now. But when we had to have somebody come back out and do that for us, that kind of thing will always happen with a large technology-based project. Best laid plans and actuality are often two slightly different things. Just some things we hadn't really thought about. I'm sort of a taller person. And when I use our new checkout kiosks, it's a little hard to read because I think it was made for a shorter person. We've actually dealt with that just as sort of a pilot project. One of our checkout machines in our circulation law, we've raised up a little bit to see if that helps. And it does. It helps the tall people. We also had to play with the screen flow and the wording on the screen just to get it right. Some of it was confusing at first, so not a big deal. We were able to adapt and move on. So the best part, did we succeed? Yes, we did. Got everything done early on opening day. Everything worked except for all that stuff I already mentioned. But like I said, for a good 98% of our customers who just wanted to get a book, check something out, get a movie, check something out, it worked wonderfully. Most of our community knew about it as well because of all of the communication we did. And this behind where it says the best part, that's a picture of our staff. We couldn't have done it without these guys. They are awesome. So, Michael and Krista, I think we're ready for if there are any questions. Right, great. Thank you. Yeah, I've been writing down my questions as we've been going along. And as Krista mentioned at the beginning, if you have any questions, feel free to either type the question into the Q&A section of your GoToWebinar interface or tell Krista that you'd like to be unmuted. And we would love to hear your dulcet tones ask your question that way. So my first question to you, David, is have you recovered? I have, yes. I'm not sure our search staff has quite recovered yet in some cases. They're still pretty busy down there. But yeah, for the most part our library has. Since I'm in charge of the techie guys, ask some of my techie staff and they'll say no, not quite yet. Because we're still having to go up and do some things and we're still getting, oh, kiosk number three is not taking dimes all of a sudden. Let's fix that. So we're getting a lot of that still. But yeah, we're back above water. Okay, and you kind of just touched on that, just to confirm these kiosks, you can pay your fines at the kiosk, right? Yes, you can. You can also, we have comprised, we use comprised for a lot of stuff in the library. So for computer management, for printing, copying, all that kind of stuff, you can put money on your comprised card, which is your library card. So what these machines will also do is read that money. So it's hooked up to a few different things. Oh, nice. Which we're still working through some issues there. But it's pretty much working. Yeah, when it works, it works great, right? Yeah, pretty much. So for those of us who have not ever used one of these kiosks, can you just kind of describe to us, okay, I've got a pile of books. I walk up to this thing. What is the process? What does a customer need to do? Oh yeah, sure. It's really easy. So you walk up to the thing. It says start on the screen. There's a button. You push it to touch screen. So you touch the screen where the button says start. And then it asks you what you want to do. Because you can do a few different things on these. You want to check out. You want to pay a fine. You want to access your account. I think those are the three things there. For the most part, people want to check stuff out. So they press that. They put all of their stuff that they want to check out. Let's see if I can go back to... Oh, never mind. Well, underneath the screen, there's a little hole that you put your books into. Actually, there's a big hole. You put your stuff in. There's a smaller hole. You put your library card in. It scans the barcode on your library card to bring all your information up. And you have to put in a PIN number as well. But then basically, once you've done all that, I guess the simple way to say it is you scan your card. You put your items that you want to check out in the big slot. It checks it out immediately. You see it on the screen. There's a little green check mark that appears by everything that gets checked out. And when all of those are green, you can take your stuff back out, get finished, and you're done. So that's a really long way to explain a process that takes maybe half a minute at the most. You can check out more than one item at the same time, so you don't have to put them in one by one. You can basically stuff the hole with five or six items. For most people, everything, they're checking out. You put them in there all at once, and you're done. So it's really quite easy. Nice. A couple of technical questions. One just jumped on me here because of what you said. So the library card is still a barcode. Is the technology available, and or do you plan on moving to RFID for the library card? We had talked about that and realized that RFID type cards are more expensive, and we wouldn't get a lot of added benefit from that. It would make maybe that customer process 10 seconds or so faster, maybe. Maybe not even that much. But otherwise, they wouldn't get a lot of benefit out of it, and we wouldn't either. I think at the beginning, the library director, Gina Millsap, she was interested in, can we use them to scan people in as they go to a program or something like that? Will it just sort of read them as they walk through the door? That would be cool. Sort of creepy too, maybe, depending on your... Yeah, I immediately just thought kind of creepy at that point. But we realized they wouldn't really do that, and so why switch the cards? So you didn't have to issue new patron cards. Their existing ones just worked with the new system. Right. Okay, because we did have someone do that. Okay. My next question here, kind of on the tech. The scenario where the CERC system is down, and so in your typical barcode system, you've still got a number. You write all those numbers down on a piece of paper. You batch them into the CERC system later. What do you guys do when it goes down, assuming it will? It never goes down. Uh-huh. Yeah, right. Sorry, I'm a bit skeptical there. Yeah, no, no, no. I'm not sure. I don't think... I could be wrong on this, ask me in a year, but since we have 11 kiosks, a kiosk will freeze up once in a while. But it's just, it's a single kiosk that's freezing up. Uh-huh. So we just turned that one off. Usually it's, we reboot it, it's having some other issues. And all 10 other kiosks are working. Security gates, those are pretty stable things. Sure. You know, the older-style security gates never had a problem. These wouldn't either unless electricity was turned off in the building, then we have other issues. Our automated materials handler, that does go down once in a while, even before, you know, when we're still using barcodes. And then we have to sort of deal with it on the fly. People bring stuff into the building, we take it, walk it downstairs, and pray that everything comes back up really fast, right? Yeah, and so, I mean... So did I cover what you were asking? Well, kind of. And we've got kind of a related question coming in from the audience. The question I think is, what if the ILS goes down? Not the simulation, but yeah, the whole, and that happens. Yeah, sure. Okay, well, with that, just like take RFID out of the process for a sec. Right. Before we had that, if the ILS went down, we have an offline CERC module on our CERC desk computers. You can move the kiosks to that also. Ah, okay, there we go. That's the thing. Okay. So if the ILS system goes down, we're still good. And then when everything comes back up again, I think we have some... It'll batch. Some text file, yeah, that kind of thing. So as long as you have power to run the kiosks. Right, okay. We're good. Okay, good. That's what I was looking for. Yeah. The backup ILS, the backup offline, you just switch the kiosks to looking at that instead of your regular, and then it all catches it. Right, right. Cool. And then along with that, what are, if any, kind of the long-term implications of moving away from barcodes, which were, I mean, there was digital technology involved, but compared to this, it was pretty, it was an analog sort of technology. It was a printed item, whereas now you're moving kind of purely digital. Are there any long-term implications here with RFID itself upgrading the technology, things like that? Yeah, probably. And we haven't hit those yet at all, so I'm just making stuff up to answer your question. Sure, fair enough. It's only been three months. Come on. Isn't there an upgrade already? Yeah. Well, there are some libraries that have had this for 10 years, and I don't think they've come up on some of these questions and answers quite yet either, I would say. But the RFID tag, it's going to go bad, as long as you could see the lines on a barcode, it worked. Right. Right, so sort of like DVDs or CDs, they go bad eventually. The tag will. I'm sure it's got a limited lifespan, so those will have to get replaced, or they'll just get worn out. The other thing is, right now, it's using a certain type of frequency, what if that frequency needs to change? That means we have to change everything or retrofit something, change all the tags. Hopefully that kind of thing won't happen, but I can't predict 10 years down the road if everybody's cell phones will do a certain thing and the government says, oh, we need to switch that frequency. Sure. Okay, you know. Otherwise, ah, that's a good question. I'm not sure what else would change. Well, I have a question from someone that might relate to this. Okay. I actually asked earlier, do you know if the RFID system is also compatible with NFC devices, near field communications, touching your phone to the kiosk instead of using a library card? Oh, yeah. As far as I know, no. They don't. Right now, we'll see. I mean, some of the barcody type apps that you can get will work okay, but that's not really... like CardStar will work. But yeah, that's not really a near field type thing. Yeah, those are... That's more of a European thing still, but it's gonna happen here eventually. Oh, yeah, they exist. It's still radio, but it's a slightly different technology and different frequencies, so... But that might be the future of library cards is it's on your phone instead of an actual card. Yeah, you couldn't rule out an NFC system eventually existing, but it would not be compatible with RFID. Right. Okay, so here's the big question, and if this just isn't your realm, I will give you a free pass on this one. What it cost? Oh, I am not remembering. I think it was in the neighborhood of 400,000-ish. Okay. I mean, that's, you know, the tags... They cost 23 to 50 cents a tag. I can't remember exactly. I think it was more like 23-ish since a tag. The stingray tags were more. It's all in parts and pieces, but I think it was right around 300,000-400,000 for us. If you really want to know, it's in our monthly board reports on our website. Okay. All right. Yeah, so anybody who... I've heard a lot about that. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, you gave us a ballpark, I think. It wasn't 20 bucks, you know, and it wasn't 3 million, so, you know... Right. Right. It was a chunk. Yeah. Jessica Chamberlain, the library director here at Northwark, the library said, they were given an estimate of 90,000 to 100,000 to convert their collection of 85,000 items. So I don't know how many items you guys had, how that relates. Cool. And I think Brian Moss was saying, I think we're talking about the near-field communication that Missouri State University is using it. Oh, really? Okay. Cool. Yeah. So the one other question I have, and obviously it sounds like in the end that it was really great for the staff, what sort of was done at the front end to get the buy-in from the staff? What was the level of staff involvement in making the decision? I'm assuming, having met your director, this wasn't a top-down order. Yeah. There were people involved in things like that. We actually have that same question from someone in the audience. Okay, and so I'm not the only one wondering. This person says, we have a lot of resistance from staff for these units, and though we still have CERC desks. Okay. Well, ooh, there's two couple of ways to answer that question. And I think this person said, because she's virtually all self-checking, I think what she was saying is, they weren't able to get everyone to say we're switching completely and eliminating the CERC desk. They've got both running. Okay. Well, so to answer the first part of that question, yeah, Gina, my library, we don't tend to do top-down so much. We had a team who were involved in looking at this from the get-go. Mostly supervisors and op techie staff, but also some front-line staff were involved as well. Some of our technical services staff, the ones who do cataloging and collection management, they were involved. So it wasn't just a top-down administration says we have to do this. That said, our community, our board said this is something that is in your strategic plan. So yeah, we did it. If some staff member is like, I don't like this new thing. Tough duties. You have to do it. If you don't like it, you can go work somewhere else. We didn't have that. So yeah, also, we had a couple of vendors come in and show off their RFID and their self-check machine products. We invited the whole library to come check those out, and some staff took advantage of that, which was pretty exciting, just to see and then they would give us feedback what they liked, what they didn't. So it very much was a team process. The other part of that question I think that somebody else mentioned, they still have the checkout desk because staff didn't want to get rid of it. I would have to ask that administration why. You don't want to do top-down, but you also need to make the best strategic decision for your library. If your community really wants to, that's awesome. If your community doesn't really care, and I bet they don't, honestly, most of them, at some point, yes, administrators have to make the hard decisions, even if they're not liked well by some staff members after that. So I don't know. I'm sure there are some staff that think we're just really weird to be on belief to get rid of our search desk. They haven't said that to me, but I'm sure that's out there. We don't really care because we had a strategic plan. We wanted to hit a certain goal. There's one really best way to do that. The libraries that don't and they're sort of wishy-washy with that, they hit 70, 80% maybe self-check. They're not going to hit that goal because they haven't made the hard decisions. Right. I remember when I visited Lawrence public the new building on opening day, which is probably not the best time to do it because it was a little busy, but they're in their checkout area. They have six. I think they have the same kiosk you do. Those look really familiar. But then they still had what I would call a circulation desk. It was more of a window, and above the window it said accounts. So it's kind of there. You're having an issue. You're having a problem. And I thought that was just a... I got it, but it caught me off guard as a very old school. There's a circulation desk. There's going to be situations where you need to talk to a person. So you need to have something there. I will say we went pretty extreme by walling over a cirque desk. Yeah. Because there were a few different reasons. One, we wanted staff out with the customers to help them. And also, if our security gates beat, somebody has to now go over there and say, hey, what's going on? Let's see. We must have missed something. Doing it in a positive way. But we wanted staff out there. Michael, you saw our old cirque lobby. There was no way to do that unless you had to walk behind our long desk, open a couple of doors to get out. That just wasn't going to work for staff. So we had to figure that part out. Because they were so used to going there, we wanted to make sure they knew you can't go there anymore. Cut the cord, so to speak. Yeah. Exactly. This person who asked about how you got buy-in from the audience says, just to clarify, we didn't keep the cirque desk because of staff opposition. We intentionally kept both. But staff hates it, meaning the piosks. And don't encourage the public to use it. You don't need to have a managerial issue. This is what we're doing. And you will, like what you said, if you don't like what we're doing, then you can feel free to have a job. Honestly, I don't know about that particular library, but most staff in libraries aren't being resistant because they hate the new thing. Usually it's because they don't understand something. They don't know the process. They don't know the goals. So it's a lot of internal communication. Here's what we want to do. Here's why. Here's what that does to our community. Now let's start. One other issue I can think of comparing a library the size of Topeka to a lot of libraries we have here where, in your guys' case, you had a circulation place and then you had reference and media, whereas I'm thinking of a lot of small libraries where there is the desk. Right. So there is the one desk and even if you have a self-checkout station there, you've got a person sitting at the desk right next to it. Some people just naturally gravitate towards self-checkout and some people just naturally gravitate towards human interaction. Like in a grocery store. So your layout and how much space you have and how divided things are can have an impact on how you implement something like this. I'll say complete self-check. That's not necessarily the best model for every library. I think we have one or two more questions from the audience. A question from earlier when you talked about I think the one I know is are you still bar coding books? Are you bar coding and tagging items? Or are you doing bar coding completely? That's a good question. I haven't looked. If I remember right, I think we're doing both. I think. I'm not really sure. If you're really interested and want to know, email me about it. Someone else wants to know how do you issue new library cards? Same way we always have. Like I said, we do have a smaller circuit desk for that kind of thing. So people can get their library card there and then also you can get them online and then just come into the building and pick it up. That process hasn't really changed. Anything else from the audience? That is it for the questions at the moment. If anybody does have any questions, definitely type them in. If you have a microphone, let me know. David, any last thoughts you want to give us before we move on? Was it fun? No, thanks. Actually, I thought it was a lot of fun. I'm a techie. Getting new technology in is always pretty exciting stuff. Also, since we sort of did an all hands on deck thing, both for the conversion week and then also after we were open, I'm usually working in my office in the basement of the library. I got to interact with customers which was pretty cool and helped them learn a new thing that they were catching on to really fast. So it was nice to see one problems that were coming up. Oh, that screen doesn't make sense, but more importantly, having customers go through the process and then laughing and saying, this was awesome. Which they did. They were like, that's so easy. It was really fun to hear that. Great. Thank you very much, David. This was wonderful and it sounds like I get pretty much a success with that. It looks like it's something that if you've got the funds, you might want to consider. For the bonding aspect of it. Just close for a week. I just remember a local library closed for a staff day one day and they papered over the outside windows on the ground floor and the comments were like, what are the librarians doing there? So with that, we're going to go ahead and take control back for a few more minutes. I'm going to share my screen for a few minutes here. I'm just going to talk about a couple of tools that I have found recently that our listeners might be interested in and I'm coming through there. That's good. I just got three of them here. I'm going to show before we wrap this up. One is this website called whohasaccess.com. This is an interesting site I found with the last week or so. This is if you are a Google Drive user and especially if you are a Google Drive user that likes to use it to share content with other people between folders and documents and things like that. What this will do is you give it permission to scan your Google Drive account with your login information and then it will go through all of your files and your folders and tell you who else has access to that information and what they have access to and then if you want you can go through this tool and revoke that access. Someone so doesn't need access to that anymore or I forgot I shared that with them three years ago and maybe we just need to lock that up so you can do that and then once you are all done there is a little button that says delete all of my information from your system so you can just give them temporary access to do that. If you are a Google Drive user I was sharing much more than I thought I was so I did it all intentionally but some of it has been quite a while ago. The other one this is just a fun one this is howlonghavei.com if you are wondering how long you have been on Twitter you just go here sign in with your Twitter information and it will tell you how many years, days, hours and minutes you have been logged in or have been using Twitter how old your account is so it is just fun. I am well over seven years pushing eight at the moment. I got in pretty early Chris I am sure you did too. It has been various things over the years that can do that and tell you what your first day on was or whatever. The last one this one is a multi-cloud I have found I keep calling it multi-cloud but it isn't multi-cloud it is multi-cloud. If you are one of those folks who has access to a lot of different online cloud services such as Box Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon Web Services, SugarSync OneDrive and a few others that I don't know what this will allow you to do is you sign into each of those through this account it will allow you to manage the content of those storage services through this one interface but it will also allow you to copy and move content between those services. So if you have got I had a backup folder in my Dropbox where I store some things I want to regularly backup and I thought I will just also copy that to my Box account and my Google Drive and whatever. Now I have multiple backups I was able to do that and clean some stuff out of services I don't use all that often and things like that. So just a couple of interesting tools there for folks might be interested in using. So with that, that's going to end Tech Talk and I will hand the show back over to Krista. Great, thank you Michael, thank you David. The show has been recorded as usual and I know David also will be said he would be sending me his slides David you send that off or send me a link to yours, correct? Yeah, I will put them up on slide here and email you the link today. Perfect, so we will link to that. I have also been capturing all of the various websites for your library and the different companies you mentioned and Michael's links that he just showed onto the library commission's delicious account so that will all be available as well along with the recording. So that will wrap it up for this morning's show. I hope you join us next week when our topic is resource description and what? Sorry. RDA for non-catalogers. If you're not a cataloger and you're wondering what the heck are your catalogers all freaking out about this is the show for you or if you are a cataloger and you want to see just a different viewpoint, Emily Nimsacan who's our cataloging librarian here at the library commission, she's done various shows about RDA but now she's got one that's for people who are not necessarily doing it on a day to day basis so at least know what's going on and changing possibly in your catalog. So hope you'll join us for that and for any of our future shows, they're all listed here on our website. So if you are a Facebook user and CompassLive is also on Facebook, you can go ahead and like us there and you'll get notices of when new shows are available, reminders like right here when to log in right now for today's show when our recordings are up. We post all of that onto our Facebook page. Other than that we are good to go. Thank you very much Michael David and everyone for attending. Bye. Bye.