 Hi everybody. I'm Anna Litton. I'm the assistant director at Robin's Library and I'm here this afternoon to talk about Libby, one of the tools that we use to access digital materials from the library. Libby is a great tool for using audiobooks, for using e-books. There's some magazines there and it's available to you from home, which makes it the perfect tool for everybody to be using right now. There are really a few steps to using it. We're going to go over all of those different steps today. I am going to ask that people hold questions until the end of the session. If you ask them during the session, that's fine, but I'm probably not going to be able to answer them until I'm kind of wrapped up with the whole tutorial. It'll only take about 20 minutes, not too long. I also want to remind everybody who's watching that if you would like any additional help in using Libby or any of our library resources, you can email us at Arlington at minlib, that's M-I-N-L-I-B dot net, and we'll try to get you your answers right away. We really are trying to answer our email and get back to people during these times. Today, we are going to be looking at the four steps, as I said, to using Libby. Really, you only have to download the app. The Libby app works on tablets and smartphones, pretty much any kind of tablet or smartphone you might have. You need to set up your account, which is really easy to do. We're going to walk those steps today, then the most exciting part, find your materials, so find your books or your audiobooks, whatever it is that you want, and then read and listen away. So we're going to go through all those steps today, and again, I'll try to answer questions towards the end. I'm going to be doing this on an iPad. I know it's going to be a little bit hard to see, but we're going to do our best to do that today. So the first thing you're going to need to do is go to your app store and download the Libby app. The app that you're going to be looking for is called Libby by Overdrive. So I'm just going to go through that, even that very simple step first on my husband's iPad. Here I am at the app store, using a very old device. It takes a minute for it to load here. We will still see it. So I'm looking for Libby by Overdrive. It's going to take a second to come up. I see it coming up right away. It's a Libby app. People can see it. It looks like, oops, sorry, a little bit of a girl reading a book with a funny little bow in her head, Libby by Overdrive. You'll see it right there. Once you open up that app or download that app, it's going to lead you through a few steps. So what you are going to need in order to do this is a library card and a pin. If you have a library card and you don't know what your pin is, you can download that or you can contact the library and we can help you get set up with your pin. If you don't have a library card, you can move to the robbinslibrary.org site and we will set up, we can help you set up an electronic library card through there and you'll be able to get your information set up. All right, so let's go through this process. So first thing I see, it's going to lead me through the steps of setting up my library card and linking it to my Libby account and linking it to my library card. So we can see right there, it's first going to ask you, first question, do you have the library card? Yes I do. So I'm going to say yes. Then it's going to ask me a couple quick questions. If you have Libby on another device, you can move through there and do that. I'm not going to choose that option even though I do have Libby on another device. I'm going to walk through that second option. You can look up your library by name and location. Somebody just asked a great question. We're going to talk about Kindle. We're going to do, we're going to address that at the end of this. So I'm going to search for a library right here and I have a little helper here. A little helper go downstairs. So it's asking me to enter my library name or library zip code. So I'm going to just enter Robin's library here. Everybody knows what it's like to work from home right now. So I'm sure other people have had little helpers hop into their work meetings recently. Robin's library, great. So once you search for that, you can see mine is, I've got a couple of different libraries here and we'll see why in a second. So the first one I'm seeing is Robin's library in the Minuteman Library Network. That is us of course. Robin's is part of the Minuteman Library Network. We are so lucky to be part of that network that connects us to so many other libraries and offers us so many additional resources. So next screen after I entered the library that I'm looking for, it's going to ask me to enter library account details. So I'm going to say, yes, I would like to do that. There are some other options there, but hopefully most of you already have a library card and a pin and we'll go through that right now. So library account details. It's going to ask me to enter my library card number and then it's going to follow by the pin. Again, if you don't have this, please email us at Arlington and Minlib and we will set that up for you at Minlib.net. Pause for one second while I enter my library card number. I can talk and type but not do numbers at the same time. Next, my pin. Thank you. And I noted that one of my helpers has added instructional guides for using our resources are online. That information is right there, which is fantastic. Okay, my pin is here. Great. I'm going to go next. I've got a lot of things checked out. I use Libby a ton for my personal life. I use more ebooks than, excuse me, audiobooks than ebooks. I listened to some, my little helper who just stopped by is listening to me a ton as well. So we all do. Okay, great. Once we're there, we really are now in the library so we can see what is available in our Libby library. And there's a bunch of different things here that we should know. First of all, Libby is, I want to particularly thank Overdrive, the parent company for Libby, for really working with libraries to provide some great content right now, as we are all facing this time when libraries across the entire country are closed. So they've made a few resources available for everyone to read. People who have never used what Libby might not know that when you check out an item there, that it functions almost as if it was a physical book. So when I check out an item from Libby, it's not available for other patrons. And right now they've kind of opened some of that up. Right now the Libby's Big Read program is going on too. They call that a global book group and there's a bunch of different things that you can do through that, which is a ton of fun. You can read all about the Big Read right through there. Right now they're featuring Harry Potter titles. Harry Potter titles are available for everyone to check out. As many people who want can check out Harry Potter titles right now, both in ebook and audiobook. It's fantastic. I know that my 10-year-old who just talked in is probably going to be listening to some of those later today. So good for him. I love something fun to read. When I am using Libby, there you have a couple of different choices here. There's a search button right up at the top so I can search for specific titles, specific authors, whatever I want to search for, which I do some of the time. But I find that more often I use this as a browsing tool. The whole point of having a digital download is something where you can go and check out something immediately. And sometimes I want, I'm more curious to see what's available right then than to see if I'm looking for a specific author. Although I certainly can. So maybe I'm looking for, let's choose a popular author with a lot of books. We will choose the Lee Child book since we know that there's a ton of those. So I'm searching for his name Lee Child and I see that Libby right now. This includes 57 books, 35 audiobooks, 82 thrillers, suspense, mystery bunch, breaking down all these Lee Child titles. So if I wanted to, I could kind of scroll through here. One of the other options I have right at this stage though is to touch on my refined button. Let's take the screen. Once I type, touch on that refined button, one of my choices is to click on availability. And I can see everything, all of the Lee Child items that are in there now. So if there's one that I've been waiting to read and haven't read, I could certainly put a hold on that item. Or I can touch the only to see the items that are available now. Once I do that, I can see the things that I can check out today and have to read or to listen to today. I often choose that method. I'm going to look for stuff immediately. Sometimes I do put holds and items, but if you are looking for something to get right away, do look for that available now option. And you can always find that in the refined button when you've been searching for titles. So I'm not going to check any of these out right now because I'm not actually going to read a Lee Child. So we have really two options to look for items. We saw our first one when we're going to use the search tool to search for a specific author, a specific title. The next thing that we would be able to do though, if we scroll a little bit further down on our front page, let me helpfully break some stuff down for us. So if we go a little bit further down, I see that I can search for items that are new, available new books and new audio books. I can see things that are very popular titles that a lot of people are interested in. Again, popular books and popular audio books. And in either one of those, again, I can focus on that refine and pull down to things that are available now. Then my favorite option, I like to use the what's available. I just want to see things whatever that I might see that I could check out today either in a book or an audio book. So I'm going to check on the available books right now. Once I do that, I'm going to see, I see that there are currently 31,000 books that are available currently at this minute that I could check out and read. So a pretty big number through there. And I can just start scrolling through until I see something that I might be interested in. I see the handmade tales available right now, maybe too dark for you, but if you've been wanting to read it, that's a great option. And I can just scroll through here and say, oh, look, here's a little book. See some different kinds of items that might be available right now. So I see that, for example, a new copy of a Louise Penny book is available right now. That's the number 151 in the series. But I think I'm going to check out an American marriage. I know my book group read that last year. I didn't have an opportunity to read it when my book group read it. They really liked it. So I think I will check that book out. In order to do that, all I have to do is touch on the borrow option right at the top there. So when I click on borrow, it's going to ask me, do I want to check this out again, just kind of confirm that this is a borrow book that I can get now. This is a Skip the Line book. It's available for Arlington patrons. I'm going to borrow that book. It's going to think for a few seconds and download that item. It does not take very long to download items at all. Mine is going to take a little bit longer because, again, I'm using my husband's ancient iPad to do this. Once I do this, and it looks like this is almost downloaded. I'm not sure if people are able to see, but there's like a little circle item. And as soon as that's done, that item will be downloaded for me. At this stage, I have the option to open this book directly, keep browsing for books, or go to the shelf. So I'm actually going to go to my shelf right now just to show people a few options within there. I have a ton of options of items in my shelf. You can check out 10 overdrive items at a time. And because I use my personal account for both myself and some of my kids, I often have that many checked out. In fact, that 10-year-old was probably wondering where his audiobook is right now, which is on my phone that's near me. So when I scroll down through here, I can see all of the items I've got checked out. So I've got a couple of grown-up books, a bunch of kids books. And in here, I can always just open them up. And mostly, again, I do have audiobooks. I can start listening through there. If I'm done with an item, I have an option to return these items a little bit early. So the Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom, I checked that out for my kid. And I don't think he's actually going to get a chance to listen to that since he's been listening to some others. So I can check right next to them, this little box, and I have the option to, oops, sorry, I can return this item early. We didn't finish it, but he's not going to need it. So I'm going to return it early and give some of those patrons who are waiting for that item a chance to get that a little bit faster. Once I'm ready to read, I'm going to come back to my shelf again. Once I'm ready to read or listen to any of these, all I have to do is touch on the item to open it. And I'm reading this in Libby. For this item, there was an option to read this with Kindle. We had a Kindle question before, so we'll talk a little bit more about that later. To read it, I just touch on the screen, start scrolling through, and there you go. You can be reading your book in just a couple seconds. So that entire download process really only takes a couple seconds. It's not long at all to find those items that you might be interested in. And I have to say for me personally, Overdrive is one of my most used apps. I really do listen to books, read books on Overdrive all the time. I do do most of it as I was, I'm not sure if I said this, I do most of it on my phone because mostly what I'm doing is audiobooks. One of my favorite podcasters likes to say her house is a lot cleaner when she's listening to a good audiobook. And I know that is the truth for me too. Stick it in my back pocket, pop my earbuds in, and mop to my hearts can tap. So that's a little bit about downloading items onto Libby. Again, my biggest tips are check for those available now titles. It can be a little bit frustrating if what you really want to read is a newest bestseller. And Overdrive titles are more expensive for libraries to purchase than purchasing a paper copy of the book. So we just don't have quite as many of those copies through Overdrive. Although during this period, we are adding additional Overdrive copies pretty frequently. And I want to thank the Robbins Library staff for making sure that we are keeping up with adding titles there. They've been phenomenal throughout this. And I know that reference team is buying additional items all the time. So that's fantastic. That's really it to using Webby. Super simple to use, super easy to make that happen for you. And I'm excited to take some questions. I only see one question right now about using Libby on a Kindle. If you're going to be using Libby on a Kindle, the real best way to do that is to start with the overdrive.com website. And through there, it's going to lead you through the directions. You can access that through the library. If you go to robbinslibrary.org, you'll see it's called the digital, the name of that is escaping. It's our digital catalog. Sorry about that, our digital catalog. And through that digital catalog, it'll show you you can search specifically for titles that are available for Kindle. A smaller percent, not as many titles are available through the for Kindle as are available through the Libby app. So if you are reading your Kindle books on something like the Kindle Fire, I would use the Libby app instead of downloading those directly to the Kindle. If you are using something like the Paperwhite, you can just go right through there. We have listed where our online resources are. And I think we're going to do another tutorial, another demo just on Kindle titles in a couple days. Look back for that one. And that's all that there is to say about using Libby. It's fantastic. It's easy. It's fun to use. It's free. And it really is the best way to offer some to access library titles right now. We do have a couple of other apps for digital downloads. Hoopla is a new app for us. We had it for a while and then we did not have access to that content and we do again. Hoopla again provides access to ebooks, audiobooks. There's more film and there's music available through Hoopla as well. You can access that through robbinslibrary.org. You can find all the information about our digital tools there through our eResources tab. For those of you who don't know, we offer, also provide access to film streaming source canopy through our digital resources, excuse me, our eSources page via robbinslibrary.org as well. Another great place to find information on digital downloads. That's a little bit about using Libby. If you have any additional questions, please feel free to type them in right now. We can take a look at those or best way to reach us is to email us Arlington at minlib.net and we'll be able to get you what we'll return your, we'll contact you as soon as we can. Particularly if you don't have a pin. We really are trying to help set people up with their pins. And I want to thank you so much for watching this and please check out those digital resources that we've listed online as well. And I hope everyone stays safe, stays happy and find something good to read. Thank you.