 Welcome back to Big Top for Small Libraries. This is the 3 o'clock hour, and we have two sessions to go, and in this session we're going to be listening about programming on a shoestring budget with Dave McStorff and Odessa Meyer of the South Sioux City Public Library here in Nebraska. So, welcome guys, and take it away. Okay, I'd like to say good afternoon to everybody out there. You see our opening shot. Our library is kind of known for our birds. If you hear birds in the background about 10, 15 feet away from my desk here, we have an aviary that's in the library, and it tends to be a big attraction for people that are brand new to our community. So, you may hear that a lot, and we're probably, I'm taking a guess, we're the biggest library that's doing presentations right now. We're in a city with a population of 13,000, but if you go about 8 blocks to the west of us, you hit countryside, and pretty much the next town is Shadron, which is 455 miles away that has a population bigger than probably 1,000 people. So, we're pretty rural here for ourselves. We're in a unique situation, because we have a city within five minutes across the river at 75,000 population. We have another city just north of us by about five minutes. That is a very well-to-do city, but our library actually competes pretty good with the South, or the Sioux City Public Library. We actually have a lot of patrons from Sioux City come here and get library cards at our library. But what we're going to talk about is budgeting on a shoestring, and how we do what we do on so little dough. For some of you really small libraries, when you hear how much we have to budget for it, you may go, jeez, that's my whole operating budget. But the big thing that we want to kind of emphasize, you can get very creative with how much money you have by utilizing a lot of different things. We're going to kind of give you a little rundown history of the library here. June 1, 2009, myself and our children's librarian, Odessa Meyer, who also will be presenting, we were both hired. Plus, they got a brand new library board, Chosen Replace, a board that actually got dismissed. We had a board that was very old-fashioned in their philosophy, and things needed to be changed. And we got hired and came in with a complete new idea on the library. The perception when we started at the library is it was very boring in here, nothing to do, programs didn't fit anybody's needs. The library was pretty much blank walls. There wasn't posters, pictures, books up on display, nothing of that sort. The library was not kid-friendly, and we had a lot of people didn't even know that we had a library in town. Now, for those that don't know anything about South Sioux City, we're a very blue-collar population. 50% of our population is second language individuals, either first generation, second generation, or third generation. We're a meat-packing industry here. We have a lot of railroads, things like that. So we're very blue-collar, and a lot of our patrons move in, work for maybe six months or a year, and then they're gone again. So we have a big transition of patrons every year. In the time period that we've been here, these are some of the statistics that we've got now. Just to show, by adding programming, and I'm a firm believer, this is why it's gone up. By adding programming into your collection and into your library, you'll see a lot of changes in your library. Now, when we started, they actually had no real computers for the patrons. Patrons used a little device called a... I'm going to go blank on the name of it. It's been such a long time. But there was not actually even a computer there. They wanted to copy a paper from a flash drive that came in my office, sat at my desk, and did it there. Adult programming attendance is one of the big things that we've really seen a big increase in. And kids programming attendance. How do we do this to turn this around? The first thing is we started to interview library patrons. And some of the other people have talked about in the presentations in the morning about the different things that they did by setting out interviews and things like that. Both just verbal interviews with individuals, and then we also handed out surveys to people. Communicate with the people who don't use the library with those types of questionnaires. We had a lot of varieties of places. We're actually putting together another one. It's been about three years. And we're going to be using SurveyMonkey as a source to be able to hit some of the individuals that use the computers a lot, but maybe aren't coming into the library. So we're going to go that route for our next survey also. Meet with the civic groups and give presentations. If you've got any kind of groups in your area, go out and just talk with them. Tell them what your plans are for the library. It's amazing how little connections like that really helps you get started on getting programming going. Meet with all the local agencies and so the library could do to assist their agencies. I think it was the gal this morning. Let me see if I can look up her name. Natalia, that was out at Michigan. Talked about the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, the Optimists, the Eagles, different groups like that. By going and doing presentations with them, talking with them, we've gotten them to actually start using the library more often. They do programs for us. We go in, do things for them. It's turned out to be a very nice kind of win-win for everybody. Offer them the use of your library as a meeting space. That's another big thing. One of the organizations in town actually wanted to have a big fundraiser, but there was no place that they could afford to do it, so the library put it on and the library benefited very nicely from that. Talk with your area schools. When I first got into library work, I was a school librarian and I never had a public librarian ever talk to me. It always kind of took me by surprise that type of situation. Talk with your area businesses. Once again, the more you're out there being seen, the more that they're going to cooperate with you. Like some of them have said, you could go to the hardware store, talk with the person you've been going in there buying stuff, talk to them, hey, could you possibly do a program on plumbing or how to do wiring or something like that that could really turn into a nice program for you. Do a review of the services your community provides and try to fill in the gaps. At one time, our area, since it's very blue collar, it's very low income. Due to the financial situations in the state, they pulled all the social workers from this area. They pulled all the variety of services away from this area and so we're looking at ways to try to fill in on a lot of those different types of things. See what other libraries are doing and recreate their ideas to fit their needs. Some people will say that stealing, I say it's recreating. And it does help. We have a handout that you'll be able to download. There's three or four libraries that I go and look at quite often and I look and see what the biggest libraries are doing and seeing if there's a way that we can do it ourselves without much of the budget situation that you run into. Keep an open mind. Even if the idea doesn't catch on right away, keep trying. We have programs that we've put in time and effort. One person shows up. Well that one person may be somebody that tells somebody else the next time. We've had some programs. The biggest we've ever had attended a program was about 450 people came. And so thank goodness we didn't have the fire marshal here that night. But certain things are very popular. Other things, it may take you a while. We started some of our basic programs. You might have nobody or one person show up. Now you're having five, six, seven, eight, ten people each time you do it. So it just keeps building as you go along. Okay, this is how much we have budgeted in a year. Now that may seem like a lot. This is how many programs we're going to offer this year. We have four full-time staff, six part-time staff. And so far at this time almost every single one of the staff members does some sort of program. We have two that are kind of shy and they're a little more timid on doing it. But we're actually going to be having them take over some of the tech programs in the evenings because they work in the evening hours. And then we also utilize volunteers. That's the big thing that we really work at. We're at that point with 1,500 programs. We have a whole list of other things that we want to do for the community. But we just don't have the time ourselves. So that's where we're looking for volunteers to come in and help. Roughly we do about 800 tech classes. Now that seems like a lot and it is. And we may have nobody show up for this one certain type of tech class. But we have it on the calendar and people can see, oh, ebook classes. They have those four times a week at these different times. We have it morning, afternoon, and evening. And people can kind of decide which time that they may want to come in. We have about, I think it's 42 or 43 actual tech classes that we do teach on a rotating basis. And we go through a wide variety of things on that. As you can see, 300 youth programs and about 400 adult programs that are all done. Cover to cover book clubs. Book clubs are kind of your basic thing that most libraries really do and enjoy doing. We do that. We're also involved in One Book, One Sue Land events. Which is an area, all the area libraries that are within a certain boundary of us. We actually do our own one book. We choose a book. And then we put together a wide variety of topics, speakers, things like that. This year's book is The Western Chain. And this is the first time they've done a Western. And we have the movie. We have four Western movies that are being shown. I think we have five speakers that are speaking on a variety of topics. We have a cowboy poet that's coming in. And the cost for all these things are all being shared between all the libraries. So it really cuts down your cost tremendously. These are some of the sources that we do. This year we're also going to be, we're putting together right now One Book, One Nebraska. Willa Kather's Book O Pioneers. And we're in the process of planning out programming for that. And we're going to be doing that later in the year. Some other sources. These will be on the handouts. Then humanities programs. Every state that I ran across has a humanities program. And that's one of those little ones that I also have put onto the handout. Connecting site to be able to get to it. But the humanities programs are a fantastic source of getting presenters to come to your library. Here in Nebraska, if we get two presenters, it costs the library 150 bucks total. The rest of the cost is picked up by the humanities program. We actually probably have four to five speakers a year that we use. And almost all the humanities speakers keep their costs at a very minimum amount. And you get fantastic results for what you have. Here's one of our speakers that actually has a new book out. He's working his way around the state. Anybody from Nebraska probably recognizes him. He's been in just about every single library when I was doing my research. But we're having him do a presentation on May 4. Then also you look at what's coming around out there through the ALA. And we are one of the host sites. I think there's only two in the state of Nebraska that has the Smithsonian Institute traveling exhibit of Lincoln and the Constitution and the Civil War. And this was at a very easy grant to fill out. And we actually received money that is going to help us pay for humanities speakers to come in. We're showing several movies that are related to Lincoln, the Constitution and the Civil War. And so for a month and a half time period we're specifically hitting just that one area alone. This is an excellent site. If you've never been to this website and it's put on by the American Library Association, the Public Programs Office, fantastic for finding out what's going on out there. Chase's calendars of events. They have kind of a link that takes you to all these specialized types of things that are going on that you can go to this website and see it. Community-wide events. Cardinal Festival is a city-wide kind of celebration of South Sioux City. And I believe this will be the fourth year that we're going to be having it. And this is probably our biggest expense out of that $4,000 budget. Probably about $1,000. We spend just on this one event alone. And to me, this is a tremendous public relations program because there are so many people that come to this that don't even live in the area. Haven't been here, don't know anything about the library. They come to the different events. We sponsor a drive-in movie where it's actually out on a big movie screen out in a parking lot. And we have cars from the 1920s through the 1950s and 60s show up. And then we also do kids programming on one of the special events. And every year it's a different movie. We have popcorn. There's all sorts of civic groups that come in and help during the movie. And it's for two days that they do these different events. And we're there and have one of the main sponsors for doing this. Community Garden. That's one of those ways of once again getting out there and working with the community. Our library did classes. We had a garden spot that was located right next to the library at one time. Then they sold the house. And so it's now moved. But from this, we got a connection in with the community gardeners or people that did like gardening. And it was a very nice mixture for both the community and the library working together. We still have the garden group that meets for this. We're putting together now, next month will be the first meeting for a garden club. And it will actually be a bunch of people that will be working together to learn or teach or show other people how to garden. And then out of this has also been now developed the farmer's market where some of the gardeners that started the very first year have now developed themselves to be able to sell stuff at the farmer's market and get a little extra income in the same process. Then this is our big group that really works a lot with the library. The Optimist Club, they were the one looking for space for being able to do a program, a big fundraiser. And so they worked with us, we worked with them and do a Christmas wreath auction. And the library is filled with Christmas wreaths from one end to the other. This last year we had one concert band that was playing Christmas music. On the other end we had a Spanish group that was playing Spanish Christmas music. And I mean it was just filled from one end to the other with people. And as you can see, this was a very nice donation which totally went to the kids program for the summer reading program. Immigration services is one of our pride and joys as I call it. Once we got that started, once again over 50% of our population are second language individuals. And a lot of people need to figure out how to become a citizen of the United States. On average we have 5 to 10 people that are coming every Wednesday to get advice from legal services that come in. And this is totally free for us. We provide the space for one of the agencies that's in our area, they come in on a reliable basis. And it helps out tremendously. Arts in the school, working with the schools, providing them a space to be able to let people know what's going on in schools and aren't necessarily parents. As you can see this could be a very big event. We have artwork on display throughout the library. And then this year we had a puppet show, we had music performers all in the library. Local and personal interest. A big thing is to look at what your community really needs, really wants, what's kind of in your area. We look at bringing in a variety. Down here is a fellow with the railroad app. We have a big background in railroad in South Sioux and the Sioux City area. And he's a professor over on the Sioux City side that has come in and done presentations for us. We actually have Elvis show up one night and perform. And it was hilarious watching some of our more mature ladies as Elvis was performing. We also participate in the Quiltway project, the Byways, the Quiltway. Our library has done a quilt show for probably eight, nine years now in a row. And the Byways, the Quiltway kind of grew out of that. And now it stretches almost all the way across the northern part of Nebraska along the highway. And that runs along out here. And I don't know if it gets all the way out to Shadburn, but it goes, I mean they can spend literally the whole day driving along for the Quiltway. We also had a Lakota medicine man that came in and talked and did a presentation. Our poetry, cowboy poetry, she does a wide variety of topics. These are all related to areas right around here. We have two reservations that are close by. We have a lot of rodeo. We have a lot of that type of stuff in our area. Musical programming. A lot of libraries don't think about having concerts in their library. Well, we actually do have concerts in our library. Besides the humanity speakers, we do this. And those are two very good sites to be able to line them up. We are kind of nice because we're close to an interstate system. And so as performers are traveling from one destination to the next, you might be the in-between spot. And programming and budget-wise, this is one of our more expensive ones. But we average probably when we have a concert, we probably average about $120 a performer. We also put in an art gallery around the area. The community college that's on the other side, their art students, do all the work themselves. We haven't paid one red cent for us. And these little things I always call cultural moments because they're things that a lot of our population, they don't go to the art museum. They don't go to the theater. They don't go to the musical symphony. But they have an opportunity to see things that maybe they never would have a chance to see before. Movies are another thing. A movie license is not that bad to get. And luckily here in Nebraska, and this is one of those things, on budgeting on a shoestring, Nebraska Library Commission provides the money so you can show movies in your library. So you look for things that your Library Commission does or things that you can get a grant for or an agency that's willing to help out. We're unique. We're a 13,000 population, but we do not have a movie theater in town. We do not have a music venue place in town. If people want to go to that, they have to go across the river to be able to see that. But we do reel-to-reel movies. We do a V-movie night at the Biju. Many of you might, if you're old enough, remember those old creature-feature type movies. These are all the little weird things that came on. This is kind of a fun one because it's like Mystery Science Theater 2000. You can make comments during the movie as things are going on. We also do a classic movie night, discuss and talk about kind of the idea behind the movie and why it was such a classic. Then we also do specialized type of things. Manga Languages Program. This is the way we introduced our Manga Languages Program to our staff. Manga Languages did a special talk like a pirate day, and so everybody dressed up like pirates that day, all but Dan, so he was our prisoner. And if you could see in behind Dan, that table there actually has a bunch of our pirate-type books on it, and they made it to look like an actual pirate ship. And then we have the Up on the Countertop, a laptop with Manga Languages brought up. Anybody had any questions about it? Demonstrated it for them. There's a lot more things. The technology classes. We do about 60 new classes a month. We've got a seed saving library classes that we do. Band book weeks, game days, trivia contests. One of the most popular trivia contests we had was The Simpsons TV show trivia contest. It was won by one of the local area ministers. We do travel logs, scribes. There's a local writing group now that's been formed, and they meet at the library and do presentations on their topics. Spanish classes. If you have a Spanish population, if you can find some volunteers, do it. Do it in Spanish. This right now is the number one program that's going on. On the average, we have five to seven people roughly each and every time. We've had 14 people show up for one class and didn't know what to do. We had to bring in an extra table. They had to share laptops, because we didn't even have enough equipment. But this is a population that's really looking at learning technology. But if they're sitting there listening to someone speaking in English, it's very difficult for them. So you have somebody that can speak fluent Spanish. Tremendous opportunity. Our 50 plus area is an area that we added in recently. I think it's now about a year old. And with the intent of being able to do programming specifically for our more mature people. And one of the programs that we started is Tangled Yarns, which we didn't want to get specific on doing crocheting or I don't even know all the terms of all these different things. So everybody brings in whatever they're working on. And they demonstrate to each other. Somebody has a question on some. We've actually had two teenage boys sit in on this. We've had some teenage girls come in and sit in on different opportunities. And they were demonstrating. Everybody was showing everybody how to do some of these things. Okay. I'm going to let Odessa take over. She'll do the next little section. Hello. Like Dave said, my name's Odessa. I'm the children's librarian. I've been working here since June of 2009. When I started, I looked at the schedule and I was like, wow, there wasn't a lot that was offered. And it was very time restricted to other parents. And so in 2009, as you can tell, the story of times that were held were held consistently twice a week and two programs that ran only once a month. That wasn't hitting our audience the way that it needed to. So in this current year, right now, I have seven consistent youth programs each week with special programming as they come up. How we get so many different programs where I'm not overloaded on what I am doing because I teach some of the tech classes as well. I help out the circulation desk minimally. But I'm only working 40 hours soon, so I didn't want to be here 60, 70 hours trying to... We encourage partnerships with our community organizations. Our move to the music classes was a program that we offered for youngsters. And she was a music teacher and she came in and she did a program for us. And it also encouraged our parents to then look at it and see if it was something that they were interested in doing and to sign up for her classes. We recruit a lot of our local teachers, especially during the summer, to come in and help with story times, special programming. And this lady is awesome, Kay Larson, that I'm using in the picture here, that she does storytelling and she has props. And the kids really get involved in following along in the story and reenacting it with her props. We also utilize our local chamber reps. The Optimist Club, as Davis spoke about before, and they are ones that work very well with all the youth programming in the area. They help promote our Halloween party and they come in volunteer every year. They've done our Christmas week with us, our Christmas week option with us. And anytime that they need volunteers, I know I can go to them. We also use our 4-H extension office for programming. It's the Coda County branch of the Nebraska 4-H extension office. And the ladies there are phenomenal. They help with our summer reading program. They do schools day-out programs for us. Right now I'm working with them, with parents interacting with infants program. And they are very great help for what we look for. I had to take a step back. And to look at our community that I served. And I was reaching some kids, but not all of them. Or not all the parents were comfortable coming to some of my story times. And so we looked and we saw we needed some bilingual story times. It's great for those kids who are bilingual and those parents are getting some quality time with their children as well. A mother who spoke was very fluent bilingual and she volunteered with her two boys to come in to do story times. We did it once a month. And now we have an employee who is bilingual and so we'll be recruiting her to continue our bilingual story times. Now that my mother, my volunteer, her schedule got too hectic to continue. So we did just like a typical story time I do. We read three books. We make a craft. We enjoy some good quality bonding time with children and parents. One thing that I really stress with your programming is to keep it consistent. Regardless if you're being consistent on your weekly programs, your monthly, or your yearly, you want to keep it consistent. It's going to help families, children, remember when to come into the library. Like our LEGO class. Every February kids are coming in. Are we going to have LEGOs this year? We're going to do, it's a class. We teach how to build structurally sound buildings or items with LEGOs for two weeks and then the third week we'll have a contest. And that's every year. So make sure that things are kept consistent and also make the library a fun place. Here we had two boys that were spending a summer day with us and we got out our Lincoln Logs and they were building their forts. At the end of our summer reading, Dave volunteered to have a food fight with the kids outside and so they were throwing all different kinds of food. The kids who read like the most and spent their time reading specifically to win that prize in order to throw food at our director. This was something that was really fun. It didn't cost us much of anything. It was a stuffed toy sleepover. I had seen the idea through another library for one of our programming books and I was like, oh, I can create that. What we did was we had children bring in their stuffed toys. I had gathered pillows and blankets and threw them down on the floor. I read to the kids. They came in their pajamas. I read to the kids. They took their stuffed toys in for the night and kissed them goodbye and they left and the stuffed toys got to stay at the library with us. Now, the only cost that the library had was I took pictures and printed them out and the kids got pictures. Some of these are the ones the kids got to take home the next morning when they came to pick up their stuffed toys of things their animals and their pets did during the night. Abby spelled out her name. The snake got in the Avery Curious. George is reading his book and the naughty dog got in and ate Dave's food, our director's food. The kids got to take these pictures of what their creatures did in the library overnight. We also have a Dr. Seuss celebration actually tonight. We will be getting ready for that where we had Cat in the Hat come and visit. We did order a cake that year. This year I've gotten some volunteers for having cookies to decorate. We've created games. We are going to be using a lot of different donating craft supplies, things like that so they can create their own Dr. Seuss characters and take home with them. Our summer reading programs, World Juggling Day, it doesn't cost us a dime. Our director is an amateur magician and a juggler and so he juggles for the kids and teaches them how to juggle. We have a great turnout with that. Our string instrument, extravaganza, was one of my mom's. She teaches music classes. In order for me to pass out her brochures, I come in and do a class and so kids got to play with her cellos and practice. We do with the money that's donated to us from either the reef options or different area businesses, which we send out donation requests. We can hire our Sioux Falls Zoom Mobile. They come in about an hour and a half, an hour and a half, 45 minutes away, twice a year, once for summer and once during the holiday break in the winter. We also hire puppeteer who then gives the kids some time to create their own puppets after her puppet show. These are some different summer reading programs. We have two colleges that are in the Sioux Land area, both are across the river in Iowa. But we have some professors who are really willing to go out of their way for these young kids and they brought in their bugs from around the world and nasty little creatures in their cases. We do hire mad science. That's one of our big summer reading programs. He's wonderful with the kids. He gets them to experiment, to have fun with science. And then we use our Nebraska Humanities Council as well. And David Marsh came in for Music Around the World. That was two summers ago. So use your Humanities Council wherever you're located and see if they have performers that are willing to come in and relatively inexpensive to get them in. These are some storytime crafts. I do storytimes I have. We have seven a week that we do. And I make crafts on every one of them from six of them. The one group is infants. And so I don't have stories. I don't have crafts with those. But the rest of them, we always have a craft for the kids take home depending on the theme that we're doing. And specifically because these are all recyclable items. I am a craft hoarder. My closet is overfilled with plastic bottles and toilet paper tubes and egg cartons and cups. Anything I can keep and get my hands on, I keep. The bulldozer was a movable bulldozer. The shovel raised and lowered. It's just toilet paper tubes, straws and cardboard boxes just pieced together. The basketball hoop had pom-pom. That was their basketball. Just a piece of construction paper, toilet tube and pipe cleaner. The race car again, a toilet paper tube painted. The fish was a plastic bottle we crinkled up with tissue paper and construction paper. Our fire truck was the egg carton. Frog was a styrofoam cup. And then the sunflower was, we have some bird feeders outside. So I swiped a few of the sunflower seeds and it's a paper plate. The petals on from construction paper. These are some new areas that we were able to reassign in our youth area. The teen area was once the kids computer room and it wasn't very well utilized. And so we made into a new teen area. It's for game playing where we have the chess and checkers. Relaxing and reading. We also do different displays for the kids in that room. And the teens right now are creating some bookshelves to hang on the walls. And then we reorganized another section of our library for the young kids area where we move the kids computers. We have three kids computers not connected to internet. So it's safe. And then we added a bunch of mind and logic games and a puppet stage and theater as well. These are different displays that they may be time consuming but you get a lot of interest with. Of course our book award displays right now for the state of Nebraska is the Golden Sowers. We always put books on display on top of our shelves. We have specific areas that draw kids in to check some of those nonfiction books that never circulate very well. And then our bulletin boards can be very interactive or chica chica boom boom. Just some old paper that I had laying around. Signs promoting some of our different programs. But the kids got to decorate all the letters that climbed up and fell down out of the coconut tree. And it is wise to read. We had a little craft day where we made owls and things like that. And so I utilized some of the owls and hung it up on our bulletin board. So your craft ideas and your kids can be interactive with any displays that you are creating as well. We have a teen advisory board. A teen advisory board we call TAV. They wanted to do a teen murder mystery dinner. And it was a fundraiser for their group in order to do different kinds of parties and order pizza and things like that. And so we had our local grocery store come in and cater for us and charge a certain amount of dollars per person. We decorated the library. We had an officer come in and she was the officer of our play. And he donated his time to work with the kids. The kids wrote their own script and we dressed up. And it was very comical and very fun. And the audience had to guess who the killer was of our outlined personal background. The teens also did a love stinks party. This was this year. It was an anti-Valentine state party where we supplied snacks. And the teens actually did a lot of baking with their own snacks and treats. We supplied the pop and water and board games and the craft items. The kids made their own posters and blew up all their balloons and everything. And they had a great time. We have a teen advisory party. Everyone, including adult chaperones, dressed up for the party. We have a basement in our library so we hosted it down there. It's kind of creepy. And so the adult chaperones had a good time. We dressed up. The kids were dunking for apples. We've done all different kinds of Halloween-type games, played music. It's just a couple-hour program. It doesn't really cost us much of anything. Just to let the kids have a safe place to hang out. These are programs that we offer currently right now. Patek Pals is an infant storytime. Toddler time is for two-year-olds. Preschool storytime is three to five-year-olds. Kiwi is our parents interacting with infants. I was trained in that. And we work with organizations in the community for that. Schools Day Out is something that our extension office offers. On days that kids don't have school, they'll come in and run an hour or two program for us. After school children's movie time, so once a week and once on Saturday, we'll play a movie for the kids so they have something to do. We have an alphabet party which is concentrating on one letter a week with crafts, things to do at home, new vocabulary words, handwriting sheets. Let's Create is specifically for older elementary-aged children, middle school where it's free-range art creating. Night of Fun is just different science experiments, things that myself and our part-time evening youth librarian can create. We do different games. Just having a great time in the library. In symphony concerts for young audiences, we had the sixth grade class come in and they performed for a concert for us. These are future programs that the adults want to offer. ESL programs, garden groups, discussions on the Muslim faith because we do have a group in our community that does have a very strong Muslim faith and we want to offer for them. That's a driver's training class. We have a lot of patrons that have difficulty in reading English so they have a hard time taking the driver's test, the written part. We want to start working on that. The Spanish Welcome Wagon program is just a way to be able to get these individuals that are brand new to the United States to be able to adjust quicker to, if you've never been here before, how do you go about setting up your utilities? How do you get all those different types of things? We have a variety of other types of tech classes that we're interested in and almost all of these we're working on right now trying to get it going. Health classes and then the big thing that I'd like to see as a social worker being able to be able to be working in the library for different things. These are different programs that I have plans for adding to our youth programming and online story time which wouldn't take anything but our technology guys from the city coming and recording me. I already have the books. I already have me so it's free of cost. After school tutoring, if I can get high school teams and teachers to volunteer their time to come in and help those students who need it, especially clubs, LEGO, science, poetry, photography, whatever our kids are interested in, I can learn enough to start a club with them and then let the kids kind of run the program. A homeschool network, I want to reach out to our homeschool students and families to see what we can offer and what they can do for us and what we can do for them. A program called Intro to Your New Hobby where we can get people who are fluent in coin collecting, stamp collecting, what have you and teach the hobby to future generations. I want to try and start something with healthy families where I would be using the extension office, sewing, knitting, crocheting for kids, a simple cooking class, books into movie clubs where we are reading the book and then we have time where we watch the movie and puppetry or storytelling work as well. Those are just me giving my time, me working at the library. There's not a lot of cost that goes into any of those. Now when you look at a lot of these things, like the teen area, the kids area, things like that, there was absolutely no cost to the library. Nothing came out of the budget. It was all donated, money, totally on that. Our computer programs, every piece of technology we got in here was through grant money. Nothing came out of the library but we do not have a budget for technology in our system. So so many of these things that we've done, I can't even probably guesstimate how much it would cost to actually do everything we did if we didn't rely on grants, on donations, on volunteers and things like that. That's kind of our program. Anybody got any questions out there? Yes, Dave and Odessa, thank you very much. We have a lot of questions for you, yes. People are very impressed and exhausted just listening to you speak. For example, the first question we got was even with the volunteers you have, where do you find room? I think there's mean in your schedule to have 15,000, 1500 programs a year. That's probably the hardest thing because we have some things that are at the exact same time. And so luckily our building, like I said, we're a good size building. We're 16,000 square feet and then we have a meeting room and the community college has kind of a classroom setting on the other side of our building. And so we utilize that and then we have a little middle space in between so we can have actually a program, a group using the facility, and then another program. We can have the kids program down in the kids area, have adult program down in the adult area, do an effect class over in the tech area, and then have another program over in the other one. So I mean, it's kind of creative programming on the schedule looking at it. And there's times that we're working split shifts. Like I'll have two programs in a day and I'm here in the morning and I'm here again in the afternoon or evening to accommodate what we're trying to pull off and make our library more of the community center that it needs to be. And the big thing that I really like is everybody on the staff does something program-wise. You know, that's the big thing. We just don't have a person that all they do is work the circulation test. They may do the e-book classes or they may do a creative drawing class or stuff like that, whatever. Right. Okay, great. Someone's interested in the information on the Custer and the Lincoln programs you got. I don't remember if you mentioned, where did you find a humanities group to work with? Who did you get to do that and how was it so inexpensive? That's through the Nebraska Humanities Association. So on the handout that I'm going to send to you guys, it has a link to all the humanities organizations that are out there. And like Nebraska, their humanities association, your first speaker is only $50. Your second speaker is only $100. So you need to just check with your own local humanities organizations and see what type of programs they have to offer. They are more than willing to work with libraries really a lot. And a logistical question, how did you get a movie screen in the parking lot? Across the river, in the big city, there's three movie theaters. And one of the guys lives on this side of the river. He had an old movie screen rolled up a big, huge, like 30 by 40 or 50 or 60 feet. And the city worked with your city. They were very cooperative. They put in telephone poles and rigged up a movie screen. There's one performance. And one kind of way that I pay back our city workers is in the spring during National Library Week, I do a cookout at the library. And I cook hot dots, hamburgers and everything. And all the guys that clean the sidewalks in the winter, the parking lots, all the library boards, any of that kind of stuff. Plus, all the staff and our volunteers, I cook hamburgers and hot dots for them. And one winter, I was out there in a snow bank cooking hot dots and hamburgers. That's the thing. It's who you know that you never know who's out there that can have a resource or something that you could use. And that was what Dave was saying with going out and just communicating with everybody that you can get in contact with in your public. Because you never know who's going to be able to help you or you help them. And now we do have a question here that I think I can answer here also related to the movie thing. How do you afford the movie license to show movies outdoors? Here in Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission where we are here. Is that outdoors? Oh. Well, the outdoors is special. The outdoors is special. Okay. Sorry. That's our big expense. Like I said, out of our budget of about $4,000, about $1,000 goes to that Cardinal Festival and $400 to $500, $600 is just for the movie for that one thing. But as I put it, boy, that's the PR right there. We have about, I think last year there was 800 people came to the drive-in movie. Yeah. Wow. Nice. Now when you do have volunteers doing some of these programs, is there also a staff member present? Someone wants to know about there's any sort of liability issues if it's volunteer versus staff? Or does insurance... Yeah. We always have people in the library. All the programs are always during times. In the evenings, especially we have, we try to have at least three staff. And so nobody's ever alone. We don't run into that situation. And like the Tangled Yarns, that's a group that pretty much everybody is their own volunteer. They all teach each other. Or the community garden group that we're going to kind of get going. Everybody is a volunteer in that group. The immigration services. That's a lawyer that comes in and provides their service for free through another agency. And if you're going to recruit volunteers for the youth programming and you're concerned about them working with kids, try and recruit your teachers, try and recruit your day care providers, things like that. And it's not necessarily to alleviate my time planning the program. It's to alleviate my time implementing the program. So I'm still going into the details of planning it. But that hour that I would have set aside, I'm at my desk working while they're right next, you know, right in the same room implementing my program. That's cool. Speaking about the programs and things, the story times that you do every day, they want to know if you repeat the same story all week long and use the same craft, does the story and craft change daily? Oh, it changes. I don't like repeating. I think I've been here three, I'm going on four years and I don't think I've repeated a craft yet. Wow. Let's see here. Okay, here's a more serious kind of question. This one, this one place they say, they only get about one to four kids for their kids movie time and they've been doing it for a year. How many participants must attend for you to consider it a success? One. Because the way I look at it, it's just like our cultural programs are humanities. You might have somebody there that's never ever heard this topic before and our main purpose in the library, as I put it, is to educate. I'm originally a teacher and to me, that's our main goal, is to let people know about certain things. Having one kid come to a program, maybe he doesn't have any other place to go. Or maybe his family doesn't have the income to take them to the movie theater that is across the river where the parents are working two, three jobs in the home and he needs something and it's his way of seeing the same movie that his friends are being able to see and talk about in school and so to me, that one child or that one adult who we reached is awesome. And to me, that's worth continuing. And in our library, after school hours from three o'clock on, we have anywhere from 50 to 150 kids that are in the library unattended by any adults and we're like their second little home because either nobody's at home or if they go home there's not really anything there to do. So that's why we have such a wide variety of programs at the library especially in the evening now. That's why we do the evening movie programs and we just turn the movie on and whoever comes comes. We have adults now that are showing up for the kids movies too. And so that's one thing that you have to look at to try and play and if you don't have enough staff time try and do something that can be self-sufficient like playing a movie in one of your rooms. You don't need staff there. You already have somebody at the circulation desk hour and a half. Go pop the movie back out. And our room is not a social or a room that's tited or hit away. It's something that I'm sitting at my desk and I actually can see people over there when they're at the movie. Okay, great. We'll just have about our time for questions. Just wanted to respond to two specific things here that I did get through. So I wanted to know more about the seed saving classes. We did do, I don't know many of you may or may not know, here at the Nebraska Library Commission we do a weekly online show called Encompass Live and a couple weeks ago Dave was actually on talking about seed saving for libraries. So I definitely recommend if you want to know what he's doing with that, check out that. Also they want to know if you can get a list of the tech classes you offer. Is that something that would be just on your website or that you can send along with us head handouts for us to share? Yup. On the handouts list I've got three lists and one is the tech classes that we do with the description and then also the third one is the sequence. We kind of set it up if you're interested in just social information. If you're interested in business, getting a better job, these are the classes we recommend. If you're interested, it's all kind of set up in a sequence and so like when we're doing our Spanish classes, this is number one that you take, this is number two, this is number three. Okay, great, alright. So that will wrap it up for the questions and the sign. Thank you very much, Dave and Edessa. If you did have any questions you didn't get answered, there's your emails. Definitely feel free to contact them.