 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar event where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, Wednesdays, we do record the show as we are doing today. And then you can watch it at your convenience. And I will show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of our archived Encompass Live shows on our website. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. For anyone who's here not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries, similar to your state library. So we provide services to all types of libraries in the state. So you'll find shows on Encompass Live for all types of libraries. Public, academic, K-12, museums, archives, corrections, really. Our only criteria is that it's something to do with libraries. We do book reviews, interviews, many training sessions, demos of services and products, all sorts of things. We sometimes have Nebraska Library Commission staff come on the show to talk about resources and programs and things we're doing through the commission. But we're also bringing guest speakers from all across the country. And that's what we have today, which is, well, actually it's kind of a combo. It's a guest speaker, not for the commission, but it's about something that we're offering through the commission. So with us today is Jake Ball, who is the founder of Reader Zone. And we, I don't know, I don't know if you were going to talk about what we're doing here in Nebraska, Jake, or would you want me to do that? I can do that. I mean, you probably have, we might have more facts in your fingertips than I do, but I'm happy to talk about it. That's, if you want to dive into it. Yeah, I'll just do a little intro about that first, since, yeah, just to let people know what's going on here. So Reader Zone is just a one-line, you know, Jake's going to get on all the details of Reader Zone. It's a great service to use to do reading programs, like your summer reading program or anything. When the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, one of our regional library system directors, Denise Harders, reached out to Jake, I think reached out to you, and wanted to, you know, summer reading was coming up and we needed a way to do it virtually, you know, safely. And she had, I don't know how she found out about Reader Zone, but she found out, reached out and he said, yeah, great, I can do that for you. And then she talked to our other, we have four different regional library systems in the state, talked to the other system directors, and they said, oh yeah, we could all chip in and do it for everybody. Okay. And then they talked to us, the Nebraska Library Commission, our regional library systems are kind of an outreach of us in the different areas of the state. And we had just been awarded, as everyone across the country, was the CARES Act money, the first big grant that was given out by Congress to help libraries, so everybody, and there's some money for libraries and library services to help people get through the pandemic. And we said, we have CARES money, we'll pay for it. So the Nebraska Library Commission paid for that first year using our CARES Act money, that was in beginning of 2020 through, it goes through like August, right, yeah, September or August 2021. And then second year, still in pandemic, as we are still now, the American Rescue Plan Act money was distributed, and we had that here at the Library Commission. So the second year, we paid for it with that money, continuing with it for everyone. It's an annual subscription, it's all year round too. And now this year, we just renewed in, as of September 1st, and it's now just become part of our regular budget here at the Library Commission, something that we'll be supporting for all Nebraska libraries. I think it's school and public, if I'm not mistaken, public school and academic libraries. Yeah, it doesn't matter to us, whoever wants to participate, participate. So that's what we have here available in Nebraska. Due to the pandemic is how it gets started, and we're continuing with it. It has been hugely successful here, I would have to say. I'm not sure how many libraries are participating, if you know that number. I think it's 106. 106, yeah. And there are new ones all the time joining up. Denise cannot be with us today. She's on her way traveling to the Association for Rural and Small Libraries annual conference in Tennessee today. She's traveling. So yeah, we've got 106 libraries now, and it has been great. There have been so many libraries that have done. I know one of our libraries, Holdridge Area Public Library, the library director there mentioned that they had doubled, more than doubled their summer reading program participation just because of using Reader's Own. They went from 60 participants to 160, and I thought that was just awesome. So it's the kind of thing that can bring in lots of people. Other libraries are Broken Bowl Public Library. It uses it for their 1,000 books before kindergarten program. So it's not just for summer reading. It's for any sort of reading program, and it has gone over really well there. So that's just a little intro about why we're doing this, what this is all about, how we're providing it for all the libraries in the state of Nebraska to have access to. As I said, we did just renew September 1st. We have another year for it. And if you are a Nebraska library interested in joining and signing up, you just need to contact Denise Harders at the Central Plains Library System. And she will get you set up with a program and add you to groups to get everything done that you might need to do. So you can reach out to me. We'll have her contact info sent out when we do the recording and the archive for this. Or you can just look up Denise Harders at the Central Plains Library System in Nebraska. And she will get you set up with that. So that's just kind of an introduction of what this is and how we're providing it here in Nebraska. So I will now hand it over to you, Jake, to tell us all about what Reader's Zone is. Well, great. Well, thanks, Chris. I really appreciate it. I was thrilled to hear from you and have this opportunity to talk to your libraries. We really love Nebraska libraries here at Reader's Zone. I love it when individual librarians call me on the phone and ask a question. I love engaging with the libraries throughout the state. Nebraska is a lot like Idaho in that there's a couple of large population centers. And then the rest of the state is very sparsely populated. So we really understand rural libraries, single-person libraries. And I love talking to you and just seeing what you're doing and what you'd like to accomplish with your patrons. I have this little slide deck here. I promise there's only four slides I'll show you just to kind of walk through the basics of Reader's Zone. What I want to do today is just quickly walk through, just in 45 seconds or so, the origin of Reader's Zone. And I want to talk about the principles that drive it. Because any software platform, if it doesn't have a base in principles and kind of guiding principles, it doesn't really, I don't think it works really well. So I wanted to kind of put some flesh on the bones of what the principles are that drive the system and the technology. Then we're going to jump into and actually look at the Reader's Zone platform. And if you have not yet built or hosted Reader's Zone reading programs in your library, you're going to see exactly how to do it. What I will do is go through and build a reading program exactly as though I were a librarian somewhere in the great state of Nebraska. And then we're going to add some groups to that. And then I'll actually take out our mobile phone here and I'll show you exactly what it looks like for your patrons to join and then participate with your reading programs. When we built Reader's Zone, the principles are important and they still are. But aside from the principles, we wanted to have just a practical application to that as well. And I'll show you what I mean here. So everybody can see my screen here. I'll just go through these slides very quickly. I promise I try not to kill you with PowerPoint. So just a quick intro. My wife and I have four kids. My eldest is a freshman. Ecology just started. I have a junior. That picture is about a year and a half old and this boy here is now a six feet five kid. And I've owned a bookstore since 2006 and it is actually children's bookstore.com. And I've been a literacy advocate since before then. And there's a long story behind that. I won't get into that. And I'll tell you why I created Reader's Zone here. I always ask, we always do these reading programs in schools and libraries. And it's not very often that we ask why or what exactly we are trying to accomplish with the programming that we put out for the community. So I just like to frame it up and ask, are you satisfied with the level of engagement in your programs? Do they reach their intended purposes? Do you even know what the intended purposes are? And there's always the question of how we're going to carry out reading a lot of programs. The rule has changed drastically since Denise called me in 2020 and it continues to change very quickly in technology. People are just engaging with outside organizations differently than they have. And I think that's permanent. I don't think we're going back to the way it was in 2019. Whatever we settle on is going to be different. So there's some aspirational questions. What if more patrons participated with your programs? I always ask, what would it look like if you had twice the number of participants in your reading programs? How would that change how you engage with your patrons and what would happen with your stakeholders? What if you had access to real-time data? And I always say we build a culture of reading. And a culture, any culture, is built on two principles. The first is a practice and the second is information. And for example, if I want my kids, if I want my family to be a race car family, or like the Earnhardt or something, then I have to take my kids to the racetrack. I got to get them in cars. I got to teach them how to drive and get helmets for them and the whole thing. And then I have to, aside from just doing the practices of auto racing, I have to share information with them about it, teach them about it and report about it. The same thing goes with a culture of reading. You have to have the practice in place, but you also have to report on the success that you're having and share that with your community. And I'll show you what I mean by that. And I always say, what would it look like if you could really set your library apart and have your reading programs be a really strong point of pride? So here's the three principles that drive outstanding reading programs. They're adapt, engage, and report. I always say engage kind of comes first and that's just getting people into your programming. Now, how are you pulling them in? Is it easy to have them participate with your programs? Once they're in, do you follow their progress and see what they're doing and adapt to your programming to what your patrons are doing? And I always say that a reading program is not an act of Congress. If something is not working, just change it, cancel it, move on. And again, reporting is so important. And I'll show you why reporting is more important as we get into this. So this is the basic, this is the last slide. This is the basic architectural reader zone. It goes on programs and then groups or activities and then readers and participants. Any reader zone account can have an unlimited number of programs. So the way it's set up in Nebraska is each library has one, two, three, or however many programs they want to have. And each building, so to speak, has, you know, the staff people can access their programs. And then when they create their programs, they create groups or activities that are associated with those programs. So you think of a reading program as kind of a bucket and that bucket holds your reading programs or activities. And then your patrons join individual activities or individual reading groups and participate with them. Each reading group or activity can be completely different than the others. And so you can offer a variety of different parameters and goals and different types of programming within the same reading program just through different groups. And then each group or activity can have an unlimited number of readers associated with it. Some libraries will just have one reading program and one group and everybody joins it. Others will have one reading program and they'll put 15 different activities in there and their patrons join the activities that make sense for them. It doesn't matter really what the setup is as long as you're following your patrons and helping them have a rich experience with your library. So with that, let's go back to our screen here. So this is Readers Zone. This is the main website. If you want to learn a lot about Readers Zone, there's the whole video suite down here. We have dozens of videos you can watch. You can join a webinar. We have this little ticker down here that I love. This just shows all of the, everything that's happening system wide. So every time somebody makes a reading entry somewhere in the world, it pops up here. So just a couple of minutes ago, somebody reread Goodnight Moon Big Book, which is kind of fun. And you can see these tick up in real time as well. During the summertime, this will, this looks like a New York Stock Exchange stock ticker. It's just really turning along. Which is really fun. In Nebraska, we, it's been wonderful. We have, usually by the middle of July, the combined total of the Nebraska Library surpasses a million minutes read. And typically more than 20,000 books read. So we like to generate a press release and get it to you and make, you know, make some hay about how great your readers are. And I'll show you how you do that. Yeah, press release about that from this, yeah, this past summer. I was just looking for that year and reminded me of that. Nebraska Libraries did 1,381,624 minutes of reading in summer 2022. Yeah. So that's just minutes. There's books pages. Yeah, over 12,000 books and over 131,000 pages read. Yeah. So there's more than that that happened. But that data point is so important because now that you have that data point, you have something that you can go back to your, you know, your legislature, your stakeholders and say, look what we've accomplished. Look what our libraries as a group have done in our state in the past 90 days. And that information is so powerful. And I always tell our individual libraries, what if you could go back to your city council or your county and say, look what we've done in the past 90 days. This is how we are engaging with our community. And it's a real data point that demonstrates your relevancy in the community. And I think that's always, it's so important that you do that. I don't get too deep into that. I'll just show, we'll dive into the platform here. So here are our reading. This is my test account. I call it my test account, but it's really in the live database, just like any other account is. There's nothing different about it. Up here at the top, when you log into your reader's own account, you're going to see this little ticker up here at the top. And this just shows you what's happening in your account in real time. If I want to see what's happened in the last seven days, I click on that, and nothing's happened in my test account. But I can see what is happening very easily just by clicking on that. And I can just kind of get a snapshot of what's happening in my account. This is where we pull in the main Nebraska account that Denise, and I think a couple of others has had access to the owner level of it, they can see that huge number up here at the top. And that's really fun to see. And so they don't have to really, you don't have to do anything to arrive at this cumulative total. It's just right there. So if you want to report back to your stakeholder and say, here's what we've done in the past seven days, it's right there. But let's talk about reading programs. So here's all, here's a batch of different reading programs. I'll just show you a couple here. For example, 2022 summer reading, every reading program has a reading program code. It's a five character alphanumeric code. And that's how your patrons find that reading program and join it. And when we created the app and went through this exercise, there were two goals with the technology. Number one, we wanted to make it so that you could build a new reading program in 10 minutes or less. You could go from scratch to being something that's, that's what we call reader ready. And then for the patrons, we wanted to make it very easy for them to participate. And that meant making it so that it takes less than three minutes to create a readers on account, join a reading program and make a reading entry. And then as they make ongoing entries, it has to be less than 10 seconds to open up the app, make a reading entry for the day, and move on. It has to be faster than finding a pen and writing something on a sheet of paper. And that was the goal with the technologies so people actually use it. And I think we, we met that goal and we're continuously working on it. So I'll click on this 2022 summer reading and I'll show you what an example is here. So I can have all the different groups. My fifth grade readers, for example, are logging the number of books. Their goal is to read 30 books every day. Kind of a heady goal. I have an August reading challenge here where my challenge is to read 1,000 minutes between, well, this is June 20th and August 31st. Here's another one. Just did you read today? And I'm just asking my patrons how many minutes they read today. I have, let's go. Here's a reading log one. This is called Read Some Books. And this is just allowing my patrons to log the books they read and they're working against a specific goal. So each group in this particular reading program can have a completely different parameter set. Different dates, different metric, different kind of goal. And they can all work together. So with this way, you can have, you know, your youth, your team and your adult readers all in one program. And in the reader's own app, you know, mom, dad, and the two kids can join all different reading groups and they all live in the same account together. And that was the goal as well is to make that really, really easy. Let's go back to another program here. Well, there's so many different types of reading challenges that you can do. I mean, libraries are, you know, all in with summer reading programs, but there's lots of other interesting things I've been doing too, like getting people over, you know, winter reading challenges or things or competition between different libraries or schools or grades or something. It's gotten, yeah. Yeah, that's all possible. Let me show you a couple here that are very popular. Then we'll get into and actually build a new program. A thousand books for kindergarten tends to be the most common application for a year-round application. So what happens here? The best way to set this up is you have one reading program for your thousand books for kindergarten program. And then you set up groups based on when kids are set to begin kindergarten. So I have my kindergarten 2022 group right here. Their goal is to read a thousand books between the date I select and September 1st, 2022. So regardless of when that child joins this reading group, if they join it when they're six months old or, you know, the summer before they go to kindergarten, they can join that kindergarten 2022 group. And their goal is to read a thousand books. You know, my kindergarten 2023 is the same way. I have this goal set up in my end on September 1st, 2020, 2023. With that, you know, every reading program has what we call the book bank. And the book bank is where you as a librarian can put suggested reading into the app for your readers. It's just a list of titles that you suggest they read. So for my kindergarten 2022 group, I might have, you know, books that are kind of emergent readers, early readers, Pete the Cat, you know, Bedtime for Francis, that's not a very good example. But if you can put emergent readers in there for my kids who are, you know, kindergarten 2027 or 2028, these kids may not even be born yet, but let's look at 2026. I can put different books in there. I can have, you know, high contrast chunky board books in there. So I can follow my readers along. And with that, you can see how they're doing in real time as well. If I have a family who joined my thousand books for kindergarten program and they haven't made a reading entry in three months, it's very easy to see through the platform who hasn't participated for a while and then to shoot them a message and say, Hey, how can I help you? Here's five new books in the library that we think you'd really enjoy. And it's a great way to, it's a great way to manage your thousand books for kindergarten program. And let me show you this. Let's see if I can find it. I'll just, this is the one that comes to mind for me. There's the library in Kansas or in Indiana. It's a little library. No, it's Indiana. I'm sorry. They are, they're running a thousand books for kindergarten program and they've been doing it for a little while and they have on their website, this little ticker that shows what's happening in real time with their program. So far kids in their program would have read 21,475 books. Nice. Every, every time somebody, one of their patrons is at home and they log that they finished a book, this ticks up by one. And this is available through the reader's own platform and it's very easy to post that to your, to any web page. So that's just automatic. You don't have to just automatically changes. It's fed into that from reader's own itself. Yeah. Yeah. You don't have, and this is where we talk about reporting and if you really want to build and demonstrate your relevance to your community, I mean, they can show this at any point and say, you know what, we've read 21,475 books. That's a real number. And this is not a big town. This is a single location library. And also we have, when, when, when a family walks into your library and you want to invite them to participate something in your 1000 book for kindergarten program, you can say, let me show you what's happening right now. There's been 21,000 books read. You're missing out. And get them going. This has been successful to the point where actually we have a lot of libraries that have created the 2000 books for kindergarten program. Where if the kid finishes their 1000 book by the time they're three and a half years old, what do you do between when they're three and a half and five and a half and they join kindergarten? Well, you just create a 2000 books for kindergarten program and they're on their way. So this is just one example. I love the 1000 books before kindergarten program because it allows your families to see what they've accomplished in real time. Going back to our programs here, I'll just show you a popular kind of year round setup that I, did I really enjoy? Let's see if this is it right here. It's called year round reading program. So when you talk about building, programming for outside of summertime, this is what something that you could do. There's like a best in new nonfiction. So if you have a batch of patrons who are interested in nonfiction books, every time you get a few new books in your collection of the library, just put them in your book bank and then shoot a message out to these folks and say, hey, we have these three new nonfiction books to the library, come and read them. And they can keep track of the books they're reading and it's a way for them to engage. A book of the month club is very important. They're very popular as well. You can have a, whoever a librarian or even a volunteer can select a book or two or three books on it for every given month and then give everybody the opportunity to read that particular book. We've had libraries that will go in and actually create a Facebook group based on these groups right here and allow their patrons to talk to each other. Or they'll do an event at the library at the end of every month where they have people come in and talk about the book they read. There's like something like a new fantasy club every time you get a new fantasy book at the library, you can post it to the book bank for this particular group and just give your patrons and who are interested in that genre, some fodder to read with. There's winter reading challenges are very popular as well. You know, read a thousand books between February 1st and March 31st. You can set up however you'd like. We have libraries that do all sorts of different challenges. So really the sky's the limit and then I'll show you what I mean by that. So I won't take too much time on that. Just wanted to give you some ideas with regard to how that works. So let's do this. Let's show you what it looks like to build a reading program. So I'm going to click add program right here and I'll do the quick start because that tends to be a little easier to work with. And here's my new reading program code. B125 or B152C. And let's call this program something. Let's call it down. There's a town that I'll call Mud Lake that's tiny. So I'll just call it the Mud Lake Library. I'll click next right here. So now I have built the bucket called the Mud Lake Library. So we're going to add a group to it. And you saw in the back or on the other side, I can make this an activities program. We'll just make this a group program for now. So for the Mud Lake Library, maybe I want to make it a group for my adult readers. Very boring name, but we'll just do that. And I have a decision to make here. Do I want to have this be a goal-based program or a reading log program? The goal-based makes it so that I, as a reading program organizer, will set up the parameters. I'm going to say the goal is to read 400 minutes per month, five books per quarter, whatever you want to do. You have a metric and an interval, and that's what you're setting up. Whereas the reading log allows you just to select the metric and the time frame and allows your patients just to log whatever they read and not work against a specific goal. I'll do the goal-based here and we'll walk through and then we'll go to the reading log program. So I'll click the goal-based here and here are my metrics. I can select minutes, pages, chapters, books, minutes. I'm sorry, yes, no response or other. Other can be really anything you want. We have a lot of libraries that are doing steps-based program. For example, I can think of a library in Kansas that is doing a program called Walk the Yellow Brick Road where they are asking their readers. They calculated it out and to walk the Yellow Brick Road was like 125,000 steps. And so the goal is to read as to what is to log 125,000 steps and so far they've logged like 13 million steps as a group. The most we've had, we had a library in Utah that had a group called the Walk to Mordor based on the Lord of the Rings. And as a group, they logged like 139 million steps. And the reason we learned about that is because they called us and they said the interface is broken. And I said, I don't know what you mean, it's broken. So I looked at their account and this number up here at the top that has the total, we didn't accommodate for the fact that somebody would exceed more than 100 million. So we didn't build the placeholders there. So we've added some more place and now they, so, you know, but that's just an example but really the sky is the limit. But let's have this group we'll be boring for our adults and we'll just say you're gonna read books. And I want them to read one book every month. And I can have selected daily, weekly, monthly, or for the duration of group. The duration of group is where I select the beginning of the beginning day and the ending day. So I can have them read one book between, you know, today and December 31st. Let's just do monthly here and click next. We'll select our date range. I'm gonna have this group start a week from today or week ago. And we'll just go through the end of the year. And I can select whatever date I want. I can edit this at any point. I'll click next. There's additional sign-up questions here. You can ask your patrons to answer, I'm gonna blow this up a little bit, to answer any of these demographic questions. What is your date of birth? What's your library card number? Which library branch do you visit most often? Which school do you attend? Which grade level do you ask complete? And what is your complete address and phone number? So if I want to ask these people, what is your library card number just so I can validate they're actually a library card holder? I can ask them that question if it's next. And now I have this group book bank. And the group book bank allows me to put suggested reading into the book banks for these readers. It doesn't mean that they can't read the book through the app. It just gives them a suggestion. So maybe for my adults, I want them to read. Let's see if this one's in here. This is the new Anthony Dora book that I started this week. And it is something else. I'll have them read it once. And I'll finish this. I can add as many books that I would like. I'll click Finish right here. That reading program is being built in the database. And once that thing stops spinning, we're going to have a new reading program that is ready to go. Here's the mudlick library right here. Here's my code. If I click into this, there's my group. And if you have the app up right now, you can join this group right now. This is ready to go. Let's add another group. Maybe I'll add my youth readers. And maybe during the school year, I don't want to make it too difficult for them. So I'll just do a reading log program. And this is where Krista talked about. You can have a contest. We have a lot of libraries that do really interesting contests. We have a few libraries that actually will have, that serve an impact area that has multiple elementary schools in it. And they'll have a contest to see which elementary school can read the most as an entire school. And that's really fun. That's really fun to see. We have schools that you can read the most books in the school year. We have libraries that do all sorts of great contests. But we'll just do promote reading right here. And click next. And maybe I just want to have my youth readers just log the number of minutes they read during the school year and not work against a specific goal. This is just what they want to read for pleasure on their own. And I'll start this maybe on September 1st because that's kind of the beginning of the school year. And instead of ending on December 31st like the other one, I'll have them go through the end of May through the end of the school year. Maybe I just want to ask them what school do you attend or will attend next year so I can get that data point. If I don't want to do book bank right now, I don't have to watch book finish. And now I have two groups ready to go. Each with completely separate parameters. So that's as long as it takes to build a reading program and put your groups in it. So at this point, I like to just kind of pull up the app and show you what it looks like to actually join this group. So let me do that. I thought it was so quick that that is done. Like boom, it's there ready for people to use. Yeah, we want to make it simple. There's not, you know, it's every time we look at this we want to every time we build new features we think is this going to bog the platform down or is it going to add value? Because it's so easy when you build tech to just kind of sit in your room and think about all the crazy stuff you can build and not realize it either. Maybe it's not helpful. What will happen with it? And if anybody has any questions don't mind everybody. If you have any questions, comments, anything you want to say if you use this at your library we'd love to hear about it. You can type into the questions section of the GoToWebinar interface. If you have your own microphone I can unmute you and you can comment that way if you would like to just let me know in the questions. Yeah, I love questions. So Gary, you can see the phone now, Krista? Yes, yes. Okay, so this is the Reader Zone. This is exactly what your patrons see when they download the app from Google Play, the App Store, or Amazon. So we're just going to click sign up here. I'm going to use my desktop to fill this out so it's going to be a little different experience but this is on my old Pixel 2 phone. So we'll put a reader in here. Put in Henry Reader. What does it say? We'll just put kind of a throwaway email address in there. I do so many of these demonstrations. I have to be careful not to repeat email addresses. I think it wants me to uppercase that. So we'll put a password in here. It has to be eight characters. We'll repeat the password here. We'll confirm it. And once I click submit or that checkbox, we're on our way. So now my choice is why I would have this be a single reader account or multiple reader account. If you're going to be the only person participating in the Reader Zone account just do one reader. If there is even a chance that there's going to be more than one person participating in this account, I would select multiple readers and that tends to be in most commas also like that. And now let's add a reader. So let's add Henry Jr. So that's how a parent would set up something for themselves and their kids if they wanted to. Yep. Yeah. So as a parent, I could join the adult programs. I can put my kids in the other programs. In the other programs. I'll click next right here. And I'll mention as well, you can be complete. A person can be participating in completely separate reading programs. We have a number of public libraries that use Reader Zone during the summer and then the schools use it during the school year. And there are people use the same readers on account. They just join a different program. So one program can be kind of all over the place. I'll click next right here. And this is where we are going to enter this reading program code you see right here. And since this is the first time I logged in, so I'm going to see these little props. Let's put it in here. It's B152C. And there's my groups. So I can see there's the Mud Lake Libraries up here. I can join my reading groups. Maybe Henry Jr. is a youth reader. I'll select that. Click next. And this is the question I wanted to end. I wanted to ask. So we'll say he goes to Heritage Middle School and then we're ready to go. That's it. So for Henry, I'll click View Reader right here. And because this is a group that logs minutes, there is this built-in timer that you can use. And I'll show you the rewards here in a second. We'll just kind of get through this. You can use the timer. This is where I can see my reading group name. Make sure I'm in the right spot. So if I click that, this will start the timer for me. And because this is a group that doesn't have a specific goal, it's not going to. If there were a group that had a specific goal, it would say goal colon, you know, 50 minutes per month, 25 minutes per day, whatever your goal would be. All of your readers have access to a book bank. So the book bank is a way for anybody rather to keep track of the books they're reading and the books they finished. So for this particular reader, let me find a book. Let's imagine that Henry is reading Allies right here. It's a great book. So if he's reading this book and he wants to add it to his book bank, you click Add Book right here and you can search for it with an ISBN or EEN. Most people just like to scan the bar code. Go for that. And this brings up my camera. I'll scan this bar code right here. There we go. Grab it. So with this, let's grab that book. And I can say, do I want to read this book more than once or just once? So if you have a youngster who likes to read, you know, Hop on Pop every night, you can read that book 50 times, especially for a thousand books working on the program. I'll confirm that entry and now it's done. So I can always keep track of the books that I'm reading and the books that I finish in the Readers on App. We'll go back to our reading entry screen, click Pause. Next. I've read two minutes. I'll confirm that entry and now it's done. And this will always keep track of the books that I've finished. If I don't want to use the timer, I click my manual entry. Let's say I read 17 minutes today. I'll click Next, confirm that's it. So again, we want to make it faster than finding a pen and writing something on a sheet of paper. Readers on has awards built right into the platform and you as a reading program organizer have total control over every aspect of the awards. You control the image. You can control the trigger when it shows up and the message down here. There's defaults that are built in, but you can completely control this. And I'll show you how to do that here in a second. We'll click OK right here. If I want to enter my past reading, if I missed a few days of making my reading entries, that's OK. We're not going to judge you. We're just going to give you an opportunity to... So maybe on September 10th, oh, I think I went back September 10th. I read 25 minutes looking for that entry and now it's done. Now it's done. The easy peasy. I love this part of it as well. This is what we call the progress area. If I click View Progress right here, it's going to show me everything that's happened to my readers on account. I've read 44 minutes so far. This is my reading entry for today. And here's the award I unlocked. If I joined. So if your patrons are participating in a year-long account or even a thousand books before we get our program, they're going to be able to scroll through and see everything they've done. And that is so fun for them to see that. So with that, I'm going to close this out and we're going to refresh this page in order to look at our handy work here. So I'm at the Mudlick Library. Here's my youth readers. Here's Henry Jr. All of your readers have their own page reader zone. So here's Henry Jr.'s page. I can see his activity feed right here. I can see that he's reading allies. I'm going to back that up a little bit so we can see them more. If I need to move him from one program to another, I can do that right here. If this reader needs moved and I need to delete their account, I can delete their account. I, as a reading program organizer, have total control over how readers are participating in my reading programs. So it's really, again, we're trying to make it very easy to get into this. This little tool down here was something that was added at the request of many librarians who have patrons who just can't stand remembering their passwords. They just love forgetting them. So if you want to click this, you can click update password or you can just put a new password for them right there or they can come around and enter it. So, you know, that was just a funny request we had that people just, I don't know why passwords are so hard. They're hard for me, I guess. It comes up so often. Yes. And yeah, can you tell me what my password is? I don't know. You picked it. You should have kept track of that yourself. But it happens in my own real life too. Yeah, I mean, people call me on the, people call us on the phone and say, can you tell me our password? Can you tell our password to our account? I said, I'm sorry, I can't access it, but I can reset it for you. But anyhow. So with that, this is how that, this is how that works. So here's my Mudlick library account. You can see that we've accomplished 44 minutes so far. And we've gone their way. I can edit these parameters at any point. Very simple. I'll just show you a couple of quick features here on the programs page that are kind of new that we really like. The first is notify readers. This will make it so that you can actually send a push notification through the app to everybody's phone who's participating in your programs. And you can put in, you know, if I want to send a message to Henry, reader, you know, I could, or people participating in my thousand books for kindergarten program or whatever I want to do, I can make them aware of what's going on and then send them a push notification. Super easy, awesome way to communicate with your patrons. The same goes here for, you can also email your readers. Same kind of a situation where you can select the readers you want to communicate with and send them a message. This is where we talk about having that conversation with your patrons, instead of kind of handing them a sheet of paper and saying, you know, come back when you're done. Who knows, that paper is usually lost before it gets home. This allows, you know, your patrons have some enthusiasm when they join these programs. They intend to do well, they intend to participate. But enthusiasm wanes very quickly. If you can just keep them going, remind them that there's something happening, you know, there's this program happening in the library on Saturday afternoon. Come participate. Here's 15 new books we'd love for you to come see. Just give them, you just feed them information that is relevant to what they want to do because they, the intention to participate with your reading programs is there. It just needs some nourishment sometimes. And this is how you nourish that. I'm going to quickly walk through the, just very quickly through some of the tools here. You can manage what your readers are doing and what programs they're participating with and everything right here in your managed readers area. If I have a group of third graders that I need to put to my fourth graders group, I can just pick them all up and drop them into a new group. And I can manage their participation. If you have an email list of patrons that you want to invite to participate, you can drop it here. It'll send an invitation out to everybody and invite them to come and participate in your reading programs. And if you do it this way, that it bypasses the need for them to enter the reading program code. This is a really great tool here. This is a share and promote badge. This allows you to just talk about your, or create a badge that can go on any webpage. You can see here's kind of a goofy logo. I dropped that on here, but if I want to make a badge for my mud lake library, I can say whatever I want to say down there. Did I spell that right? If I save that, I have a new image here. I can put my mud lake library logo here. I can put a message here. Then I can take this little badge and drop it on any webpage. So this way you can tell your patrons, you know, to join the reading programs, just go to the website. There's a purple badge there. Just follow the instructions. And it's really easy to get them into your programs that way. The progress badges are my favorite part of the system. I showed you one for that library. There's a lot of options here. You know, for example, I can look at my mud lake library, and I've read 44 minutes so far. If I pull up my app again, I'll show you how this works. Let's see here. If I go back to my app, and we'll do a manual entry, let's say I read 10 more minutes. We're going to confirm that entry. And just like magic, once the entry is done, and I refresh this page, close like mud lake again, and 54 minutes. So this updates in real time. You can select your timeframe. You can share this to Facebook very easily. You can download as an image. We like this HTML embed, which is what's happening here, where it updates in real time, and you can show your stakeholders what's happening. Reports kind of go along with this as well. There's no reason to collect data if you can't do anything with it. So within the reporting tool, you have all these parameters. You can pull reports for timeframes. You can do a report for a specific program, a specific group within a program, a specific reader, and get down to a very granular detail set, if you would like. You can download your reports as a designed PDF, or as a CSV file as a spreadsheet, and really do anything you want with it. I always tell folks to go into the reports page and just do your worst. Just download stuff and see what works for you. See what it looks like. Those kind of things, reports and infographics, people love that. That was one of the PDF version of that, if it's like... Yeah, if we want to look at that, if we want to look at, let's look at Mud Lake here that we just did. So for Mud Lake, I'm going to apply that filter. So if we read 54 minutes so far, I have one reader. If I want to look at the overview, it's going to pop up here. So there it is. So I can see what's happening right here. And this is really easy. You can just pull this report before you go into your city council meeting and say, here's what's happened in the last 30 days. Right? And they're going to be very keen on seeing your key performance metrics. That's what you and I forget about formatting it or figuring out how do I make it look pretty and put the logos on and stuff. It's already done for you. That's huge. Yes, it's done. So that's the really short version of how the Readers Own Platform works in general terms. The question we always get, the first is with regard to the awards. So I'll just show you something here very quickly. I'll go back to Mudlake again. We'll just keep picking on them. If I look at this group, my Youth Readers Group, I can look at my awards here. So these are the awards that are built into the pro, every program by default. And these are the triggers. But if I want to change that, let's say I want to change my 60 minutes read to 75 minutes read. So this award will trigger at 75 minutes. And I can say, if I want to upload a new image here, I can upload anything I want. We've had libraries that will upload QR codes. They'll create their own, their own graphics. They'll put in CSLP stuff, anything they want, really. But once that's saved, now that's my award. I can turn these on and off, and there's a lot of options here. So this is what it looks like for your reading log groups, for your goal-based groups. It's a little different. It's based on percentage completion instead of thresholds. And there's some modules that talk about that. But awards are great. And you know, go ahead, Christian. Whenever you get those notifications, like on my watching stuff saying, you walk so many steps, good job. It's, yeah, like, yeah, I do. Yeah, that's fine. Yeah, and you know, if you're doing prizes in the library, your patrons can come in and just show you the awards that they've unlocked right there. And that way it's easy to keep track of that. For each of your readers, you can also make notes. So for my Henry reader right here, I can make a note for him that says, Henry picked up his coupon to Derek Lee for having read 500 minutes, whatever I want. So there's a lot of flexibility here. And it's just a matter of getting into the system and just deciding what you want to do. I always tell our new folks that, you know, it's the getting part, started part that's the hardest. So what we like to do is just is to ask you to go in and create your programs based on what you'd like to accomplish. Then we can just jump on a quick Zoom call and walk through what your setup is and just kind of advise you with regard to what you're trying to accomplish and make sure you optimize the platform based on what you want to do. That's one of the great things about this too is that Jake is always there for whatever you all need. Yeah, you'd reach out and he'll answer quickly and get you set up. And it's worked great for so many of our libraries. Yeah, we try to have what we call immediate support because we know when you are sitting there and you're ready to ask a question, the thing is open. You've taken the time to do it. And if we can get you the answer right then in real time, then that's better. I always support that you send a question in and then two weeks later you get the answer and you're already 500 steps away from that. You can't even remember your question. I forgot why you asked that question. Yeah, I mean, there's no point to that. So we try to be right on it. So one other thing I'll show you right here is there's a big resources page. There's a knowledge base that shows articles about everything that we're doing and how to do everything in the data or in the platform. There's the toolbox here and the toolbox is just filled with videos, website banner, social media posts, printable flyers, all sorts of assets you can use for free to get the word out about your reading programs. And for example, our social media posts, I'm really proud of this particular thing because we see these all over the internet. We have these little summer reading 2022 where you can put in your reading program code and you're on your way. So we're going to do this again in 2023. And I like that you have like, so summer reading for this past year this year was the sea or the called oceans of possibility. Yeah, they have some that are for that theme, which is great that people can use things that are related to the theme. But then also things that are not because not every library does do that summer, that same summer program theme. I know that we have libraries that do their own theme or something different. So having those nice just winter generic ones is great. Yeah, so we'll go through and update this again and put a whole new suite of assets here for next year. Right. And always we'll say 2023 to that 2022 on it. So that is, I know you didn't want to go more than an hour and we're six to the hour. No problem. Should we open up for questions? Yeah, if anybody has any other questions or comments or thoughts if you've used to set your library, please let us know. Type in the questions section. I did a couple of questions about the app when you're showing the app. First thing of course people wondering about is, I assume like is it have like push notifications that come out like will like automatically notify you of things, you know, it works that kind of way or do you have to log into it to see everything? That's actually- No, the push notifications will come through just like any other notification on your phone if you're opted in. That's okay too. That's one, so you can opt out of that if it decides that it's too much. Yes, you can. If you opt out what will happen is you can still see all your notifications right here. Sure. It just won't pop up on your phone and disrupt you so to speak. If you don't want to do, yeah. If you don't want to. Yeah, that's kind of an industry standard in app building that has kind of worked that way. Yeah, it depends what you like. Like I said, I like when I get those little notifications but sometimes not everybody does. Yeah, that's fine. Your patrons will opt in or opt out and there they can kind of control their participation. Your patrons can join and leave your reading programs as well. I mean, they have the, if they decide in the middle of January that they're tired of the winter reading challenge because it's just too hard. Sure, you don't have to stay in it, yeah. Yeah, this is not, this is voluntary. Let's not make it harder than it has to be, right? It's supposed to get fun. Yeah, it's fun. And I think we have, you know, this is an opportunity. Our goal is just to make it easy to build programs and easy to participate. If those two things are happening, then your reading programs can become something that is easy and fun to manage instead of a grueling task. I know librarians, I talk to them all the time who work putting a zillion hours carefully planning and creating their programming and then they put it out to the community and you know the response is almost, is nil. And that's very discouraging. We want to give you a tool that will be easy for people to join and participate with and make you feel like you really are making an impact because you can see what's happening in real time. It's really fun that that's kind of our goal here as well. And I do see a lot of libraries quite asking, you know, how do we, how do you track it? How are you, how are we going to keep track of it? And it's gotten so big and how do we do it? Like I said, with the pandemic, you know, how do we do it safely now and having these online, this online way to version to do it is great. And just the fact that it is doing every, these are the beginning, you're hoping that these kind of things will, these kind of things are going to stick around. And I agree. And it's a lot of it is an accessibility issue. And there are people who are able to do these things because they became virtual and online, who've never do it before. Families who just did not have the time to bring their child to the library, you know, getting them there and then doing the, being there for the program and getting them home, it just couldn't work. But doing it virtually is working, you know, attending the summer, or the like story times on Zoom or Facebook Live or something and this kind of thing too, that is brought so many people into the library. People who have anxiety issues or disability or mobility issues and can't get in, can now, you know, participate as well. And it's just huge. And I'm so glad that it's going to be. Yeah, that, that, that's, that's a huge, that's a, that's a, that's a, we have people all the time who, you have a whole set of people in your community who may only want to come in the building once a year. And there's nothing you can do to change that. But they, but if you give them an online, an online program, they'll do it. We also, yeah, you mentioned other people who might have mobility issues are, I'll mention here that people do not have to have a mobile app to participate with Reader Zone. If, if you want to have people who are insist on using paper, reading calendars, or they want to call on the phone and report what they've done, you can still create for them a record. And if you go to your managed Readers area right here. Yeah, then you just add them yourself. Yeah, it's called add an internal reader. And that's a reader who's participating in your programs, but is not doing so through, through the tech. Even that's not. That's all that data still lives in the same place. And that's, you know, that's that, that's important to us to make sure that people don't have to have a phone. And if you want to participate with your reading program or your account just through the website, if you go to Readers Zone.com and click login, you can log into your Readers Zone account. You don't have to have a phone. And you don't have to use the app. There are two other great options. Yeah. I mean, the libraries have been doing, having people sign up for summer reading, like you said, with paper and stuff for years. And you can still have the people do that, but then put them into the system so you have everybody in one place, no matter which way they've chosen to sign up. Yeah, if the data all lives in one place, then it's so much easier to report on and work with. We always suggest if people can participate on their own and create their own accounts, do it. But if you have folks who just can't or just simply won't, that's fine. We don't wanna close the door on anybody. That's not the goal, so. We do have one question here that just popped into. Let me see here. Okay. Maybe what is the cost? For all Nebraska libraries, there's no cost. This is free to you. The Nebraska Library Commission pays for access to Readers Zone for all public academic and school libraries and to participate and use it. We pay the annual fee, and you just have to contact Denise Harders and she'll get at Central Plains Library System and she'll get you set up. So there is no cost to any of our libraries. We probably should have pushed that out more. It's free to you all because we are covering the cost. We've covered it the last two years with grant funding we received from the Congress due to the COVID-19 pandemic. And now it's just part of our regular budget here at the Nebraska Library Commission. That's a pretty good deal. I would love to see you next year. I want to see Nebraska reach two million minutes before July 4th. I would love that. That would be great. Looking and we had the previous years. We did go up yet. So I had because I found the press release from 2020 from there. When we first started, it was like in May, it was May 2020. Okay, sure. And by July, we'd already gone over a million minutes. 1,086,000 minutes. And then this summer, we did 1,381,000 minutes. So it is going up. But yeah, if we could do two million, that would be great. Yeah, we saw kind of a surge in 2020 because that was the only option that was available. But I think it's just a matter of getting more folks involved. We'd love to have, if we were able to get that big of a number, I think we could get the Library Commission on National NPR to talk about their accomplishments and just draw some really, really positive attention. Libraries lately have been getting undeserved bad press. And I think it's great if we could give some really great earned attention to the Library. I agree, absolutely. And we will do that. Yes, we will talk to Denise when she's back from ARSL about what's our, let's do some sort of a push for next year and a goal for the state. Yeah. Oh, that'd be fun. Yeah, that would be really, really fun. You know, I started this company because I really, I'm a, I really believe that a child, a person who reads is better off for it. And the more readers we have in our society, I think we're more compassionate, more understanding. We're a little smarter. And, you know, I think reading is just, it's so important. And we can't let, we can't let games on our phones just completely take over our entire lives. We, you know, reading is just so important. That's why, that's why I created this company. It was, you know, building a software platform is like trying to build an airplane while it's rolling down the runway, take it to take off. It's, it's crazy. And if somebody would have told me how hard it would be to build a software platform, I probably would have just, you know, went to become an insurance salesman instead. But, but we're into this now. Can't go back now. And we have, you know, we read our zone as in 18 countries around the world in all 50 states. We have hundreds of thousands of users and we are always furiously working to add and improve and continue to build out the platform so that it serves people better. So we only build features in reader zone based on input from our customers. We don't, in fact, we have a white board that has proposed features up and we just kind of, we keep literally a tally of who has reached out about what and how important a feature is based on what our customers are asking for. So that's why we love talking to you. Good, bad, even if you have a, you're having a bad experience with reader zone we want to care about it because that helps us know what to do. Very customer centric and customer responsive, yeah. Absolutely, I mean, yeah, that's the only reason to be exist. We don't, we didn't build this thing and then try to make everybody fit until we want to build. You know, it's going the other direction. We're very happy that you chose to do this instead of becoming an insurance salesman. Thanks, me too, some days. All right, well it doesn't look like any other questions came in while we were chatting. That's great, we are about a little after 11, we start a little after 10, so I think this is perfect timing. If you do all have any questions, definitely you can reach out to Jake, read your zone on the website, reach out to Denise and she can get you set up with what we have here in Nebraska for like I said, all Nebraska libraries of any and all types are welcome to join and start using it. Yep, I'll put my phone number right down here. I'll put it in the chat along with our help address. Cool. Please call in emails. We love talking to you. Great. Well, thanks for the opportunity. Yeah, awesome. Hang on a sec here. I'm just going to make sure I grab this stuff too here. Let me send that there. So we'll have that contact info there. Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you everybody for being here today. I am going to pull back presenter control to my screen now to do my wrap up of today's show. I can find the right button. Yes. There we go. All right. So thank you so much, Jake. I'm really glad we were able to have you on today. Before you head out to Arsolt too, Association for Role and Small Libraries conference starting today. And as I said, we've been doing this as our third year of having readers unavailable to our libraries. And we are, as you said, over 100 libraries using it. We're committed to keep supporting it and get more and more libraries in the state on board. So we will definitely be doing that. So thank you everybody for being here. I'm going to pop over to our main Encompass Live page. These are our upcoming shows. If you go on to your search engine of choice and type in Encompass Live, the name of our show, it's the only thing you'll find on the internet. Nobody else is allowed to use that name. You'll find our page. These are our upcoming shows. And Roy Anthony here is a link to our archives. Most recent one at the top. This is where today's recording will be available. We post the recordings to our YouTube channel for the archives. And then the slides. If Jake, if you're willing to share your slides, I know there's only a few of them. We'll include those as well. Everyone who attended today's show and registered for today's show will get an email from me when it's letting you know when the recording is available. And we push out onto our various social media as well. We have a Facebook page for Encompass Live. If you like to use Facebook, you can give us a like over there. You get notifications. Here's a reminder about today's show. Introducing our speakers. When we do our recording, it'll be posted here as well. We also post onto Twitter and Instagram. We use the Encompass Live hashtag, little abbreviation for the show so you can look there as well. And out to our regular mailing list we have here in Nebraska. While we're here on the archive page, I will show you there is a search feature here. If you want to see if we've done a topic, a show on a particular topic you're wondering about, go ahead and do use that. You can search the full show archives or just the most recent 12 months if you want something current. That is because this is our full archives and I'm not going to scroll all the way down because it is really long. You can see over here if you can see the scroll bar. This is our full show archives going back to when Encompass Live premiered, which was in January 2009. So that's a lot. So just pay attention to the original broadcast date of anything you watch. They all have the date there when they first were done. Some of the shows will be good and perfectly fine and stand the test of time and still be good, valid info. But some things will become old, outdated. Resources and services might no longer exist anymore or have changed drastically or be about something in particular going on that year. So just pay attention to a date of when a show is originally broadcast. So that is our archives. These are upcoming shows. I'm going to have some more October dates filling in here. Note on October 5th, that is the date of our Nebraska Library Association annual conference. We always take that week off for Encompass Live because everyone is usually at conference and involved in that and in the state, along with us here at the commission. So that is the week we will not have a show. But next week is our Letters about Literature for 2022. This is our statewide program where students can write letters to authors living or deceased about their favorite book. So people involved in that will be on next week. And we have some other shows showing up here as well. So please do sign up and join us for any of our future episodes of Encompass Live. So thank you again, everyone, for being here. Thank you so much, Jake. Good luck on your travels. I know you're heading out the door very soon. And hopefully we'll get many more libraries in Nebraska joining us on Reader Zone. Very good. Well, thank you so much, everybody. I appreciate it. Yeah, all right. All right. Bye-bye.