 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 online event. We are a webinar, a webcast, online show, whatever you want to call us. Terminology is up for debate still in the world. Nobody can decide what they want to call these things or what they like to call them. It's a mighty fine production, whatever it is. Yes. But whatever we are, we are here live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We record the show every week and then it is posted on our website and I'll show you where that is at the end of today's show. All of our recordings are posted to the library commissions, the Nebraska Library Commission's YouTube account. If there are any presentations like these slides here, they are included as well. Any websites anybody mentioned, we put together in a group in our delicious account. So anything related to the show you can see afterwards. I think I said we're here every Wednesday morning, 10 to 11 a.m. central time. Both our live show and our recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with your colleagues, friends, neighbors, family, anybody you think that might be interested in any of the topics we have, both the live show and our recordings just right out there on our website for anybody to watch. We do a mixture of things here on the show, book reviews, interviews, mini-training sessions, demos, just anything. The only real criteria is something is library related. So something libraries are doing, resources they're using, new ideas they have, anything that could be of use to libraries. Some of the topics might sound a little like it has nothing to do with libraries, but trust me, everything always comes around to libraries at some point. That's the whole idea. We do have Nebraska Library Commission staff that do sometimes present on some local things that we're doing here in the state, but we bring in guest speakers as well. And we have a guest speaker today who's a Nebraska speaker, but still, not library commission staff. Scott Childers is our Southeast Library System Director. We have four regional library systems here in the state of Nebraska. For those of you who are here not from Nebraska, regional kind of consulting. Yeah, with you consulting and training. We partner with the commission on many things, so... Work together. Yeah, like on things like this. Yes. Who would have thought? And he's a presentation here that now you did this previously, right? Is this the one that you did previously at the... This is based off of a discussion that we had at a regional library director's meeting for small town librarians. We were discussing this topic. And so, took that discussion and turned it into a presentation. If they wanted to know more, they need to know more. Yeah. So, Scott's topic today is making space administrative weeding. And this would be a different kind of weeding than what you might do on a daily basis in your library. So, I will hand it over to you to take it away. And hopefully, either you have the keyboard or the mouse. All right. We had some technical difficulties a little bit earlier, so hopefully we will... We have options, so it'll work out. So, yeah, as Christa said, talking about administrative weeding, I do want to throw out that anytime during this presentation, if you have a question, repeating, get it in that Q&A box. I'd much rather prefer to answer them as we go along today instead of waiting until they end. So, don't be afraid to just start typing when you have a question. Yeah. Don't need to wait. I'm happy to interrupt. I'm good at that. See, she just did it. It works. So, yeah. Please do. I'd much rather make sure that we're answering the questions that you have than me just going off of a script. And with that, I'll start the script. So, we're talking about administrative weeding, and I want to make sure it's clear that I'm not talking about your collection or the stuff that's out there in the public. This is going through all of those documents and papers and those type of things that you gather in running the library, the operational side of the library. But oftentimes, we forget about that, and here it is. It's springtime. We're thinking spring cleaning. I know there's some libraries out there that spring is when they do their weeding project. I think it's one of the other regions. I think this is their month of weeding promotion. But we don't talk about the back rooms that often. If you have a back room, I know some of you, the back room is the desk that you work at. But even that, you might want to go through your files every so often and keep or get rid of some of that stuff. Why do you do it? Well, the same reason why you would weed your collection. It helps things go more smoothly. You get greater efficiency because you're not going through piles of stuff. And I'll tell you, different people have different ways of filing. I worked with some people whose filing system was geological. You'd go through the very strata on their desk to find. The oldest stuff is at the bottom. Right. It's chronological because that's the way they thought. But when someone else needed to find something, it was incomprehensible to them. So you're doing yourself a favor. You're doing your successor favor. You're doing the staff and volunteers, everyone else is helping favor by keeping up on that other stuff that we don't talk about that much. All right. So before I talk about getting rid of things, let's talk about the things you have to keep. And how do you decide if you should keep it or not? There's some guidelines out there. One thing, a phrase you might want to remember, it's the term document retention. If you're looking for more information on what to keep, you may want to use that as your search term in your search engine or database of choice. Document retention policies are sometimes lax in library land. But let's talk about some places where you can go to find out what you should keep. First thing I want to mention are statewide guidelines. I want to give a shout out to Kentucky and Wisconsin. I found those statewide guidelines for those states online with just a couple of simple searches. So there are guidelines out there that say you keep your financials for fiscal year plus five or seven. You keep your acquisition records for this amount of time. You keep donor records for this amount of time. There are statewide guidelines out there. In some cases, and if you're from one of the states, I'd love to know, throw it in the Q&A box if these are still applicable and if they are simply guidelines or if they are mandates like law. But there are some out there, even if you're not in a state that has these like Nebraska, we do not have a statewide guideline for libraries for this type of thing. Now, I did find the commission has one. Yes, we do have guidelines, yeah. And there are guidelines for state departments and Lincoln City libraries. State agencies like we are, yeah. Yes, yeah. And Lincoln City libraries also has theirs online as well as part of that statewide thing. So you can get some ideas on what people are doing. Now, granted, the library commission, it's a slightly different type of operation. But you get an idea of maybe papers that you need to think about. So something to look for, again, Nebraska. Here's one, yeah. Yes. This is Elaine from Kentucky. Kentucky has, she says, Kentucky has record retention schedules that our library must divide by. Okay, and so the key word is must. So thank you, who's that? Elaine from Kentucky, thank you very much. And so, yeah, I'm going to move on here to local document retention guidelines. And these also might be in that must category. When I say local document retention, I'm talking about your institution, your city, your village. We have some school librarians on today. So whatever your school practices are, university practices, these will be different from place to place. I know I worked at a large university, and there was a archival unit, and there were lots of document retention policies of what is kept, what isn't, and where they are kept. Then I moved to a public library, a small, well, for us, it would be one of the middle-sized towns in the state. And there was not a local document retention guideline besides financials. So everything else was up to me to decide what to keep or not. So before you go on an administrative leading binge, definitely check for if your institution has these guidelines. Does your city have one? All financials are kept in the city office. I've heard of that. Please check, schools, I imagine you have some very definite local retention guidelines. So keep that in mind. Another guideline, this is something that's near and dear to Chris's heart, E-Rate, okay, I'm going to use this as an example. In E-Rate, all documents related to the bidding process, the invoices, the contracts are kept for a period of at least 10 years after the last day of the funding year. So again, don't count the year that you're in as part of that 10. You have to wait until that's over. And now now with Eric, right, Epic? Epic, Epic. Not Eric. Eric's a different database. Epic. Education, yeah. Now with Epic, like the form 470, form 471, you don't have to worry about keeping those. They have said they will keep everything in Epic for you as long as their guidelines come from the FCC, the 10-year guidelines that it went up to. It used to be, it was five. It was a five or seven. It was a seven. Whatever it was, it's 10 now, so it doesn't matter. So you wouldn't have 10 yet. They just changed a couple of years ago, but eventually you will have 10. And they said they will keep everything in there. However, it's everything in there from when you started, we started using Epic. So not anything previous. So the first year of using Epic was your 2016 funding year, which is now. So from now forward, they'll keep everything. So you will still have to keep yourself anything before that. So they're not like loading everything into there. It's a new place at the E-rate Productivity Center to keep all of your E-related processes and things. So yeah. So that'll be good once you're 10 years down the road and everything's in there. Well, if here's the thing, everything. It's not everything, right? That's the thing too, yes. Your forms, of course, obviously, in any of your communications with USEC will be in there. But if you have invoices, if you have contracts in things that you have that are not needed to be submitted with your forms, but you need to keep just in case they come and ask you about them, they have 10 years to ask you. That's what this actually makes it. And that's their audit period that they would call it now. So you do stuff, keep those somewhere on your side. What they do not say, actually, they do say which good. It doesn't matter in what format. You don't have to keep file cabinets full of papers. Electronic is fine. So scan everything, put it on a flash drive, or put it on a file folder somewhere on your computer or in your hard drive, wherever you want to. Just be able to access it at some point to give to someone from USEC if they come and ask about it. Yep, yeah. So that's one thing to keep in mind that even though there's any of these things scanning and keeping it would be a good idea too. Yeah, yeah. And we'll actually talk a little bit about electronic if there's time today. But yeah, you'll hear, oh, Epic keeps everything. Well, it keeps those certain forms. You still have an obligation for all those other things. And it also protects you if one of the companies that you happen to be working with doesn't get you the credit. And you can get all those documentations as well. We file this, we file that. We have the contract. So it's not just the governmental audit. It's also protecting you. It's probably in the most current year, of course. But if there's a couple years, it's most likely to be what they'd be. And I think we've had a couple here in the state that we've had to go back and by we, I mean, Krista and the library question, I just kind of stood back and said, oh, that's too bad. Yeah, and generally it's things like mistakes that were made or they're just, a lot of times in this, I know we're getting really into e-ray, but we'll stop talking in medicine. Don't worry for those of you that don't care. Yeah. Audit in the e-rate terms is not scary like audit in the IRS terms. They do regular checks of just seeing is the system working, is the process working, and they will randomly select libraries and say, we wanna see what you did three years ago, just to make sure, and we'll come and talk to you about it, how was the process, did it work, could something work better? Sometimes though it is because somebody made a mistake or did something wrong and they need to go back and figure it out. And the thing with e-rate too is sometimes you will have audits or you will do appeals when if they've denied you for funding, and that can last take years to process through. So you're gonna need all that documentation, as you said, to show, well yes, we did do this and here's where we did it, and here's my proof of whatever the thing was from three, five years ago, yeah. And I bring up e-rate because it's an example that many libraries work with, but it's not just e-rate that does this type of thing. It could be, let's see, oh, grant agreements. Oh, I went a little too fast. Other grant agreements may have some document retention, things that you have to follow. And it could be anything from just keep the agreement in a folder for the length of the grant. It could be keep the grants agreement, it could be invoices related to equipment purchased with the grant, it could be email correspondence, and you keep it for the life of the grant, a grant funded project plus a couple of years. So read those grant agreements carefully. On what kind of documents you need to keep, and for how long, because each one might be different. And so like, if someone will have after the project is done, you hold on to them, others will say once the project's done, you can shred them. E-rate, I want to mention, even if you stop using e-rate, I know there's many libraries going off e-rate because the phone discount, you still have to keep those years that you were on e-rate until you run. You can still come back, yeah. Right, so if I quit e-rate, I get to get rid of all of these past years, no. You still have that obligation for the time you were under e-rate. Same with other grant agreements, you still have that obligation. So keep those in mind when you're doing grants. Not only will you get the money, but you may get some administrative burden to some to think about. So are we having a question or is tech something? No, somebody just has a question about e-rate. Why did I want the oldest year now that we should keep for e-rate? And it's actually for the current funding year that we're applying for right now, it's called the 2017 funding year. The year ends, starts in 2017, ends in 2018, June 2018. So you need to keep things through June 2028, which sounds like crazy ahead. So for this year, that's when you would get rid of this year's process. Yeah, at the end of the year, you get rid of the oldest one, yeah. So this year's anything related to funding year 2017, which is starting in July 2017 and goes through June 2018, you keep through June 2028, that's your 10-year jump. Yep, she did the math. Well, I haven't written down something. Oh, okay. All right, so I could. And I say this every year as my, I do e-rate for us, I'm the e-rate consultant for the state, so that's how I do it. All right, so let's move on to the next one that's already showing on your screen. And this is for the public libraries out there, library board business meeting documents. And this is gonna be somewhat dependent on the state you're in, because library board meetings, at least in Nebraska, are under the Open Meeting Act. And in that Open Meeting Act, we have some document retention types of things that are law. This is a policy, it's not guideline, they are law. And that is documentation created for that meeting need to be available after that meeting. It's part of transparency and government, it's a good thing. Now, here's the thing, I've heard different municipalities here in the state say two different interpretations of that act. And I don't know which one is correct, I'd have to look into that, I am not a lawyer. But one of them says, well, as long as it's the agenda and the minutes, we're good, because that's the bulk of the things. The other one says, any report. So if the library director goes to the board and here's a sheet of our statistics for the month, here you go. That report, according to other interpretations, that has to also be permanently kept. And so this is one of the things where I've been going back and forth on with some people. Personally, my interpretation is anything that is brought into that meeting is kept, because that's the intent, it's transparency, and making these documents available for the people who couldn't be there. So, I would err on that in the state of Nebraska. Other states may have other types of- Find out what your laws are and read them. Absolutely. And now, I know we've got some school, I don't know if we've got, oh yeah, we've got some academic, as far as college, yep. So check with your institutions, you don't have library boards, but you may have committee meetings, and there might be some obligations with that, especially like personnel-type stuff, search committees. You may have stuff to handle with that. So you'll have some documents as well, and that would fall under the local document retention guidelines, too. All right? Now, financials, this is probably one I get the most questions on. And now, if you go, like I mentioned up at the top, a statewide guidelines, Kentucky, Wisconsin, both have these in those guidelines. I've seen people say five to seven. Oh, here's a comment, sorry about the introduction comment that relates to what you were just the previous one, the board minutes. Kelly, in Virginia, in Virginia, guidelines indicated that the monthly reports would be so superseded by the annual report, search stats and everything. So yeah, you would have your monthly meetings, but if there is then an annual report that encompasses all of that that happened, that then can cover, as far as providing your transparency. That's a Virginia statute, so that's a different way of doing it, too. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah, and that actually gets into something. I was going to talk about a little later, I'll bring it in here. There might be stuff that you have that is not a report, like a monthly statistic sheet, and then you compile them for the annual. Do you really need to keep that monthly statistic sheet anymore? Because now you have your annual report. You know, if you're doing that comparison, you might be able to just get rid of that one sheet that had the month of June, because now it's part of a larger report that includes all months, so you take that one and keep the compilation. And thank you for pointing out what was, Virginia, thank you, Kelly, for pointing out. It is different in different states. It's different in your local places, so please double check on that. Now, financials, again, this is where you're gonna have to look at either the city council or the school or the place that you're, the larger group that you're part of about what their financial report and financial documentation guidelines are. There are some places where the library actually holds on to the financials that I've worked with. There are others where all the financials are kept in the city office, and only just the open bills are kept at the library, and then once they're closed, paid for, then that shifts over. So the practice may be different. If you're one of those that has to keep your own financials in the library, I usually suggest a seven-year. That's usually your best case for auditing. Like I said, I've seen five and I can't remember which state it was, Kentucky or Wisconsin, one of you guys said five, but that does not count the current fiscal year. That's full year, so current fiscal year is year zero. So this year, plus seven years, plus five, yeah. Exactly. But that's one of the biggest ones I get questions for from smaller libraries that aren't told you keep your own stuff. All right, so those are things that have some sort of mandate on what to keep, whether it's accepted practice or expected practice, statewide guidelines, which we've heard of their actual mandates. There are some law-type things in here. Now I'm going to give you a couple of, a few things that don't have generally a guideline out there. I'm going to give you some suggested guidelines. Again, if you have any questions, feel free to pitch in. We've had a couple of good ones already. Some other things to keep, donor agreements. And this is one I've seen all sorts of advice on. I've seen some that say five years after the gift is given, they ditch it. I've seen some that keep everything, and I mean everything. My usual suggested, unless there's something overriding like a local document retention policy, my suggested is that the bigger the gift, the more unique the gift, or the more politically loaded the gift, the longer you keep the documentation. Those small little gifts, like a gift of five bucks that someone throws in a donation chart, now you don't need to keep lifelong records of that. That's just, you'll spend more than five bucks keeping that around than the five dollars is worth. So put it in your financial report, you don't need a line item at the end of the year. Even books, people donate books to libraries all the time. I do not suggest keep a separate donor agreement for those. Maybe a note in the cataloging record, so this copy was donated by so-and-so. There are some exceptions, and I know some of you live under these, that the donor will come into the library and ask to see the books, they donate it. That's the thing too, yeah, what are they gonna do about their donation, yeah. And so you have to decide, are we keeping them happy by making sure we can locate them all like that, or are we just gonna say, yeah, they're here, they're all checked out. That's that politically loaded statement that I mentioned. If the donor had put any sort of restrictions or instructions when they donated it and said, I will donate this to you, if you do this, you have to put a nameplate in the book saying it was from me, sometimes they might say, you don't have to, they want some sort of recognition and they've indicated that in there when they gave it to you so that you then have to follow their, you know, that. Yeah, and this also goes with endowment-type funds where they say, hey, we're giving you this money but you have to use it on X. Make sure you have those agreements out there and they're part of your circulation development policy because here's the thing, you know what's going on right now, 20 years from now, even if you're in that position, that's 20 years of memory creep. You may be buying SpongeBob books where the actual intent was to buy books on aquatic wildlife that aren't fish. You know, over 20 years, things kind of go off the intended path unintentionally and there's been cases where if you have the original donor agreement and let's say someone from that estate comes back and say, no, that's not what they really want you to do. Well, if you have the original donor agreement because I guess this is exactly what the will said or this is exactly what the endowment was created for. So it helps protect you, it helps keep you on task and again, those politically loaded ones, you may want to keep a little bit longer than you normally would for things because you need to keep yourself involved in that world and not get cut out just because you didn't have great grandma's copy of Better Homes and Garden recipe book. Okay, so correspondence with new or problematic vendors. These are things that I'd probably hold on to a little bit longer than normal. Correspondence with new vendors, you want to make sure they're keeping their promises to you and you don't know what their billing things are. You want to make sure that the packing slips and the bills and email correspondence, hold on to that for a little bit longer than you would with a vendor that you have a longer experience with. Keep more things, like I said, the email correspondence and the packing slips just to make sure everything's on the up and up. When you feel satisfied that, yes, this is a reputable vendor, they're keeping their promises, they're meeting their deadlines, then you can start getting rid of some of those extra pieces of paper that you've been keeping. Problematic vendors, of course, so that way you can build a case against them, whether or not it's an actual legal case or just to email them and say, here I have the email from your sales rep that said this, how come we're not getting that? Right, so keep those. Another one is building records. For some people, this is a no-brainer, yeah, keep them all. Other people say no, the building's already been built, we don't need to keep these. I would, from personal experience, keep anything to do with the building, readily available, or at least that you know you can get to. There was a case where the building I was director of, we were redoing the restrooms, and we had the blueprints, but they weren't sure exactly where the piping went through, and part of it was they were tearing down the walls, and they didn't want to accidentally hit a pipe or something. Oh yeah, yeah, you want to know where things like that are running through your walls. Right, and so, Piping, electrical, whatever. Absolutely, so the previous director had photos that they took during construction that included this infrastructure stuff. So I was able to present a photo, here you go, here's exactly where that vent pipe goes, here's exactly where that water pipe goes, here's what that is connected to, and it made that process so much smoother. So if you have those, make sure you know where to get them. I was gonna say, in many cases, this kind of thing would be kept by your city or county too, hopefully, potentially. Yeah, but if you could keep it copied locally, especially with repairs, you don't know when something's gonna happen. You know, there's a library that got hit by a car and had a big hole in the brick wall. I don't plan for a car to hit a building often. If you have that in your plan, I feel sorry for you guys, it's just great. It happens that often. So those are some things to keep. Right, now, I've told you all this stuff to keep. Anything other than that? It's a fair game. You have to ask yourself, is it of use? Does this have some utility for the continuing operations of the library? Now, you may be thinking, well, this is interesting. This is a historic type of thing. Well, what we do, if it has historical value, let me say that a business office is not the place for historical artifacts. So if you're keeping it just because of some sort of history, first thing is, is it the information? Maybe copy, scan, like we mentioned before, compile it into a different format and remove the original from the business office and put it into a place that can handle preservation of artifacts. Do you have archives? Is there historical society that keeps track of this kind of thing for the area? Absolutely, because I've seen places where they want to keep on all this history, but the building itself is not conducive because of humidity controls or temperature controls. To keep documents in a preserved state, they're going to run on the shelves at the same rate that everything else does. As you're keeping it for history, treat it as a historical artifact. So like I said, put it in a place that's designed for historical artifacts. Whether that's a place in your building or another community spot, some of you may be lucky that have an archive as part of your organization. Or maybe even in the larger places on the list, maybe your city has a temperature controlled vault or something like that. Talk with archivists and museums. So don't hold on to something just because it's historical. In fact, if it's holding on to something just because it's historical, that's one of the things you probably need to find a proper home for, faster than some of the other stuff. So other than that, use your common sense or will this be of use? Will this protect me and my organization if I have it? Those type of decisions. You do not need to keep a packing slip from a vendor from the 1980s unless there's historical value because that was the homegrown authority. Then you put that in the museum or all right. So I gave you all the documentary retention stuff. That's the stuff to keep in mind. Those type of things. Other than that, fair game, right? Any other questions so far? Okay. I've been to your question section if you do have anything you want to share or any thoughts of your own about these. Now we mentioned scanning and putting them into an electronic format and that is a great idea if you need physical space, right? Because you can scan a bunch of things, poem in PDF, poem in external hard drive about the size of your hand. And it's out of the way, right? So that's something I would consider and also more and more places are accepting the PDF copies as legitimate in the cases of dispute, right? Epic, they're saying we're keeping the forms for you and they came out and said, you could do PDF, we'll accept that. Other places are doing that. However, if you're going to scanning or out, you do have to maintain that stuff because hard drive space isn't infinite and are you buying a bunch of hard drives to keep stuff that you don't need to keep? So go through those document folders, those external hard drives, go through your email. Having that email archive, okay, here's the thing, it works for you. What happens when you move on? No one's going to stay in the job forever, right? So how much institutional knowledge is locked into an email account? So either you have to have a mechanism of sharing that password after you leave or you are exporting the important stuff into like a shared drive or an external hard drive or something. There's another cost involved. You need to have a digital refresh as part of your retention policy if you're doing electronic. What that means is you are taking the files and you're making sure you can still open them that the software is still available. I got handed the disk of 10-year-old documents that I can't find software that opens them, right? And this wasn't for a library thing, this was another organization, but no one thought about even opening it up in the latest version of Word and converting it so that we would at least continue one more year nowhere along the path that they do that. Also, hard drive fail, CD-ROM's locked. So you need to make sure the actual medium is still working. So you're trading the space for maintenance schedules if you're doing it properly. So you have to think about what do I have more of? Space, physical space for the paper documents or time to handle all of these other issues. Check this, check on them on a regular basis, yeah. Now granted, a lot of the stuff we talked about, you have to keep, it's five, seven years, you don't have to worry too much about it, but those board minutes, you know, those are perpetuity for most of us. Some of you on the list don't have that mandate. So something to think about before you just go scanning willy-nilly. I'd like to scanning idea, but then again, I'm going to invest the time in having multiple backups. Yeah, that's thing too, as I was going to say, but having other backups somewhere here on another drive somewhere or in the new, in the cloud, yeah, somewhere off-site, yeah. If you're looking for backup policy, look up 321, that's a backup philosophy. It's like three copies in two locations, one of them is in the cloud or something. But yeah, if you Google 321 backups, that'll help you come up with a backup policy that's a little bit more robust. It also means you're investing a lot more time in keeping that up. Again, you're training space or time for space. Sounds like a Doctor Who episode at this point. We do have a question about scanning. Do you suggest saving in another format besides PDF? It is the easiest format to access, but what about it being a proprietary format? Like what if Adobe shuts down? Yeah. Which I can't imagine, but you never know. Is that Sherry who said that? Sherry, that's a really great question. That's something that archivists who deal with digital stuff are constantly arguing about. Here's the thing, if you're looking short-term, like I said, those financial records keeping five to seven years PDF is probably a good choice because even if Adobe goes down, there's enough people invested in having their documents in that format to find a short-term solution. Now if you're talking long-term, you may be looking at something more like a plain text type of thing or a tiff image, but even then, you may be looking at down the line having to change formats. So it really is, it's a decision that you have to make your best guess for now and how long you're planning on keeping that document before you decide what type of format you wanna use. If it's gonna be one of those things that, like I said, if we're talking administrative reading, you only need to keep it five or seven years, a PDF is fine. Another nice thing about PDF is it's locked in, right? You can, general PDF is not going to change. Whereas a Word document, someone could alter unless you're password protected that you have to pass on the password. So it's good for those short-term solutions. If you're talking true, archival of digital information, that's a whole different task and a whole different podcast, I would say. We could do that one way. Yeah, or actually get a digital archivist to do that. Oh yeah. I would say answer your question, Sherry. Is it? That helps. Yeah, yeah. So in short, the short-term stuff, I'm okay with this proprietary because everyone else in the business world is and they'll scream. She says yes, thanks. Okay, thank you, Sherry. The short-term stuff, I'm okay with some of those proprietary ones. And if anything does happen with like Adobe says, we're getting out of the business, you're gonna hear about it, you know. And something will come up that will say, okay, what do we all do? Here's the way to then still have access to all of that. Yeah, and the software is still, will probably still work. And there are third-party softwares that will still work as far as reading. You may not be able to create in that format if something weird happens with trademark and copyright. There's a lot of open source things. Like you can do a PDF in Google Docs and Google Drive, I mean, and so you can always move them into other... Yeah, so good question about keeping this. It's good to think about, yeah. If it's one of those more disposable topics like we talked about earlier, PDF is fine. Okay, I think that's all for questions right now. I wanna talk a little bit, since we've got some time on some methodology that might help you as you go through administrative reading. And actually, some of this is pretty good advice if you're doing collection reading as well. Time to use the mouse. Okay, so tips on reading. First of all, tackle small amounts at a time, right? Don't go into your storage closet and say, I'm gonna go through all 20 boxes today, right? Not only is it you're overestimating the amount of time you're gonna spend, there is something out there called decision fatigue. And I don't know if you followed that, it's in psychology. I think there's also something related called ego depletion. Basically, the idea is the more decisions that you make in a day, the worse they become over that day until you've had a chance to not decide stuff. So for example, some of the Steve Jobs, he only had one outfit. Well, that's one less decision he had to make for the day. There's a lot of executives that have the same thing for lunch every day. Unless decision they have to make so they can make a bigger, more meaningful decision later on. And we have mental fatigue. I mean, it's just, I get home some days from work and my wife asks me, what do you wanna do for supper? And I'm just sitting there staring. I'm done. Not a clue. Don't care. I'm done making decisions. So tackle small amounts of time because most of you might also have other duties where you're deciding things throughout the day and working to sort of desk or rough desk. You're doing administrative tasks. You're making all sorts of decisions. And then you pull up this piece of paper and you're staring at it trying to decide, what is this? Do I need to keep it? So tackle small amounts at a time. Yeah, you either make a bad decision or you just give up totally. And after maybe five of your 20 boxes, you're like, this is impossible. I'm just not doing it. And then you never do anything. You stop with the sorting and weeding. I had that with moving from last year from old house to new house. At the beginning, we did a lot of weeding of our belongings, donating clothes, books, whatever. Trash went out a lot, getting rid of all the things that you just had within the same house for 15 years. But near the end, I was like, I don't care. Throw it all in a box and we'll deal with it later. Any year later, those boxes are still in my garage to be weeded. But so you want to, yeah, space it out. And here's another thing, don't feel bad if you hit that point. If you realize I'm not deciding very well, stop. Stop for the day and come back to it, all right? My next one's sort of related is, don't put off deciding where items go. Now at first glance, it says, well, you just said, take your time. This is each individual item. Once you pick it up to look at it, you are deciding right there what's going on with this particular document, right? You're not saying, oh, I'll decide this, I'll put it at the bottom of the pile because guess what, it's gonna come back up. So you pick the thing up and it's either going in your long-term file for whatever it is. If it's an active project, you create a project file and you put it in that. If it needs to be recycled or shredded or whatever, that happens. If it needs to be passed on to another office, it gets passed on. Or at least put in a pile of things to take to the city office or the principal's office or the dean's office. The city treasurer, the county clerk, whoever it needs to go to, you're looking at it, deciding where it needs to go and putting it in the pile to put it in there, right? You're not putting it at the bottom of the pile to look at it again. And so again, this is why I'm saying tackle small amounts of time because you may be taking a look at something and trying to remember, why do I even have this document? Is it really worthwhile? This could go in two or three places. So you may end up making a copy like the e-rate documents. You have your fiscal stuff that you can get rid of in five to seven, but those bills... The same copies need to be kept for some other purpose as well. Exactly. I've seen some people, they'll make a copy and put that in. This was before the PDF was encouraged. They'd make a fiscal copy, put that in e-rate and then put the original in the fiscal to make sure they had something in that folder. So that's another tip that is just don't wait on that. And this also goes with your electronic stuff. When you're going through your electronic archive that you've created, you open up a document and decide, am I keeping this? Am I putting it in a different folder? Is it whatever? When you are doing administrative leading, you're doing leading. It's not, you're focusing on that. You're not doing it in between something else. And keep the new stuff in check as much as possible. So as new stuff comes in, put it where it needs to go instead of letting it pile up on your inbox or on the corner of your desk. And I'll admit, I'm really bad at this because I'm in and out of the office a lot. I don't have a lot of time sometimes to do the filing to keep things in check. So I'll go through and it's like, oh, I've got a month's worth of stuff that I picked up from various meetings and came in through the mail. I need to deal with this now because I can't find anything anymore. I don't file geologically. So keep that in mind. Try to keep the new stuff in check so it doesn't become part of the problem. So those are some tips on that. Keep those local, those guidelines in mind, especially your local stuff because that's what will get you in trouble first is not following the local document retention policy. If it's law, some of the stuff I mentioned is a legal requirement in your state. I've mentioned a couple of things here in our state in Nebraska. So follow those as well. So I think, try that one. No, all right. Whoa, apparently no one gets question. So general questions on stuff we talked about or if you have a statement about your process, we've got what, how many more minutes? About 10 minutes still. If you guys have any questions about anything in particular that you're wondering about, should you be keeping that you've been maybe holding on to because you weren't sure what to do with it. Yeah, absolutely. Let us know, type in your question section or if you have any tips or advice about how you've done it. Let us know as well. We do just have a comment. Great webinar, I really needed this. Oh, well, thanks for the comment. While we're waiting, I do want to make one thing. You have to try to keep two frames of mind when you're making decisions on these. One is it useful now and it's going to be useful for my successor. Because there's stuff that you know, no problem. But once you leave, will the next person be able to do that without this piece of knowledge or compilation of that knowledge? There have been some places where the new director comes in and they didn't have passwords for accounts. They didn't know who the vendors were because the vendor files were missing. And so that might be some... We've had where new directors come in. They contact us here at the library commission because we do a lot of pass-through of selling them databases and resources or books and they have no idea what they've paid for, what they have to pay for or what they're on contract for. It's very discouraging. It's really, you know, I feel bad for these libraries. These people have come into these jobs brand new and they're ready to go and there's been nothing left behind to keep them on track with how to do their job. And it might be something as simple as you create one document that says for information about X, I file it under this topic. Yeah, that could be, yeah. Instead of actual all the information for my successor or in an emergency, you have an index that goes to your, your peculiar filing quirks, I know. If you do, yeah. I file paper things differently and I have to explain that to my staff. You know, e-rate is here separate because of this, right? And this is kept separate because of that. And then they give me and put, we come up with this, a balcony that, you know, once all three of us leave, someone else would have to be able to figure out where things are. So we do have a question confirmation here from Lola. So then financials 2010 and newer should be kept. That's going about back seven years. And they could be kept at the city office. Yeah, and that's one of those local decisions, Lola, that you'll have to talk with the city about what their, their practices are. Now I want to say this, I have been in some libraries that even though the city kept them, the library kept a copy as well, I will say that sometime in most of those cases because the library and the city had, they weren't cooperating the most in some of those cases. So it's okay for you to keep a copy even if the city mandates that they keep it or keeps the original. That's cool. Does it serve, is it of utility? Does it serve your library? But definitely double check, make sure that is the actual practice that's going on. Yeah, before you get rid of something. Yes, yes. Yeah, that's kind of like local practices similar to local practices for cataloging. Each town's going to have a different situation of what your city or your county or hope or ministry of body is keeping and whether you need to duplicate that. But then in addition to that, what is your current or historical relationship with that? Some people have really good relationship with their city clerk and their city manager and it's, yeah, they work great together. Some people don't, they butt heads a lot. And you may have issues with if you're trying to get some information but if you had your own copy, that's, you know, speed things up a little. So, look at your situation. Let me throw something else in there. If there is a new, I don't want to say administration, but some of the new people in that position, you may want to keep a copy locally until they get the hang of how things are happening or if they come in and say, we're changing our document retention policy. So, that's one of those transition points where it's like, we'll keep this just in case. Things, you know, the practices aren't quite being kept up to speed right now but they will be after someone's had training. So, there are going to be moments in time where you might be keeping stuff longer than you normally would, but eventually you can get rid of, so. Yeah, air on the side of caution maybe of a just in case, yeah. We have a good recommendation here from Beth about memorial donations of books, how they do it in their small library. For memorial donations of books, we have, et cetera, we have a card file system in place and we have learned the hard way to note on the cards when the donated material was withdrawn. This is something you might not even think about. When did you actually get rid of it for some reason? There are people that will come in 30 years after they donate something in grandma's memory and they want to know where it is. This is helpful for us in our small town. So, not just when you got it and where it came from but if you did end up with your collection weeding with drawing it for a valid reason, note it just in case someone says, you know, somebody who lived in Nebraska 30 years ago went away and came back to visit and said, hey, remember when we gave grandma's stuff or someone says, let's go check it out. Well. Yeah, yeah. And it's one of those cases where there's that political side of things which we wish we didn't have to deal with in our jobs but we sometimes have to. And it's not like political in the sense of elected officials but you're still, still try to influence people or have them influence other people for you. You're gonna have a good relationship with them 30 years later. Yeah, thanks for that tip, Beth. All right, we're almost at the top of the hour again. Anybody have any last minute desperate things that they want to ask? And Beth says, yes, much politics going on. Yeah, and I'm not saying that's good or bad. It just is, right? So we're not making that a negative connotation here. It just is, that's the nature of what we do. I'll talk to you a little bit later. Okay. Okay, well, another clarification question about looking to the past years in e-rate, what would be the year to keep? Yeah, well, I mentioned this earlier, for the current upcoming year, 2017, you count 10 years out from the end of the year. So the end of the funding year is 2018, 10 years out is 2028. For anything before that, you just gotta do the same thing. Look at the end of the funding year, count out 10 years and then you can get rid of the older ones. Right now, unless you've been keeping things longer, for some reason, the previous amount you had to keep was only five years. So nobody yet has a 10 years worth unless you were, for some reason, just keeping everything, which is awesome. Yeah, and some people feel free to go back and get rid of anything that's older. That would be what, 2006 or 2007? Yeah, I think with the end of the funding year, so, let's see, 2007, 2008. So the end of last year. Yeah, so the 2006 slash 2007 funding year is the oldest you should still be holding on to right now. Because that will be able to get rid of summer this year. So 2006 slash 2007 is the oldest information you need. So go in the other direction. I guess that's it, I guess I can't go in the other direction, that's the oldest you need to have. But you might not have that at all, I'll clarify, because until just a couple of years ago, you only had to go back five years. So it's okay if you don't have the older stuff until we get up to being 10 years out from when they initially made this change. So don't panic. If you have any questions, you don't know if you can handle that, and want more, just call me. Here in Nebraska, does it afford? E-rate people, if you do E-rate in other states, each of you has an E-rate coordinator, that's your person to contact for this and reach out to them if you're unsure. So we had some really good, great questions here. And this is something that, just like weaning your regular collection, the more you do your administrative weaning and keep you track of that, the more it'll become second nature to you on what to keep, what not to keep. And I will mention that, just like in your collection, there might be a couple cases where you get burned, where you think, oh, I wish I would've kept that one piece of paper. You just don't know. It would happen to be, and I'll give you, it was the notes from that previous discussion that turned into this. I didn't keep that page of notes. So for this actual presentation. Just in media, you get a lot of month ago. Yeah, yeah. So there are times where you might get a little burnt, but it can be recreated, just like you're following those ones that are laws or local guidelines from your higher ups, right? But those other weird things, yeah, you'll be okay. All right, well, it's just hitting 11 o'clock by my clock here. So, and nobody has typed anything else in right now. I've been chatting, so I think we'll wrap it up for today. Thank you very much, Scott. That was really good tips and information. And I have things that I need to be weeding through myself recently. I just, as of yesterday, got into a new position here at the library commission. I'm now the library director of library development. Congratulations. Officially as of yesterday. So I have my predecessors' files and things to go through. Although he did do a good job of weeding, he said before he left, but we'll see how that goes. I'll use some of these tips as I'm going through his old office. So thank you very much, Scott. Thank you, everyone, for attending. As I said, the show is being recorded, as we speak, still, and will be posted to our website. And I will switch over to that. Hopefully we can get it to work here. Let's see. Our keyboard here is having issues. Ha, all right. Let's open it up. Let's see. All right. Cool. This is our library commission website. For our Encompass Live site, you can either search our website, or if you actually just searched Google, I'm going to show you this Encompass Live. It's filling it. So far, it's the only thing called Encompass Live is us. So you just use your search engine of choice and come to our website. Here we have all of our upcoming shows listed, but right beneath them is our archives, a link to our archives. This is where all of our previous shows are here. This is just last week's. So we will have, for this one, we'll have this recording, and then I'll have Scott Slides available. Didn't really mention any websites. We don't have any of that. I think the links to those statewide guidelines for Wisconsin and Kentucky will put a link to those. And some of those other statewide guidelines. I'll get you those URLs. Okay, great. So we'll add those as well. Ideally, if YouTube cooperates with my uploading, I will have this available later this afternoon. I'll send you all an email to let you know when it's ready to watch. And you can see it there. So that will be what we wrap up for today's show. I hope you join us next time on our topic is building a digital image collection with Flickr, a low or no cost way to share your digital assets. Many people have their digital assets. They have their different software programs you can purchase or pay to get into to share all photographs, anything scanned, those kind of digital resources. But this library here, University of Michigan, the director of the library there, Corey Siemens, is gonna be on this talk about using Flickr, which is a free resource, up to a point. Low cost, they do have an annual fee that you can pay to hold more images. He's gonna tell us how you can use that to actually have your digital image collection rather than maybe paying a lot more for some more robust, more expensive project. If that's not what you need as a smaller rural library, this may be the way to go. So please do sign up and join us next week for Corey's session on that. And any of our other shows we have listed here, Scott's actually gonna be back at the end of May. Yeah, sometime there's not out there. We're getting the description together, talk about ad blockers and ad filters, filtering ads on your websites. So look for that one. And any of our other ones, sign up for those. We are also on Facebook. So if you are a big Facebook user, pop over there and give us a like. We're gonna pop up this, yes it will, no. I post reminders of when, here's a reminder to log in to today's show, but when our recordings are available, I post on here, there we go from last week. So if you are on Facebook and do follow things there, give us a like, you'll be notified of what's going on on the show over there. Other than that, that does wrap it up for this week's show. Thank you everybody for attending. Thanks for being here, Scott. Thanks for having me. We'll see you next month. Yeah. All right, bye-bye everybody.