 Welcome, and thank you for joining us today for TechSoup for Libraries webinar, Technology Planning Tips for Small Libraries. My name is Crystal, and I'll be your host. Today we have two guests who will share their experience developing technology plans for their libraries. They'll also share tips and advice from the IT management and library director perspectives. Before we begin, I have a few announcements to share. We'll be using the ReadyTalk platform for our meeting today. Please use the chat in the lower left corner to send questions and comments to the presenters. We'll be tracking your questions throughout the webinar, and we'll answer them at designated Q&A sections. All of your chat comments do come only to the presenters, but if you have comments or ideas to share, we'll forward them back out with the entire group. You don't need to raise your hand to ask a question. Simply type it into the chat box. Should you get disconnected during the webinar, you can reconnect using the same link in your confirmation email. You should be hearing the conference audio through your computer speakers, but if your audio connection is unclear, you can dial in using the phone number in your confirmation email or that Becky has shared in the chat. If you have any technical issues, please send us a message, and we'll do our best to assist you. This webinar is being recorded, and it will be archived on the TechSoup website. If you're called away from the webinar or if you have connection issues, you can watch a full recording of this webinar later. You'll receive an archive email within 24 hours that will include a link to the recording, the PowerPoint slides, and any additional links or resources shared during the session. If you're tweeting this webinar, please use the hashtag T-S-4-L-I-B-S. We have someone from TechSoup live tweeting this event, so please join us in the conversation there. TechSoup connects nonprofits, charities, libraries, and foundations with tech products and services as well as information so that you can make informed decisions about technology. Since 1987, TechSoup has distributed over 11 million technology donations to over 200,000 nonprofit organizations, libraries, and charities in over 60 countries worldwide. Last year in 2014, the TechSoup donation program distributed over 61,000 products to libraries for a savings of over $19 million. TechSoup offers a wide range of software, hardware, and services through their product donation program. This includes tech consulting services with tech impact, software from Microsoft, and refurbished computers. For more information about TechSoup product donations or services, please visit techsoup.org and click on Get Products and Services. Okay, so now we're ready to begin. So thanks again for joining us for today's TechSoup for Libraries webinar, Technology Planning Tips for Small Libraries. Now whether you're a small or a large library, today you'll hear from us with examples, tips, and advice for developing a technology plan for your library. Technology planning doesn't have to be a painful process, and it has many benefits that make it well worth the effort. We hope you'll learn a few new things from our guests. We are joined by two guests today who have developed successful technology plans in their library using different methods. Julie Elmore is the Library Director for the Oakland City Columbia Township Public Library in Indiana, a small library that serves under 4,000 people. And as the only librarian on staff, her duties vary from reference and reader's advisory to management and to basic IT. She's also an active board member with the Association for Rural and Small Libraries. Travis is a technology specialist at the Liberty Lake Public Library located in a town of about 8,000 people located near Spokane, Washington. Along with maintaining the library's network, he also provides device support and teaches weekly computer classes. He's very passionate about this topic and enjoys sharing it with others. My name is Crystal Schimpf, and I'm your host for today's webinar. Assisting us with chat and Twitter, we have Becky Wiegand and Jenny Meese, both from the TechSoup team. And just as a reminder, we will be on Twitter and we use the at TechSoup for Libs handle. Throughout the webinar, we'll be sharing tools, tips, and additional resources. Julie will share her perspective on technology planning as the Library Director. Travis will share his perspective from the IT side of things. We have some templates and some best practices to share, and we will all share resources and I'll share some additional resources from TechSoup and other organizations. Again, all of that will be included in the archive which you'll receive following the webinar. We'll have time for questions throughout, so just as a reminder, please send your questions using the chat as they arise, and we will address as many as we're able to. And if you ask a question that we're not able to answer during the webinar today for any reason, we will follow up later via email with a response. Also, as a reminder, this webinar is being recorded and all of the slides, resources, and materials will be sent out later. So we'd like to start off by knowing just a little bit about you. So tell us, what's your experience with technology planning? Does your library currently have a technology plan of some sort? You can choose your response by clicking the radio button next to it, and then clicking submit to send us your response. You can see your responses are coming in right now, and it looks like actually a fair amount of you do have a technology plan of some sort in place. Some of you do not, and of course some of you aren't sure. Maybe it's not in your position to have dealt with that before, or maybe you're coming in new to your library, so that certainly makes sense there. I'll give you just a few more seconds to respond here before we move on. I will say though, if you're new to technology planning, then this should give you a good introduction. But if you have a lot of experience, I think you'll learn a few new things that you may be able to implement into your plan as well. So we'll go ahead and move on to our next poll. We'll close this one. You can see our final results there. So thanks for participating. We do have one more poll because we're also curious to know, are you required to have a technology plan in your library? And let us know, does your state library require it, or does a funder or your board require it? Maybe you have other reasons. You can share those in the chat. And you can check all that apply here. So let us know what your responses are. I know it will take you a second to think about that. And of course if you aren't quite sure, there's a response for you there. Actually that's one that's rising to the top is not quite sure if it's required. I know in a lot of cases maybe it's something we just have done for a long time. So absolutely. You can see that some of you are already asking some questions in the chat, and that's great to see. I know we'll have some good time to answer those questions later on in the call. All right, so I'll give you a few more seconds to respond here before we move on because I know what you've really come to hear is Julian and Travis tell their experience. But I'll give you just a few more seconds here. And I'll go ahead and close the poll in 3, 2, and 1. All right, and it looks like actually about a third of you say that it's actually not required for you to have a technology plan. About a third of you say that you're not quite sure if it's required. And then we see a variety of reasons. The biggest reason being that state libraries are requiring that. And they know in some states that is the case in order to get whatever support you get from the state library, then it's required. So thanks for sharing that with us. And so I think at this point what I want to do is hand things over to Julie to tell us about her perspective as a library director on technology planning. So Julie, are you ready? I am. Thank you. All right, well thank you to everybody for having me and letting me share our tech planning process with you. I thought at first maybe I'd share just a little bit about my library. As Crystal said, we serve less than 4,000 people. All right, we have a budget that's approved of $200,000 but we really only get in about $175,000 a year. And we also have a staff of myself as a full-time director. We have four part-time clerks. And they average hours from 12 hours to 25 hours a week. So all combined it's less than two full-time equivalents. And most importantly in that list you'll notice that there are no IT professionals on our staff. So we kind of run a little lean and a little skeletal but we do tend to at least try to focus on the basics that our budget will allow. Also our area is fairly economically depressed. We seem to have a lot of people that may have internet on their cell phone but maybe not the computer skills to go with most of their internet experiences through their phone. Everybody has their reasons for why they create their tech plan. I didn't have a choice. The state said you shall have one so I said okay. So I went out and went towards creating it. But in hindsight I kind of think that the state was kind of right on this one because in reality I was really kind of glad that it was required. The tech plan that we have it kind of serves as our roadmap for where we want to go and how we want to kind of get there. And we do tend to evaluate our plans pretty regularly. So it kind of keeps us on track and lets us measure our progress and see whether or not we're meeting the goals that we set out to meet. Our plan is a three-year plan. And when you're talking technology my personal opinion is three years is 20. You look back three years and you know the iPhone 5 came out in 2012. So we're already a generation beyond that with the iPhone 6. Three years is kind of enough in my opinion. Also our state library, we took advantage of some templates that our state library provided. You know that's kind of the best part about being in the library world is that we really do tend to help and support each other out a lot. So there's templates and policies everywhere especially you know if you're on any sort of state listserv or if you are a member of the ARSL group and their listserv it's a great place when you're seeking plans from those smaller libraries like we are. But you know when I started I looked at what was required in the plan and then I kind of designed it and then thought about where we want to take it. But meanwhile I pretty much opted to use the KISS strategy of keeping it super simple. And that tends to work best for us. We like to keep it simple because you really don't want to get buried in the specifics. We kind of look at our tech plan more as a guide and not necessarily a hard and fast rule. So it helps us to be able to keep a lot of the writing fairly simplistic. And you know as I said earlier we are lucky in our jobs. We can borrow from other libraries and the best part about that is you remember you don't have to borrow all of their plan. Just kind of use what applies to you and leave. If there's too much details in it you can leave that stuff out. But most of all the simpler the plan is the easier it is for you to kind of adapt to any sort of changes in technology and such. But it definitely does take some time and it is a process to create the actual plan. You know they say Rome wasn't built in the day and neither is your tech plan. But you will need to make sure that you have a good grasp of your current inventory. If you don't really know what you already had you are not really sure where you are going to be able to go. So it kind of takes some time to consider the inventory. Consider the direction that you would like to go in. Maybe pick some of your key areas. Take a look at it. No IT people in my building that generally means that I tend to keep it to what I can do myself or what I can afford to pay out of my budget for a contract or to do. So that's also a really good way to hone in on your key areas because there is really only so much that you can do. Of course you want to set your goals and achievable objectives. Again it's what I think that we can actually do here. Then begin that first draft and do not be afraid to edit that draft along as you go because what you first thought might be a goal. By the time you are finished with it you may realize that you are either already doing that or that it is really not where you want to go anyway. In my personal tech plan or our library's tech plan we do include our mission statement. I tend to try to include that whenever we are doing any sort of planning document. It's a real short easy reminder of what our purpose is and why we want our plans to go into a specific direction. So really if you can kind of keep that in mind that does help. Of course we took our technology inventory and we set our goals and objectives but we also wanted to make sure that we included a professional development strategy and a budget to make sure we could get it done but we also wanted to include our evaluation processes. When it came to looking at our inventory it's really important to include not only what you currently have but what you are proposing to have three years out. When you are looking at your inventory you tend to look at everything because you might be surprised with everything that you have. It's more than how many computers you might have. You also have the operating systems. You also have the software. There is a huge difference if you are running five computers running Windows XP and Microsoft Office 2003 versus five computers that are running Windows 10 and Office 2013. So tend to take a look at everything that is on your computers as well. In addition some of the peripherals that are around your building that you may not think of outside of just the basic where you have with your computers or your tablets but you might want to think about your fax machines and electronic phone systems, e-readers, tablets and maybe even if you have a security camera system. All that falls under your technology. And of course you want to take a look at your bandwidth. I have yet to really find the library that has too much. So I think that if you remember to take a look at that and plan for those upgrades. And you also want to kind of take a look at your ILS system. If you are not happy with it and you have had it for a while consider making it a goal to just work towards replacing that. Something that we did keep in mind as well when we were doing our inventory was that it is a tech inventory. It is not necessarily an insurance inventory. So while you may have another document that might have the serial numbers and all of that for purposes of your tech inventory we didn't bother getting into those type of details. We wanted to know what we had and how much of it that we had. We tried not to go overly specific and with specific makes and model numbers. But for instance we have a gaming system and in 2018 we still only plan to have one gaming system. But rather specifying that we currently have a Wii and in 2018 that we propose to have a – we don't want to be stuck with still having a Wii if we are able to upgrade to a nicer unit. Also when you are talking about what you have that is as far as proposed versus current think about what you don't want to have anymore either. In that picture you can see our copier and next to it we have our inkjet color printer. Three years from now we really hope to be inkjet copier free or inkjet printer free. So currently our current inventory is one but our proposed inventory is zero because we have a separate line item for an all-in-one unit with a current inventory of zero with a proposed inventory of one of that black, white color all-in-one unit. And that's really just to kind of keep us on track to remember that that is one of our goals. Real quick I did see a question about what the ILS is. That's your integrated system where you have your catalog, your circulation, that sort of software. So after our inventory we decided we were going to take a look at our goals and take a look at, you can see the list here. These are some of the areas that we chose to focus on. This really is not the place for your wild dreams when you are running a small library. It's kind of the place where you should include what you realistically want to get done with your technology over the next three years. But also keep in mind that sometimes it doesn't necessarily have to be a new goal. It is okay to maintain a certain level. We are a smaller staff workplace. Sometimes we actually do have to accept the fact that there are limitations as far as how much more we can take on physically and financially. For instance, right now we have enough public computers that we are not really having long wait lines. We plan to maintain that number and we'll focus on updating them and replacing them. But actually as far as increasing the number of stations our goal is to maintain where we are at right now. Don't forget also when you are looking at your goals and your objectives to take a look at what is outside of your library. Our initial tech plan involved building a website. That task was completed. So when we went about creating our next three-year block, we decided that we were going to take a look at just maintaining our website. If I had a dedicated person for technology I would love to maybe insist upon once a year having a complete makeover to the look of our WordPress theme. But I don't have that. So I have to kind of focus on what I can get done. So we are opting to maintain the current look of our website for quite a while but utilize some plugins to make sure that it stays up to date. The biggest ones being our Google Calendar plugin and our Facebook plugin. So you want to kind of make sure that you don't leave out the online presence as part of your technology plan. I know Travis is going to cover more on the maintenance end of your tech plan and then a little bit more in detail that he can give you from that perspective. But I will say that when you are taking a look at the wording, we really went with keeping our wording pretty simple so that it was achievable. There is a line in ours that one of our goals is to keep our computers clean twice a year. That's it. You could say January and June or April and October or whatever but when you are working in the small libraries something as simple as a staff turnover can throw you behind a good month of just about anything. So you want to really kind of make sure that you set yourself up for success rather than automatically putting yourself behind the eight ball going, oh gosh, I'm never going to be able to get this done. I'm failing at my goals. So that's why one of the reasons why we tend to like to keep our wording realistic. And of course, like I said, we focus a lot on training and our goals. Think about where you want your patron training to go. Are you looking more at teaching classes? If so, how often? Do you want to set a quarterly goal, a monthly goal? How many of those do you want to have? When you are looking at maybe one-on-one do you want to make sure that you have certain times available where people can come in and get that sort of help? Our library tends to promote patron self-training. So currently one of our big goals that we are working on here within the next year is to grow and maintain a list of quality training materials for the patrons to use. And please, please, please do not forget your staff in this. They cannot help the guests that are in your building if they don't know how to use the technology that you offer as well. You can read here this is a line straight out of our technology plan regarding professional development. But there are lots of ways to accomplish this goal. You can have staff development days. You can have self-directed training at the desk, different versions. We also here in our library we tend to use each one-to-one philosophy when one person learns something, it's their job to pass that knowledge along and share it with a co-worker. And a lot of times that includes just writing directions in our master how to do everything file that we have on our Google Drive account. But at the end of the day the main goal with that is to never have only one person know how to do anything when it comes to your technology. But also you have to be a little bit realistic and you also have to remember that money is directly related to your technology plan. You have to be realistic that there is a cost associated with having technology. Generally speaking if it's required and we classify it as a have to have we make sure that we can fit that into our existing budget. Now that's not to say that you shouldn't look for grants or even that you can't write something in as a goal that is grant dependent. But you really want to make sure that you're pretty clear in that that is a goal that you're going to go out and seek the grant to fund whatever it is that you're looking forward to adding to your library. And do not forget the free stuff either. A lot of our staff training is free stuff whether it comes from state library trainings or different webinars through TechSoup or Web Junction. A lot of times that really only cost staff time and in my case sometimes it will cost me a little bit of time for a commitment from me to go and cover the front desk clerks so that they can go off desk to make sure that they're learning. It was a great example yesterday. We had one of our clerks was taking a webinar and as soon as she got off of that she turned right around to another clerk and she said you need to watch this webinar. And it was great because now today there's my next clerk in there watching a webinar on handling the technology petting zoos and the e-readers and that sort of stuff. So that was a great opportunity where they tend to talk amongst themselves and create that cross-training environment. But sometimes when you're talking money you really do sometimes need to remember that sometimes it's worth it to pay the professionals for their hour or more. If it's going to cost you more time in time than spent sometimes you just have to find that balance of what you can take on yourself and what you really just need to outsource. And if your staff is not as tech-friendly as you might like them to be you just need to keep that in mind and maybe budget a little bit more in the line items for your IT services. And of course you really do want to make sure that you evaluate your plan periodically. We prefer to evaluate them yearly kind of make sure that we are going where we need to go and that we're staying on target. And sometimes as well we've been checking to make sure that the goal that we have is still a necessary goal. So you want to kind of take a look at it, see where you're at. Like I said it doesn't have to be a big evaluation process but mainly just make sure that your plan is not sitting in the back of some file drawer forever never to be seen again. That's kind of a key thing. And of course a few things to remember as I wrap up here, keep it realistic. There are only so many things that you can do and we do them well in libraries. We're used to running on small budgets and such. But when you are planning you really want to make sure that you set that plan up as realistically as possible. And of course my favorite, just keeping it simple, keeping it super simple that works quite a bit. Always be sure to remember to review that plan and include that in your plan how you are going to review it and how often you are going to review it. And even without having that IT professional in the building your library can meet the specifications of any of the required plans if you have the requirement you can meet those. And most importantly just use that plan to create that roadmap for where you want your library to go with technology. You know your librarians you can do it. That's about all that I have on my end for the directors. Great. Well Julie thanks for sharing. That was certainly a lot actually to share in a short period of time. So first I just want to say thank you for sharing all of your experiences with us. And we've had some questions come in already and I know we maybe will have a few more come in in the next few minutes. So I wanted to go back to a couple of the things that you've said. Now you mentioned taking a look at how much bandwidth you have and I like that you know the way you put it you've never seen a library that had too much bandwidth. And I was wondering what you do, actually this came up from one of our participants as well. Do you have any recommendations for monitoring the broadband speed, the bandwidth that you have coming into the library? How have you gone about that? Well we are very lucky. We use ENA, Education Network for America to handle the bulk of our internet. And any time that I want to report on how we're doing they are able to just I just email them and say hey can I get this report and they will send me one. So I'm a little spoiled on that end as far as viewing those reports. But I know a few years ago when they come in once a year and kind of give us the annual this is where you're at. And we were running pretty steady with a T1 line at about from the time we opened we would hit 80% max capacity. Then after school of course we were running a nonstop 95%. So at that point in time we started looking at okay we need to make the switch from one T1 line over to fiber. And that's where we're at right now with Five Nights of Cyber. Great. So you were able to look at what you were using and then make the case to expand the amount of bandwidth that you had coming in then. And could you say the name of that company again? Sure it's ENA. ENA and what was the answer? Education Networks of America, they mainly do libraries in schools, internet connection for them. Great. And if they're not available in your area there may be other organizations to those of you listening in your area that help support library broadband so you can check into that locally. Good. Well that was one of the bigger questions that came up. And I also just wanted to say that as far as the training goes there was some conversation going on in the chat. And your idea of each one, each one I just think that's a really good thing to maybe go back to for a minute. And you shared a really good example of how one of your staff members has learned or how they're sharing with one another immediately. But it seems like that's a really good way to have more informal training on an ongoing basis in the library. And I just wanted to know if you had any other ideas or examples you could share around that. Well sure, part of our training process with all staff is that they are required to go one hour every pay period and do some sort of self-directed training. And mainly because it keeps everything nice and neat that's actually attached to their sign in and sign out sheet at the bottom of it. There's a box down there to talk about their tech training. So they are allowed to pick and choose from whatever topic they wish to learn more about as long as they can relate it back to how they're going to use it in the library. From there I've gotten comments as far as meh, not so much to oh my gosh this was great. I had no idea we could do this. And then on those ones I tend to go back and I might say hey can you show me how you learned to do this so that I'm aware. And then I will also again, we keep a master file in our Google Drive account where they can write how-to sheets. And these are sheets that we have everything. We have how to scan a document and how to do this. And just yesterday, well two days ago, I'm sorry, somebody came over to me and they said hey I need to scan this document to computer 4 and I can't figure this out. So we went back to the Google Drive account so that we could reiterate that it's in there, printed that out. They went over and it's step-by-step directions. And we normally have somebody that writes it and then their job is to give it to somebody else and they have to go and follow all those directions to make sure that the directions are very clear for each other. And that has really helped out a lot with making sure that people learn how to do things or if somebody or if I'm not in the building that they still have a resource to draw upon that's written very clearly by at least one or two other staff members to know how to do something. Great. And just a follow-up on that, Monica asks if you have instituted or employed any technology competencies for staff. So have you put anything out there as here are the standards for what I'd like you to know or do they just follow their own path? They follow their own path. I do know that there are some libraries that have set competencies for their staff. That might be a goal in the future, but right now we're really more focused on keeping it a little bit more of a relaxed. They don't have to fear that they're not at that level. I want them to enjoy the process of moving forward in whatever path they choose to go down. Great. Great. Well, I love that you've emphasized including training for staff in the planet itself. Of course, we bring in all this new technology and we have to learn how to operate it in order to really be functional. So I love that you've prioritized that. Just a couple of things for those of you who are asking about will Julie share her finished policy. I think you mean the technology plan here and also the template from the Indiana State Library that she has used. And we will share both of those in the archive for this webinar. So you will have access to those and just a reminder, if you didn't hear this announcement at the beginning you'll receive an email with that archive within a couple of days of now. So you'll get that information and be able to take a look at what she's been talking about. So I think Julie, that's all the questions we have time for right now. So I'm going to say thank you very much for sharing what you have so far. You're welcome. Thank you. All right. And we may have more time at the end for questions with Julie. We'll see how our timeline goes from here. In just a minute we're going to hear from Travis who is going to share the IT perspective of things. But I also wanted to share just a few resources from the TechSoup for Libraries website that you might find helpful. We have several cookbooks as we call them that talk about technology planning and some of the other things you need to consider when it comes to your technology, especially if you're in a small or a rural library. And so these guides are available at TechSoupforLibraries.org and there are three different topics there. And you may find them all useful. They are free to download and I will include the links for this in the archive email that you'll receive shortly. So that's another set of resources if you want to dive into any of these topics or look at more templates and ideas. Some of that is included in those cookbooks. But for now I think I'll go ahead and hand things over to Travis who is going to tell us about the IT side of things from his experience at the Liberty Lake Municipal Library. Travis? Thank you, Crystal. Hi, as you know I'm Travis Montgomery. I work for the Liberty Lake Municipal Library in Liberty Lake, Washington. We're about 10 minutes from Spokane, Washington. Our population is almost about 9,000 people now. We have a staff of three full-time employees and nine part-time staff employees. And then we have several volunteers. As you're speaking to me, we do have a dedicated IP person. I am that person. So let's get right into it. Practically reasons for having a technology plan. For me, I'm a big person about saving money. So first and foremost is saving money. The best time to buy something is when you don't need it. If you're buying items when you have an outage or you're in need, you're never going to get the better price that you could possibly do if you shop around. Great sites that we use ourselves for New Wave, TechSoup, Amazon, eBay. A lot of people on probably on the East Coast have probably not heard of Fry's Electronics, but they're a discount electronics chain. The big thing is to, like I said, shop. I'm a big proponent of spending a little extra time and saving hundreds if not thousands of dollars by just doing a little work. So don't be afraid to take a price and go other places with it. Shopping at the right time is just as important as shopping around in my opinion. For technology purposes, Christmas time just like for anything else is a great time to buy. I don't know if anybody has heard of Cyber Tuesdays. That's their big electronics sale that they do on websites like Amazon and other places there. So when you buy is just as important as what you're buying kind of thing. Preventative maintenance, this is something that I am really passionate about. A lot of libraries they focus on having something new and staying with the latest technologies. Preventative maintenance can make something last much, much longer than you had previously anticipated. Thus, every year that you keep something longer, you're saving a significant amount of money there. So some things that you can do preventive maintenance wise, I'm a big proponent of compressed air. There's an image right there. There's a computer before and after picture. That is more of an extreme case there, but computers will get dirty. The whole point of the circular fan thing is to dissipate heat. When the coils and other things are clogged with dust and dirt and cobwebs and other things there, they can't dissipate the heat and you have a higher failure rate than if you kept a nice cool, clean computer. If you look at the picture we have a can of compressed air. We also at our library, if you look at the data vac, we use one of those compressed air. Overtime is great, but it gets expensive and it's not as powerful. So for about $60 you can buy one of these vacs that push much more air and you never have to buy another can of compressed air. So that's a great way to save money and keep your computers clean. Another thing, this is a printer thing that a lot of libraries don't think about, is printer maintenance. Again, compressed air is utilized to clean it out, but a lot of people don't think about the rubber wheels that push the paper. I'm sure just about anybody that's worked in the library has dealt with paper jams. It's a common occurrence and that right there comes down to dust on the wheels, on the rubber wheels, but it also comes down to rubber over time will harden and crack and not be able to push the paper. The rubber is what grips the paper and pushes it through. So they have this spray called Rubber Rejuvenator where you can actually just, you spray it on like a cloth and then you rub it on there and it actually gets your rubber softer and back to its original state and thus prevent paper jams. So that's another inexpensive thing that you can do and save tons of money over time over printer repair or printer replacement. Another basic that most people are aware of, search protectors, uninterrupted power supplies or UPSs are something that every library if they have their own server should be utilizing. If there's a power outage, the nice thing is it gives you a window when you are from five minutes to an hour to properly shut a computer down or if the power comes back on within that time frame, not have any data degradation or have any outages that can damage hardware. So those are two things that are very important. Now we'll get into some of the software side. Kiosk software is something I heard Julie talking about a couple of times a year they clean out the computers. A great way to protect yourself is to lock down your computers. Kiosk software like Deep Freeze, Drive Vaccine, Reboot Restore RX, or our programs wherein they do an image of your hard drive. So every time you restart your computer it takes it back to a factory state. So you can have somebody come in and do their worst damage mess up over the computer. You do a simple restart and the computer is just like the day you have it. You have what's called a baseline that you set up. So you can still do critical updates and a virus and what have you there. But by doing this they can't mess up the operating system and thus minimizing your downtime and saving you having to pay a technician or somebody else out to come and fix things there. So I'm a big fan of Kiosk software. Another program that is kind of being phased out is Steady State. It was designed for XP or Vista. We actually still use it in our library. If you run a 32-bit operating system of Windows 7 you can run Steady State and we use that for some of our patron PCs instead of using the Drive Vaccine or the Reboot Restore. The reason for it is you have controls over what programs they can operate. For us with the Drive Vaccine or any of the other programs you don't have as much control about locking the computer down. For us here we had an issue where patrons would use Craigslist which everybody wants to use and love. But there's also a section called Craigslist Personals. So we wanted to be able to block those and allow you to be able to use something else. Well the only browser that we have found that we can lock down and choose what's called a white list on or a black list is Firefox. So by utilizing Steady State we can actually decide what programs the user can use and then we can go in there and we can block certain parts of the website. Not the entire Craigslist, just the personal section. That way we don't have racy pictures being shown there. So that's a great resource that we utilize. Software and updates Julie, she touched on this for a little bit. Big thing is critical updates and antivirus definitions. They will keep your computer protected and again save you time in the future. So I won't spend too much time on that. What do you do if you don't have access to an IT guy? It sounds like mostly you don't or mixed. There's a number of different things that you can do. Search engines, as an IT person there I could not do my job without Google or Bing or what have you. Nobody knows everything. And even if you learned it in the past you don't utilize everything every day. So I use search engines to do my job every single day. The big thing is knowing what question to ask. The proper way to ask the question is just as important as what the question is. Microsoft IT Academy, I don't know if every state has access to this. I'm here in Washington State. We have access to it. It's a great personal based training resource that allows you to go in there and set courses on whatever you want be it office, be it just basic computing or operating systems. You go in there and it's self-based training and it's really quite wonderful. How-to books. We all work in libraries so we have access to books. If your library doesn't through interlibrary loans there are tons and tons of how-to books. And I just chose some examples of computers for dummies there. There is a ton of information out there. All you got to do is just look for it. YouTube is something, it's not just for watching funny cat videos. YouTube is a great resource for how to open up a computer or how to, if you're trying to utilize a function in Excel, go in there and ask a question and you'll find most of the time people have actually taken the time to demonstrate exactly how to do it. If you don't learn as well reading something there's a total of videos for just about anything that you could possibly think of and they're really quite helpful. Networking. Communicate with other libraries be it through your annual library meetings or what have you. There's forms, there's message boards. Networking is not just for computer talks. Get a partnership with like libraries. Get a plan. You find a library that does something that you like. Don't be afraid to copy it. You don't have to do it exactly, but get a partnership with other libraries and you'll be surprised at the information that you can get. And you'll find out inexpensive ways to do things that you're wanting to do. Community outreach. I believe Melissa said something about she had a volunteer from like a college or something come and train. Here in Liberty Lake we're really lucky this is a big technology town. So we have lots of people that we can lean on for things like that. Ask around. There's a guarantee in the high schools and in the colleges around your library there's plenty of tech kids that would love to spend some time and do things. And they could utilize it as school extra credit or what have you. But there's lots of people around that have technology backgrounds that would love to give some of their time back to the community. So that's a great resource. It can definitely go both ways. Let's go into replacement schedules. Schedules are one of the things that every single library is going to be different. The biggest thing is it's going to come down to budget and need. So make your schedule your own. Again, go into the networking. Communicate with other libraries. Get the ideas that you like, but then make it for your own library because they could have a totally different budget than you have or they have a different direction that that library wants to go. So make it yours. And don't be afraid to make it evolve over time. Most libraries over time their budgets increase and technology is not going anywhere. It's just going to get bigger and bigger. So audit it every year. And don't be afraid to reach for the stars. That's the best plan I've found so far. The Liberty Lakes Technology Plan. We actually don't have a rule that we have to have a technology plan. And we actually don't have a written technology plan. What we have at our library is I have a really good partnership with our director. Her name is Pamela Mogan. And we sit and we talk. And she gives me a direction that she'd like the library to go. And sometimes I have to tell her, well, that might be a little more money than we want to spend. And vice versa, I'll have a direction that we want to go. And she has to tell me otherwise. So it's a collaborative effort. And I think that if you have an IT person, good communication is paramount. So have a partnership. Don't be afraid to give some suggestions and get them from your director as well. So I think that a partnership is the best way for our library to do that. Other than that, that was my presentation. I'm a bit of a fast talker. And I go through information a little bit faster. So I wanted to have ample time for people to ask questions there. So I will give it over to Crystal. Great. Well, thank you, Travis. And we certainly have had a lot of questions coming in. So we will get to as many of these as we can. Let's see, where would be a good place to start? One of the things that was coming in, and I just maybe want to touch on it, oh, let's go back here. I want to just touch on this because there was some interest in the chat about IT Academy, which was a resource which you had mentioned. And the question was whether or not it was free. So I just wanted to clarify that for everybody. It's not a free tool, but it is one. Travis is from Washington State, and their State Library has purchased access for all libraries in the state and worked out a deal there. So it's possible that your state or someone else in your area might have access for you that you can use another similar tool, a few others that have been mentioned that have similar types of training include lynda.com, which sometimes has a state library level subscription or a regional consortia subscription. Also, free tools like GCF Learn Free have been mentioned in the chat. So those are some of the different training resources you might have if you're trying to learn more about this. And then Travis, one of the other things that you had mentioned was just asking questions in Google to learn as you have questions that arise. And you said that it was really important to ask the right question. And I don't know if you might be able to give us an example of something where maybe we might commonly ask it one way, but the best way to ask it in a search engine would be when it comes to IP types of questions. Do you have any examples? Absolutely. Well, a great thing is say you're the example I used earlier, say you're looking to do something in Excel or Word. So say you want to learn how to properly space after sentences in Word. When you're doing a search, you're not going to just say Word Spacing. You'll get information and results back that are just not going to help you, and you'll have to weave through so much. But what you do is how to change the spacing after sentences in Microsoft Word. And that is a great way to do it. Another way to ask proper questions in Google is to use quotes. And that way it doesn't just search words. It will search all the words inside your quotes there. So you'll get much better results doing it that way. Great. And based on what you're saying, I'm imagining the types of results you're going to get are like forums where people have asked a very similar question and then you can see responses from IT experts on the Internet. Is that kind of what you're getting at here? Absolutely. And there's tons of – you'll find just a myriad of websites where people have asked the same question. You'll get Yahoo answers. You'll get a myriad of different things. But you'll also touch on what I talked about earlier, YouTube. Quite often if it's something that you're just not sure and you don't want to do three hours of reading, sometimes you do your search and then put YouTube at the end of it. And you'd be surprised how many people take the time to do videos on exactly what you're asking. Great. Great. Now maybe to move to a slightly different topic. We've had several questions relating to the topic of kiosk software or like the deep freeze and the various programs that can be used to protect your computer. One question was that if you're using something like deep freeze, do you also still need to use a virus protection or security software on the computer? Do you need to double up on that? Most still do that because there's times when you still need to do your updates of the baseline. So it is suggested to still use an antivirus program. It also comes down to you can set up different times for it to restore. At our library I have it set up to every time the person logs off, it restores it. That way you're not seeing the searches of the previous person or what have you. But the deficiency of that is you do have the downtime of the computer restarting and coming back up. And this software does slow down the computers there. So if you have heavy traffic maybe that's not as ideal. For our library we have about 12 patron PCs. So it's rare that we're anywhere near full. So we can have a little more time between people logging off and allowing the computer to restart. But if you're in a library that you only have say three patron PCs and you've got people waiting, that may frustrate some people that you're going to have to wait three minutes or so for it to restart and come back up. And that also comes down to hardware. If you've got newer, faster computers it will definitely come up faster. But most libraries don't have cutting edge, i7 processor, beefy computers for their patrons. So speed will even be more of an issue when they're older computers. Right, so many things to consider. And then maybe another little bit more technical question related to the maintenance of computers. And this maybe will just help clarify that air compressor that you were sharing with us. Kelly asks, if you use that data vac only through the back of the computer or if you should take the computers apart? And actually that's a really good question because I think the images we saw were of kind of the insides of the computers which were pretty dusty. So what would you recommend for that? Well just to elaborate on the data vac it's not an actual vacuum. It pushes air. So I don't know why they came up with the name data vac. I think that's kind of a misnomer. It's a blower. Essentially it's put in out compressed air. You definitely want to open it up. I know a lot of people are afraid of opening up a computer and making sure they're breaking it. The big thing when you work on any of these things is to unplug it, never have power to these things there because the power supplies and some of the pastors can absolutely kill people there. And I'm not trying to put fear of anybody. But anytime you're going to open up that up make sure it's unplugged, powered down. But usually you just need a Phillips head screwdriver or some of the sides will just pop off on some of the Dells and other brands. And then you're just doing a visual search and you're just looking for massive dust. Usually that big circle of thing that's the heat sink and fan for the CPU that's going to be usually the dirtiest one there. The big thing is you don't want to push all the air directly on it. The fans on these things use ball bearings. And if you, like the data back, it pushes a significant amount of air. So you can actually damage the fan. So don't just push it on there and have that fan spinning a million miles an hour. Just get it around there and push out all that air. The cleaner it is, I guarantee you the cooler it's going to work. And other people think, people don't realize is hotter computers run slower than cooler computers. So you'll get actually more performance the cleaner it is. So it goes hand in hand. But just make sure it's unplugged and open it up and just clean it out is what I would suggest. Great, great. Now it's kind of a more forward thinking question. Travis I'll put this to you first and then Julie maybe I'll have you come on and respond as well. Pamela asks, what do you think the future of the desktop computer is? And should we be looking more to replacing them with tablets and laptops as those desktops get a little bit older? So Travis what's your thoughts on that topic? Yeah, I answered that question. For me, I am a big proponent of desktops. I know a lot of people think that everything is going to laptops, it's going to tablets. But you still see the patrons need to sit down. They're going to be working at their screen. The advantage of desktop PCs are twofold. One, you can have a faster desktop than any laptop or tablet that you can have. Also, the upgradability. Me personally, I do not like a lot of libraries are converting over to what's called all-in-ones where the computer, everything is built into the monitor. We had a bunch of those when I came to our library and I absolutely hate them because you are very limited in what you can do to upgrade them. Also, they are very tight in space so they tend to have more heat issue. So I am a big proponent of desktops. I hope they don't go away anytime soon. And there shouldn't be because if you're doing things like be a CAD or Photoshop you need, a higher-end PC, so you're going to utilize desktops for a long time to come. And the big advantage of a desktop is upgradability. I don't foresee them going away anytime soon until they come up with super fast laptops and tablets for that matter. Great. Thanks for responding to that and giving a little bit more detail there. Julie, from your perspective as a library director, where do you see this headed? And maybe in your library, how are you thinking of it? Well, I tend to agree with Travis on this one mainly because I still have so many people who come in with things that are on their tablets or things that are coming in going, I need to print this and it's on my phone. How do I get to it? Or somebody emailed me this and I need to print it but you can't print from this. So I kind of think that the desktops are going to be here for a while. Our cell, as far as my tech plan goes, we make sure that we budget no less than one computer every year to be replaced, hopefully two. And they normally get purchased, kind of carbon what Travis said earlier. That Black Friday sale is generally when it's close to the end of my fiscal year and I know whether or not I can get one, whether I can get two. But we always try to make sure that we have at least a couple new ones a year and we still are looking at desktops. And you know a lot of times, honestly the price is still pretty right when it comes to buying those desktops. So from our perspective, we still tend to go towards the desktops. If I could go on one other thing there, when it comes to purchasing PCs, I see it all the time, libraries and other places go out and they purchase higher end machines thinking that they're going to be faster, longer, and that is true to a point. But I see a lot of places, I was at a library the other day, and this may not mean a lot to a lot of people, but I see computers with higher end processors be it i7 or i5 processors being utilized for things like self-checkout or patron PCs. I think that that's a huge weight. So the way you spend your money is just as important. If you're just looking for a patron PC or like I said, a self-check PC, you don't need a cutting edge processor. You don't need to go out and spend $800 on a machine. Go out and buy, spend $300 or $400 and get two machines. So spending your money wisely is really important. And Travis, I think that's really good advice. I have to cut in here because we're just about out of time and I want to make just a few announcements before we go. But I think that was a great thing to put out there at the end. It's important to know what you need the technology for and make those decisions. And technology planning can certainly help you work through that process. So really I appreciate Travis and Julie, everything you've had to share today. We have a few unanswered questions and I just want you to know if we didn't get to your question, we will respond via email. And I also will say that we have another webinar coming up in September that may answer some of those questions as well. So you may want to tune in for those and I'll give you more information on that in just a minute. Just a few other resources that I'll share again in the archive as well. Our friends at Web Junction also have some resources on technology planning. And Lita, one of the ALA affiliates has a guide on technology planning for small and one-person libraries. Idealware has a technology planning training which is available through a TechSoup product donation program. And then there's also a webinar archive on tactical technology planning that was from a few months ago that we will share. If you haven't already done so, I hope you'll visit TechSoupforLibraries.org and sign up for our email newsletter and see what blog posts and other resources we have there to share. Again, we do have some upcoming webinars, one on Adobe InDesign taking place tomorrow, one on Windows 10 taking place on August 27, and then one on managing mobile devices especially for a library device checkout where we'll talk about both e-readers and tablets, and that's coming up on September 16th. And we have just posted the registration page for that. I just want to ask you to stay on the line for one more minute. We'll have a survey for you to take. But thank you to our presenters again for sharing their knowledge with us today. Thanks to our webinar sponsor ReadyTalk. And thank you for joining us. I hope you have a great day. Bye-bye.