 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Christa Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly online event where we cover anything that may be of interest to librarians across the state of Nebraska and across the country. The show is free and open to anyone to watch our live show and our recordings. We do these sessions live on Wednesday mornings. Everyone's in mourning at 10 a.m. central time and they are recorded, so if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. You can always come back to our website and watch all of our recordings that are posted up there from all of our previous shows. We do a mixture of things here, presentations, training sessions, interviews, book reviews. Basically anything library related, we want to share it and have it on the show. We have commission staff, Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes present and we have guest speakers. This morning we have a mixture of that. Next to me is Laura Johnson, who is the continuing education coordinator here at the Nebraska Library Commission. On the line with us, we've got three or four, depends on how it works. Guest speakers from libraries across the state. This morning we're going to be talking about the ARSL Conference Association for Rural and Small Libraries Conference that was here in Nebraska up in Omaha at the end of last month, end of September. We're going to talk about some people that attended. I'll just hand it over to you, Laura, to explain who we've got on the line here. Last year, when we heard that the Association for Rural and Small Libraries was going to have their conference in the area, and then it was going to be in Omaha, we were so excited. This is an association that is so right on for so many of our libraries in Nebraska. And here's a national conference in our own backyard, so to speak. So we gathered up our little pot of continuing education monies that we usually have every year to make small grants to people to go to conferences or to do some kind of continuing education project. And we said we were going to dedicate it all to sending people to the Association for Rural and Small Libraries Conference. We were able to give 43 grants. That's awesome. And we got a whole lot of Nebraskans to the ARSL Conference. For many of them, it was their first time at a national conference. And we thought maybe it would be interesting to hear what their take on their experience was. So that's where we are. And I think our first person up to talk is Abby, right? Yes, I'm going to get it here. Yes, on the line we have Abby Yellman who's from Scott's Bus. Yes. Hi everyone, how are you? Yeah, you're unmuted Abby. Hi. There, Scott's Bus website. All right. Well, I just want to thank you guys first of all for including me today. Being awarded the Nebraska Library Commission Continuing Education and Training Grant to attend the ARSL conference in Omaha was amazing for me. I'm pretty new back to Nebraska. I've only been here in Scott's Bus about a year and a half. Being located out here in the Panhandle kind of makes travel to Omaha and Lincoln difficult, time-wise, but also financially. It's hard to get out there because you know you're going to stay in a hotel and pay for the conference and all of that. So I was very appreciative to receive the grant to attend. And the ARSL conference allowed me, you know, it was really neat to be able to go to a national conference in Omaha, which is not a bad drive, seven hours to get there, but it was great to be exposed to a lot of different librarians from all over the nation. I really met a really nice group from Louisiana, you know, people that I wouldn't normally get to sit and chat with and talk about ideas for your libraries and all those different kinds of things. The sessions were really good. I mean, I went to really good ones on fundraising and financial sustainability, which is the financial sustainability I think for any library is important right now. So any ideas we can get from that was great. And also they were from Colorado, which was kind of ironic because they're not that far away. I also went to building library awareness with Geek the Library campaign, which was great. A weeding session that was really good. And then also the technology sessions that were really great. The sessions, you know, sometimes they reinforced what you're already doing. But it also, there was things that were provided that gave us some new ideas and strategies to bring back and modify and try here in Scut's Fluff. Honestly, the most enjoyable part of the conference for me was the authors. I thought Joe Serita and Craig Johnson were amazing speakers. Joe is definitely a more academic research type of author, but I really enjoyed his speaking. He was engaging still. Sometimes when they're really academics, they kind of can talk too high for me. You know, I'm not very smart sometimes, but literally he was very engaging and enjoyable. Craig Johnson, he was amazing. He's more my kind of guy, really relatable, great author. But I also really enjoyed the fact that I got to talk with him and Judy, his wife, and talk about the possibility of them maybe coming to Scut's Fluff. They had been here a couple years ago, and I wasn't here yet, so I was really excited to talk to him about the possibility of him coming back maybe next spring. Again, an opportunity that I wouldn't have had to network with him without the grant money from the commission and also the attendance to the conference. So again, I just want to thank everybody at the Nebraska Library Commission. I know Laura's answered a bunch of questions for me regarding the grant, but really the process was simple, straightforward, easy to apply, easy to follow. The guidelines were clear. And again, without this grant, I probably would not have been able to go this year, so I appreciate it. Well, we're glad you came. Thank you, Abby. Thank you very much. Was there any particular session that really stood out for you or anything that you would say to people who were thinking about going to the ARSL conference next year? You know, honestly, the one that stood out the most for me, and I'm not sure that I... It was kind of a split session where some of it didn't apply in regards to the financial fundraising part, because the Scut's Fluff library just was redone. But the financial sustainability, I talked to Paul quite a bit. He had presented it. He's from Colorado. I talked to him quite a bit. I ran into him a couple of sessions later and got to speak to him about sustainability and just endowments and things like that. I mean, I thought that was really, really interesting because it's people that have gone through it. You're getting their experience of what they've done and then how we can maybe use some of that experience and use it for Scut's Fluff to sustain what we're doing here. So that one was really great for me. Good. I did want to show people, we're at the ARSL website here, that so many of the sessions had handouts and they are available online. So, you know, it's useful that you can get some of the materials that were covered later. See, I mean, a lot of people put their handouts online. Yeah, well, the conference people are very good about, I spoke as well, about contacting us as presenters and saying, you can get them to us ahead of time, we'll put them up there, or even if you have to wait until afterwards, we'll keep putting things up as they are sent from people, from the presenters. So if there's some that aren't up there yet, they may just not have gotten them yet. They could be on their way. Well, thank you, Abby. Did you have anything else that you wanted to include? I know that you had another meeting that you had to get to this morning yet, too. Yes, we also, we have an agenda review for our city council meeting, but I just again, wanted to thank you guys for allowing me to go on providing the grant. And I know you do a lot of hard work down there at the NLC. So we appreciate you, especially out here in the panhandle. So thanks again for everything you do. Well, thank you. That's great. Thanks. Okay, and now we're going to go to try Cindy. We're going to try Cindy. She was having a little trouble with her audio. So can we get Cindy? Are you there? I've unmuted you. I am. I'm very thankful that I finally got it connected. I don't know what the problem was. That's okay. You're good to go now. Thank goodness, because I hated to miss this. I'm sorry I missed the Scott's Bless presentation a little bit, but it sounded like she had a good time. So how was your experience today, RSL? Was this your first national conference? This was my first conference period. Having just taken over the library about a year and a half ago, I am new to all of this. So I have a different experience to where everything was new. I was disappointed. I couldn't attend every single session, because I think all of them would have made wonderful points for us. Being a community that's less than 600 people, I picked a few things that I thought were more important just to our patrons that are using the library in the last year and a half. I went to the first pre-conference with, I believe her name was Heather Woody, inspired for greatness, and she was a wonderful, wonderful... I don't even know if I want to call her a speaker, but a wonderful coach. Her big thing was, why not now? And one of the quotes she gave out there was, you cannot steer a parked car. So why are you sitting doing nothing when you could be doing something? I really enjoyed her quite a bit. She inspired me to come back and just get those ideas out there. I mean, the only thing they can do is shoot you down. I can say the same thing as it was a few... I can't remember if it was, I think the second day in, I went to... Oh, and you'll have to forgive me. Her name was Andrea Bretzler, is that right? Yeah, I believe so. Yeah, and I think it was called, The Future is Now. And I enjoyed her as well. She really did a lot of... I guess I'd say inspirational speaking and encouragement and coaching on how to really approach your library board when they're kind of laxidazile and you'd like to get them more involved. Afterwards, she took the time to talk to us and had a lot of great advice for us. So I really appreciated her quite a bit too. I think the other one I went to was, Dazzling Displays on a Dime. Being a very small library, it's very important that we stay within our small budget. And Leah Croats, is that right? Had a fantastic presentation on how to make your own posters using publisher. Now this is something I don't know anything about, so I am looking forward to trying to figure all that out. You know, something as simple as keeping your shelves nice and neat. I really thought, you know that's so true. Don't overcrowd. Keep things a little uncluttered. People don't want to come in and look at your workstation and just see things everywhere. They'd like to come in and have something catch their eye. One thing she said that I thought was really neat. As you know, we're working toward a new library and this is something I hope to use. In the present library, our shelving goes to the ceiling. There are no display areas. And she said, you know, don't have your shelves be, I don't know, like five or six feet tall, like eye level. And then, you know, you can absolutely read a cover better than you can read the spine. And maybe label your books by genre. And so people know right away, you know, whether it's a Christian or a mystery or something. Kind of route your displays too, she brought in. And so I'm looking forward to having the space to do something like that one of these days. Engaging your community was another one that I went to by Building Library Awareness by Jennifer Powell. They did a lot of get your geek. And I think it sounds like an incredible promotion for your library and advocacy to market, decorate, advocate. I'm not sure I can commit to that right now, but I thought it was a great idea. As you know, we're busy doing fundraisers and this is the end of the fourth quarter for grants and things like that. So I know people are busy everywhere. What else did we do? I enjoyed Chris Ripple's Accelerate Rearranging. I did that one because, of course, you know, with the new library, I'm looking for ideas. The firm that we're using doesn't have a lot of experience with libraries, but a lot of experience with buildings. And so he helped a lot with showing how to use Excel to kind of design your own little floor plant. I have yet to work on that. I'm not that great at it. But like he said, make a path, you know, for people to view things as they come through your library and then put some of your more important things toward the back. You know, those are just a few things that I've learned with this incredible, incredible conference. I'm looking forward to going again if it's ever in Nebraska. Again, that would be great. It's something that I can say with the scholarship that was granted. I would not have been able to attend at all without it. That is something that we just couldn't work into our budget and myself personally could not have afforded. So the fact that that scholarship was granted to me provided a huge service, not just for me, but for the library, for the community, because I did learn a lot. I'm looking forward to just doing more conferences in the future. I don't know how much you want to know because I could go on forever. I could go on to talk. Well, you know, we make these grants available to people because we think that it does help improve library service in the end. It gives people ideas. It gives people a chance to network. So really, it's not that we're not nice people, but we're not doing this out of the goodness of our hearts. We're doing it because we think it's useful and worthwhile and does pay off. Well, I hate to tell you. You guys are nice people. Without the Nebraska Library Commission, there are so many things that small and rural libraries would not be able to accomplish. And to have you guys there, I hate to say this basically at our beck and call and I know Krista, I'm on the phone with her a lot. That's okay. That's my job. It's wonderful. It's a wonderful service and I can't say you guys, like you said, it is a huge thing for the libraries. Well, that's good. I'm glad you had a good conference. Like you said, to networking, I met so many wonderful people out there that we exchanged emails so I can ask questions and just having that kind of support as well as the NLC is phenomenal to me. I'm very blessed in this library and I'm sure all the libraries in Nebraska feel the same way. Well, that's great. Well, thank you very much. You're welcome. You can stand the line. We might have some more questions for you later if that's cool. I will stay on the line. Thank you. Thanks. And now I think we'd like to go hear from Kirsten if we can. Hi, Kirsten. Hi, guys. Hello. Good morning. So how was your conference experience? Now, you commuted, right? I did. And I have to echo pretty much what has been said before. I was really, when you talked about the resources being shared after the conference, that was in my notes to talk about because as we all know, when you're balancing a notebook on your knees in a crowded room trying to write down everything frantically, you sometimes get back and think, I have no idea what that word was. So the one that I came away with the most was the family read with Heidi Shewitt from Minnesota. And she was just phenomenal. But I came back and promptly emailed her a whole list of questions. And she emailed me right back and said, please keep in touch if there's anything else. And sent me my own separate email with the slides on it. So I didn't even have to go back to the website to pull it up. And I've said it before. I'll say it again. The generosity in our profession is there's no words for it. If they want, if they share an idea, they give you the whole idea. They don't just say, here's what I did, good luck. They detail it. And there's never a question of you can use it. They're like, take it. So anyway, it's the same with the NLA conference. I always come away thinking, gosh, people are way smarter than I am and much more original. But I talked to our other staff members that went and got some notes. And the dazzling displays was one that two of our staff members went to, and they were both just blown away with it. And they said it was really, really helpful and really well done. Karen, my director, referenced both of the authors and said they were amazing, that they were really well done. Although we both agreed, she and I both thought we would have liked more breakout sessions and maybe a little shorter keynote time because we wanted more time to network with people. So not a criticism, just a, you know, I thought Mary Stanger was really fun. But the words that I wrote down when I was thinking about her was bravado. And I just, I respected her just going in and taking charge and making it what her people needed, not just what the board thought she should be doing or even the city or the town. Mary is the director of the best small library in America, right? Yes. Yes. Thank you for clarifying that. Exactly. And again, thank you for the grant. It was fabulous. It was just a great experience. And the other note that I made to myself when I came back was it's always so refreshing or I can't think of what I'm looking for right now. But to hear the common ground, when you work in a small library, sometimes it feels like I'm the only one who only has two people show up for a program that I've worked three weeks on. Or we're the only ones that, you know, my story time numbers are dropping. And I go to these conferences and when people are kind enough to be honest and say, we tried this, this is where we came out, it wasn't as accessible as we hoped, but this is what part of it worked. It kind of gives you the thought that, oh, okay, I'm not the only one. Does that make sense? Yes. Is that concept coming? Do you understand what I'm trying to say? Well, I think you do. You get reinforcement. But you also get encouragement. And what's the word I'm trying to find? I know. Inspiration, that's a better word, yeah. Inspiration, that's exactly it. And I just appreciate the honesty of people when they say, here's the best part of the program, here's the part that we would change. And with Heidi Shewitt, she went to the seven library regions that participated in the Family Read program and said to them, tell me what worked, tell me what didn't work. And they were all very honest. We would change the timeframe. We would do this differently. And that was really, really helpful to someone like me who is a one-woman band to kind of know where to start and where not to start. Anyway, but it was just, it was really interesting. The other one that I really enjoyed that kind of surprised me was the laughter workshop. Yeah. Which was the last session on Thursday. And it was really, really interesting. And I thought a really fun outreach, the presenter, I'm sorry, whose name has completely escaped me, talked about taking it to senior centers. And I thought what a great thing to do to do the intergenerational outreach because we do a lot of outreach here with the daycare centers and I read at our Head Start Center or whatever. And sometimes we kind of forget that piece of the puzzle. And I just thought it was really, really a cool, practical idea. The laughter for the health of it? Yes, exactly. We have a handout online here. Yeah. And she was really concrete about how it worked and how you could put it into practice. But those are pretty much my notes. Is there anything else you'd like me to cover or is there anything I left out? Well, we really were interested in your experience. Did you feel that a couple of your colleagues went too? Did they have the same kind of experience? They did. They did. And we all talked to each other before when we were talking about participating in this. And unfortunately, the two of the others were supposed to be here with me today but because of scheduling things. Yeah. It's just me. But we all agreed on the same things, the networking, the diversity of the programs that were offered was really helpful because we could all go to different sessions and then come back together and have things to share that we could all apply here when we came back to work. So the other session I wanted to mention that I went to that was really helpful was the makers, mentors, and more because they defined STEM and STEAM and those terms which I kind of read about, they made it very easy to understand and I found out why the Lego Club which I funded with a grant from the library commission two years ago is so spot on for right now even just the fact that we put our Legos out all the time and kids just come in and just know where they are now. So thank you for that too. And I echo everybody else without the commission. I don't know. I'd be lost. So you guys do an amazing job. Thank you. Well, thank you. But we think the librarians do amazing jobs and that this is the kind of thing that helps them. And so it was a good way to spend the money. We felt that we really were going to get a return here in terms of the services that would be provided to people. So it was not totally just a gracious gesture. It was an investment, okay? Exactly. Invested. Because there's no way we would have been able to take four of us on our own and that was just huge. So thank you again. No, that's great. I'm glad that you feel and we'll look for some of your good displays. We have one up now as a matter of fact. We're a couple actually. You need to take pictures and we need to get them up on Pinterest. That seems to be where people are sharing their display ideas is on Pinterest. So we'll be looking for that. We will start doing that. Thank you. Oh, you're welcome. Well, that's great. Lauren is up next. If Kirsten, you're... Hi. Okay. Hi, Lauren. And here's your library website. How you doing? I am doing fine. It's been fun listening to all of this. So how was your experience at the ARS? It was amazing. I want to thank you guys so much for the grant funds. I've been a member of ARS for a couple years now and was really excited, like you were, to hear that the conference would be so close this year. But then I started to worry about, you know, with the conference that's just tailored to libraries our size, how was I going to get to all the sessions? So with the grant funds, we were able to stretch our budget so that we could send three members of our staff. So that was amazing. We love the keynote speakers. And like everyone, the ability to visit with librarians in a sit-down situation is just great. You get so much information that way. There were two sessions that I want to mention. But first, I want to say, I think it's interesting that everyone has picked different sessions. Yeah. And you guys didn't prompt me about what sessions to talk about. So I'm sure you didn't prompt anyone else. No, we didn't. I think it's really interesting. What was going to be talked about. The first one I wanted to mention was the superhero leadership. Uh-huh. With Lisa Lewis from Arizona, she compared the work of supervisors or library supervisors to various superheroes in their traits. Both good ones and bad ones. Some of the traits included sense of purpose or fairness or insecurity. That's one of my favorites. Conviction, light-heartedness. But I think my favorite one that she talked about was courage. She had it broken out into three different types. The courage to try, the courage to trust, and the courage to tell or to speak out. There was so much good information. And I'm working on tweaking the staff in service of superhero librarians, translating these traits into how we interact with our public. So that one I'm looking forward to making some good use of here in our own facility. The second one I really was impressed with was small libraries can make a big impact with Joan Weaver of Kansas. If anyone went there, I can't imagine you wouldn't agree that this lady is just amazing. We had tried to do some old histories in the past with the StoryCorps program, and it didn't turn out as well as we had hoped. In listening to this presentation, I discovered it was because we had done virtually everything the wrong way. I can't begin to list all the information she gave us, but I would really recommend that everyone visit the Kinsley Library website, and I think she has, yeah, there are handouts there on the screen. Take a look at this program. It is just amazing. And the other thing I wanted to mention that there was one quote that came out of the whole conference that I really liked and is just perfect for dealing with our fellow staff and with our patrons and with our constituents out in town. It says, treat every day as a job interview. I think that just says it all. Unmuted. Wow, that's, yeah. So you say you spent a couple of staff members. Have you, you know, did the three of you have similar experiences or did you do different things? Yeah, at the end of every day, we just sat in our hotel room and babbled about the sessions we had gone to. We kept tripping over each other and trying to share the information we'd gleaned. It was just great, and then the whole drive home we were talking about it. We're really going to try and work this into our budget so that we can go every, you know, two or three years to one of these, because it is just amazing. That's great. You mentioned your hotel room. Nobody else has really said anything about the hotel so far. I thought the facility was very nice. It was nice to have it all right there together. And I thought the food was good. Yes. Yeah, we thought so too. Our only complaint about the facility, and we all three agreed on this, it was really an uncomfortable setup for the vendors. Yes. They were in a hallway that was maybe a little bit narrow. Yes. I think if they had been able to have a space that was like one of the meeting rooms designated to them, that might have made it easier. I mean, I get the fact that people are constantly walking by them so they have to maybe get more of a chance to interact, but it did make it awkward to get through the hallways and to get to places. Yes, very much so. On the other hand, sometimes crowds are, they have an excitement. They have an energy in them. There was a lot of that definitely at this conference. Yeah. Everyone seemed to be having a wonderful time. Yeah. I was just excited about the whole event. I had that impression. And I hope people, a lot of people, several people said to me that, oh, Omaha was so nice. Surprise. And I was glad they thought so. But, well, I think it's neat that people did get things out of it and that I think we're going to see some of this stuff put in practice here so it will be like the little ripples in a pond moving out from it. I think it would be interesting to do the same sort of thing six months from now and see what has changed in the different libraries. Oh, do a follow-up? Yeah, do a follow-up. Okay, then six months from now all of you guys will be contacting you to give us an update. And what you've done. Well, we'll see. Pressure's on. But really, we do love to see pictures and displays. Pinterest seems to be the place where people are putting pictures of their displays. But we love to see pictures of your programs and things on your websites or in the system newsletters. Well, I know a lot of these libraries, websites, have blogs built into them. So we'll see a post about what you've done. We think that's very cool. And we're glad you went. And we appreciate the work you're doing there. So thank you very much. Well, while I still have the phone, I want to thank you also from everyone here in Wayne for all you do for the libraries. We feel real blessed right now that we're still standing. Yes. Oh, we're glad you are too. But we think our library is what it is in great part because of the support we've had from the commission over the years. Well, thank you. That's very nice of you. We're happy to help. We're glad to help. It is a point in trying to get... I mean, the reason we all do this is so that we can provide good library service to the library users in Nebraska, to the people of Nebraska. And, you know, it's important, I guess, not to forget them ever. But we're really glad that you had a good conference. And thank you for sharing with us today. Okay. You're welcome. You want Dave? Do we have Dave? Are you there, Dave? Yes. Hi. There you are. Hi, Dave. So how was your conference experience? Well, I wasn't a scholarship person for the fact that I was a presenter. And so that's the thing I'd like to also to recommend to people out there that if you have an idea, put in a suggestion, you get your way paid for free. And so that's how we could afford to go. And then I also got involved in the planning committee and helped do things there. So, I mean, for me, that was a really worthwhile conference because I've learned kind of some of that stuff that I've never been involved in before. And the other thing is that I found so impressive. I've been to ALA and PLA. And all the time I'm sitting in there, I keep thinking, boy, we just don't have the funds to do any of those kind of programs that they're talking about. They explain their marketing budget. That's our whole book budget. You know, little things like that. The first one, the very first session I heard, I thought, hey, we could actually do that literally in a month. We could get that started. Wouldn't cost us hardly anything at all. And every single thing that came up, it was something that we could actually do right then and there. And at this conference, I actually felt like we were one of the big huge libraries compared to everybody else because I kept running into the one person or the three-person libraries. But every now and then, there was a city with 25,000 population that had a lot of staff and they were doing a lot of variety of programs, too. So that's the kind of thing that I really felt more comfortable at than at ALA or PLA. Yes. I think one of the exciting things about this conference is it really aimed at so many of the libraries in Nebraska. But it was about small and rural. And these are people who understand the situation of the small library. Right. I mean, it's probably 90 to 95% of our libraries in Nebraska are all in that category. Oh, yeah. And these are programs that you can just literally walk into with literally no funds at all or just very minimal type funds like the keeping records, the DVD or the videos of the people, the historical perspective, the military veterans of that. We've actually turned that over to one of our staff who is completing his master's looking at academic work. And so that's going to be his kind of assignment because that's a nice tie-in to the background of the history. And so that's his little thing that he's going to run with right now. So, and then when I came back, I gave the suggestion to our children's library. This is what this library in Arizona all is doing for videos for their kids. And then at the Nebraska Library Conference with the library there that was doing their tab programs, I gave them some ideas on different things like that. So that's the thing I like picking up at these smaller size library conferences because they are things that we can use right away. Mm-hmm. Well, you presented, how was your presenting, how was the experience of presenting there? It went really pretty well. Like she said from Wayne, my only real complaint was it with the vendors as crowded as it was out there. And then if they were sitting right next to your room, you could actually hear them through the doors at times. Oh. And so there was a couple of times I would, as a room monitor there, I would get up the door and down a little bit and go back in. But for the presentation part, I don't get tongue tied when I'm doing those types of things. I can kind of handle doing those. Yeah. So it went really pretty well. And what was interesting is that, like in my presentation, I did the seed saving one. Yeah. There was probably 45 to 46 people and everybody walked away with seeds. Everybody got something. They got handouts. Mm-hmm. I've had comments back. I've actually sent feeds out to other libraries in the United States that they weren't able to be at this one for some reason. They were at another one and they were interested in getting more information on it. So it's just kind of that nice little networking type of thing. Because every time I sat down at a meal, I was with somebody else from another table or a country or a country state or something like that. Yeah. I felt that that was very, very comfortable too. I tried to sit with different people at the different meals and some conferences maybe you wouldn't feel okay about sitting, just walking up to a table of people you didn't know. But this one for some reason, I felt fine about it and met a lot of neat people that way. Well, when you sit down at a table and you start talking about a program, you say, yeah, we only had three people show up for that. Yeah. And they're going oh geez, it would be great to get three people to show up for a program. Yeah. We only had two. And for those very small libraries that only have 600, us with 13,000, we have programs that nobody comes to or one or two people come to. And we just keep, as I call it, keep trying. Keep shooting enough times in that marrow and something could have finally closed the service. Well, that's great. I'm glad that you had a good experience and that, you know, you feel you've got some things that you brought back. But it seems like I'm already making plans for next year. I'm sorry, I talked over you. I'm already making plans for next year. I've already got it done on the schedule. I'm already thinking of program ideas possibly to put in for a potential presentation again. So at least I'm going to get my pay way paid again. So you'd like to encourage people to go ahead and present at the conferences? Yep. And I could see, especially these really small libraries, a group of people together that you're all that same size type thing and what are those problems that you're always running into. Look at those types of things and how do you work together as a group, you know, to be able to do some of this thing. Some of the things I'd like to see down is a cooperative buying effort through a bunch of libraries. So you can only afford to buy one or two things. You're going to have to pay a higher price. But if 40 libraries want to buy the same thing, you can get it at a discount. Good examples overdrive. Yes. Well, you know, you felt that the talking with other libraries is really important at the conference. Yeah. Because it really opens up your eyes to see that you've tried this or you're thinking of trying this but you don't quite know how to pull it off. When you're a one person library, how do you get things done with programming and things like that? How do you get all those jobs done? And you rely on volunteers for some of our programs. We're lucky enough, we have ten staff and one of my requirements for our staff is everybody has to take a potential program that they can do and then we find a time to fit it into the schedule and we have two or three staff that their program, they normally work daytime hours, but their program would probably only work at night so we actually pay them to come in and give a couple extra hours to do that program at night. Well, that's great. Well, thank you, Dave. I'm glad that everybody seemed to have a really good experience with the ARSL conference and they're ready to go out and do it again and they would encourage other people to do it. So, thank you very much. I'm going to talk a little bit about the continuing education grant if we can and then we'll be able to round off this program today. I do have just one comment that did come in during when Dave was talking for Nebraska people. Brian Moss, who's at our eastern library system had just commented, he's looking forward to seeing you, Dave and everyone at the NLA conference which will actually be next year in South Sioux City. We're going up to the eastern part of the state for our state conference. I agree, yes. That's going to be fun. About the continuing education and training grants because that, yes, that's kind of what this program has been about, the people who got the grants to go to the conference. We do make continuing education and training grants what we have made continuing education and training grants every year. This is usually state money, sometimes there's some federal money involved and as you know, things always do depend on whether we get funded, whether we can then fund these programs we have. We think this program is important because we think the continuing education is one of the ways that librarians can improve their skills, which then helps them improve their services to the people that they're serving and that's really the bottom line. As I said, this is not charity. This is not really totally out of the goodness of our hearts. It's because we're making an investment in the librarians and their skill levels. We try to make the grants easy, fairly easy to apply for. This one right now there's no we'll have the schedule out soon for next year for the grants. There were directions and we tried to write out exactly. I tried to make it really clear what it would cover, what it wouldn't cover, because I didn't want there to be any surprises for people. I wanted people to know exactly what was going to happen. And this of course was all for one event. Very often our CE grants will be for either going to a conference or doing a continuing education program at your library. For instance, if you all had some if everyone at your library had some skills they wanted to learn more about and you had a speaker or a teacher at your library for a particular program. The year before we have funded an in-service day at Lincoln City Libraries for instance. We're going to have an Encompass Live about that because that was a very interesting program. So these are the kinds of things that we will fund. We try to have the schedule out so you know when you can apply for the grants. We try to make the guidelines pretty clear. We have not really had any upper level of how big a grant we would make. On the other hand most of the grants have not been huge. You know, maybe a thousand dollars or so. And the idea is just if this is something that's going to improve skills what do we look for when we're looking at grant applications and let me just say that we think that the simply the process of applying for a grant is maybe an educational experience for some people. And the CE grants are very easy grants to apply for. More and more as libraries want to do things and don't have funding. They are applying for grants to a lot of different places. And writing grants is a skill, like anything. You learn how to do it. And this is a great place to start. You will never get a more sympathetic reading of a grant proposal than you will if you send in a proposal to the Nebraska Library Commission. In fact, if you want to send in a proposal and ask us to read it and tell you how you could strengthen your proposal we will do that for you. But what do we really look for? Well in this case I looked for where people really got to go to this conference and get something out of it. Generally what we look for is do people have a good, viable idea and have they shown us that they really have a plan that it looks like they have a really good shot at carrying through on their idea. That's what we're really looking for in the grant. Sometimes that means that we really want people to understand what all the expenses will be and really give us a good budget. Sometimes that means that we want to know that people really have a good grasp of what all the steps in the project will be and how and who's going to be in charge of them and what order they have to get done in and that they have a reasonable schedule to finish it. That kind of thing, that's what we're looking for in a grant proposal. We do try to make grants for services to children and youth and we have sometimes grants for library development. It does depend on whether we get funding for our grants but we do like to see the libraries come up with their own ideas and be able to carry them out. I don't know if anybody has any questions about grants at any time. They can give me a call and send me an email. We're happy to talk to you about them. I'm glad this worked out for everybody. I want to thank the Association of Waterloo and Small Libraries for coming to Omaha and I hope that Omaha was good to them, I think it was. And I just think this is a great organization that we do want to support if we can and try to get people to the conferences because they are so worthwhile for so many of the librarians in Nebraska. Next year's ARSL meeting is going to be in Tacoma, Washington which, yeah, that's a bit of a stretch for travel for some of us but we'll see what we can do. But you can still apply for one of our grants and see if you can get some of your funding through us, yeah, to go there. Mm-hmm. And we hope that having heard that some people had very successful conference experiences that you can then go and show your funders why this would be a good thing for you to be able to do. Mm-hmm. So... What are the questions? No, we have a comment. Tina Hansen who is actually the current president of ARSL is on with us right now. She's here. Great. And she just typed in and said, thanks for allowing me to be a fly on the wall today. We're glad to have you. Glad to have anyone come. Glad to hear each of your persons reflections on their experience and hope to see many of you at future ARSL conferences which we're just hoping would happen, yeah. Yeah. And thanks to all of us for their assistance, yes. We did the commission since this was kind of on the border of Iowa and Nebraska, there was help from both sides the State Library of Iowa and we're helping to do certain things to get the conference going as well and we were happy to help, of course, since they were here in our home state. Yeah. And so, let's all look forward to next year. Yes. Okay. So thanks to everybody, thanks to Abby and Cindy and Kirsten and Lauren and Dave. Of course. Thanks. Don't forget anyone. We hope that you all had an interesting and do look at the ARSL website for the handouts from if you didn't get to attend this session. I know some of the sessions people mentioned I did attend but I heard about a lot of other ones too that seemed to be very, very popular and got a lot of good info that people were, as one of the persons said, I wanted to go to everything and I couldn't, and how am I supposed to do that? Listen, you know, one of the most fascinating things I went to was the one on Model Rocketry which, you know, it's not really my bag, but it was how this man had put together this really amazing program I thought was just a great story and really an interesting session. So thanks to everybody. Yes. And I guess that's it for today. Thank you so much for attending. Just type in Encompass Live. Just Google Encompass Live, yeah. It'll bring it up. So thank you everyone for attending and hearing all about the ARSL this morning. That will wrap it up for today. The show has been recorded as usual. So you will be able to watch recording afterwards if you want to or share it with any of your colleagues who couldn't make it today, just like going to conference. If you couldn't make it right now, you can watch the recording. So that will wrap it up for today and I hope you'll join us next week when, and this was mentioned by Abby or Cindy, I forget, we will have online with us next week Mary Beth Stanger who is the director of the Southern Area Public Library this year's Library Journal Small Best Small Library in America. So she will be with us next week, so if you weren't able to see her speak at ARSL, she'll be here on Encompass Live for the hour. How they pulled it off, how the cool things are doing up there. They are a very, very small library in a very, very small town. It says their community has 498 populations. So we're talking small, yeah. So I hope you join us next week for that show. You can register right there on our website. And if you are a Facebook user, please do like us on Facebook. Encompass Live does have a Facebook page, and we do post onto there when we have new shows coming up. Reminders of when a show is starting, like this morning I posted and said join us right now. People can come in and just on the fly and join. And when our recordings are available, we post them on here as well, so that you can find out when they are ready to go. So, thank you very much for attending, and hopefully we will see you next week on Encompass Live. Goodbye Jeremy. Bye. Thank you very much, and bye bye.