 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. We're a webinar, a webcast, an online show, whatever you want to call us. We are online and we're live here every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. We do live sessions on Wednesdays and then we record our shows every week. So if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. You can always come back to our webpage and go into our archive sessions and see recordings of any of our shows that we've done. We put up the recordings, we put up any slides or presentations or documents that people may have, and also we link to any websites that may be relevant to a session. We do a mixture of things here, presentations, interviews, mini-training sessions, demos, anything that is library related we will have on the show. And we do bring in guest speakers sometimes from outside the Nebraska Library Commission or the Nebraska area, and we sometimes have commission staff. This morning we have a commission-centric session, Nebraska-centric, definitely. Next to me is Susan Nicely, who at our online services librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Hello, Susan. Hi, everybody. And she's going to tell us about discount shopping with the Nebraska Library Commission. Some great deals and things you can get on all sorts of stuff, library related things through the commission. And I had mentioned earlier, and I'll mention it again here while we're on the recording. You'll notice if you are a regular viewer of Encompass Live, we do not have a camera view. We had some technical difficulties with our software for running our camera this morning. So unfortunately, you will not have our faces on the screen for you. It'll just be the slides today. We hope that we'll have things back up to speed and working correctly for next week's show. So I will just hand over to Susan to take it away. Okay, thanks, Christa. As Christa said, my name is Susan Nicely, and I work in the Technology and Access Services Department of the Nebraska Library Commission. And one area that I'm responsible for is discount opportunities on databases, books and supplies, conferences. And so that is kind of what constitutes our discount shopping program and what I'm going to talk about today. There we go. Christa and I were just talking before the show started, and we've done a version of this program before, back in 2009. In many ways, the program has continued on in the same vein as it has been chugging along in for quite some time. But we did want to revisit this program on Encompass Live because we do know that library directors, library staff members come and go. And so people who've been around for a while know about this program and the opportunities that are available through it. But we want to make sure that we periodically get the word out to catch new people that might not be as aware of what to look for. When I talk about our discount program, I really like to start with the Nebraska Library Commission mission statement. It's two sentences long, and I have it on this slide. And I just want to go ahead and read it to you. The mission of the Nebraska Library Commission is statewide promotion, development and coordination of library and information services. As the state library agency, the commission is an advocate for the library and information service needs of Nebraska. I really like to pair the mission statement with this program because I think this program really clearly fulfills this mission and works towards meeting it. One of the big challenges in Nebraska is that we have a relatively small population. We have lots of small libraries, which means small budgets, small staff, not a lot of staff members sometimes, not necessarily a lot of library hours open every week. And so that does provide some special challenges. And so if we are able to make people's jobs easier and help their budgets go farther, then that directly contributes to helping them meet the needs of their patrons, Nebraska residents in terms of making services available to them and getting that information out to them. So we try to work to get pricing that is affordable for our libraries. We try to get information out to libraries about discounts that they may want to take advantage of. And we also really do strongly advocate for Nebraska libraries with the vendors who don't often have an understanding of what we mean in Nebraska when we say small library. And that really comes into play when we talk about cost and some of their pricing strategies. We've had vendors who consider a small library, any library serving 20,000 pop served or smaller. And you just don't lump in Nebraska, you don't lump a library that serves 20,000 and has a budget that is supported by a pop served of 20,000 into the same category as a library that serves 1,000. They're not going to be able to afford and pay for the same price is not going to work for both of those libraries. And so that's one of the ways that I think we really do strongly advocate and try to educate vendors. And that's an ongoing process because as many of you know, there's a lot of staff turnover with library vendors and sales representatives. And so oftentimes we'll work with one sales representative for a couple of years and they'll start getting the picture. They'll try to sell a product in Nebraska at a price that's not affordable. And then finally they'll start getting the idea that they need lower prices if they want to drum up business. So we'll get them educated and then they move on and we get another vendor in and start the process over again. But we are in a good position to really try to drive that point home with vendors and so sometimes with greater and sometimes with lesser success, we're able to sometimes get them to modify their pricing to be more affordable in Nebraska. I thought I'd give a little bit of history about this program. And so what I did was I have to admit I wasn't energetic enough to actually go down into our paper archives, but I did poke around online in some of our online newsletters archives. And I did find our department technology and access services used to be the network services department. We used to have a newsletter called Nebraska Library Commission Network Services News, abbreviated as N-Cubed. And I found a July, August 1996 newsletter online and in that newsletter there was an article talking about referencing summer 1995, talked about the Nebraska Library Commission Steering Committee discussing the possibility of offering statewide first search database trials. So this was kind of the beginning of offering database trials, trying to promote products to libraries and see what we could do cooperatively to make services available. And in that article when they were discussing the Steering Committee's recommendations, they did directly tie this trial and the first search service to the Library Commission's mission statement. So they were thinking about this program in terms of our mission from the very beginning. The first first search trial ran from February 1st through April 30th, 1996, and they reported that 155 libraries participated. Back then it looks like people actually had to sign up to participate so they really were able to track those numbers. So this was a big deal. This was really the start of that sort of broadcasting database trial opportunities statewide and trying to get libraries interested, getting feedback, etc. I didn't include this information on the slide, but it was interesting in the January 1997 issue of the n-cubed newsletter. I also found references to discount on registration fees for the Computers and Library Conference, which is a conference discount that we still offer today. There was also an article talking about the CD-ROM group purchase that had just taken place. Back in the day we used to work with another library network based in Colorado and they would coordinate actual CD-ROM purchases and we'd get the physical CD-ROMs and we would package them up and send them out. You remember using CD-ROMs in the library? I worked in you. That's the way to do it. So back in the mid-1990s we were really getting started with this program and it has grown since that time. So there are really, I would say, three strands to the discount purchasing program. We offer discounts on databases and electronic resources and I would say this is by far the most part of the program that the most libraries participate in and take advantage of. It's where the most savings derives from and it's also where the most staff time gets devoted. We spend more time on this strand of the program than on the others. We also have discounts that we offer on books and supplies and we also regularly offer discounts on conferences. So I'm going to go ahead and move through these three different types of discounts throughout the program today and give you a little bit more information. So what I want to do now is actually direct you towards the pages on our website where you can get information about the program. So this page is just a screenshot of our discounts on databases and eResources page and I'm going to go ahead and jump out to that page now. I'm going to go ahead and start out on our main Nebraska Library Commission webpage because I want to show you how you can navigate from this point to the discount pages. Over on the left side menu we do have a discount group purchases category and as you'll see we have a flyout menu. And over on the right under discounts we've got our three different strands of the program books and supplies, conferences, databases and eResources. So I want to go ahead and start out with the databases and eResources part of the program. This is an InVex page and you'll see we've also got links that let you jump directly to discounts on books and supplies and discounts on conferences. So we've tried to make it a little bit circular so you can move from one part of the program to the other. This page is an alphabetical list and what we try to do is we try to list both vendor names and database online resource names. So depending on whether you're thinking about a database by its specific name, for instance, maybe you're thinking of Grove Music Online. You can find it alphabetically under G. That's actually a product that's sold by Oxford University Press now and so you'll also find a listing for Oxford University Press. So we've tried to provide cross-referencing so that you can find products that you're interested in. This page is particularly useful I think for new staff members, new directors that move to Nebraska and they want to get an overview of what products we have discounts on, what vendors we have relationships with. It kind of gives a good overview for what opportunities are already in place. Let me go ahead and just jump to one of the specific pages so you can see the type of information that we provide. So I'm going to go ahead and go to Britannica Online. On a vendor specific page, the information that we include varies but it usually includes some version of the following. We'll have a list of products that are available at discounted prices through the program. Descriptions of the product will often link to the vendor's website for more information about the product. We'll have information on pricing. In this particular case, pricing is based on weighted number of users and so we'll talk about how to determine the number of users you're going to base your pricing on. So for instance, four-year colleges count 100% of their full-time equivalent students. Two-year colleges count 75%. Public libraries use 7% of their total population served. It's not at all unusual for vendors to not want us to include pricing on the public website and so you will not always find pricing actually listed on the website. Sometimes you'll just see a statement that says, contact Susan Misley for pricing and there's a link to my email so that you can email me to request pricing. And when you do that, it's usually a good idea to provide me with what your FTE is if you're an academic institution, what your population served is if you're a public library or what your student enrollment is. And then I can get pricing to you either based on a priceless that I already have in my files or in some cases I have to contact the database vendor individually each time an institution is interested in pricing in order to get a quote. In this particular case, Britannica has provided us with pricing and they don't object to us putting it up on the website and so you actually have the pricing up here on the website. And because the pricing is predictable and it's uniform depending on whether you're a new subscriber or a renewed library, we actually have been able to put up an online order form. This is one of the few products that we actually still use online order forms for so in this case you can just fill out an online order form and submit it online. Usually, again, there's information here saying contact Susan Nisley if you want to order and I'll send you as an email attachment paper order form to sign and fax or scan an email back to me. We usually also have information on the subscription term that the vendor is working with and the order deadline. I'll often try to track down information on how to contact tech support. If the information is easily available and I'm able to track it down, I'll provide information on how to access usage statistics. And in this case, I've got access URLs that you use. So whatever information I'm able to find, I will link to it from this page. It does vary from vendor to vendor though. But that's kind of a good overview of the type of information you can find on a particular page for a vendor. Just to give you a little bit of some background information on the types of discounts we are able to arrange. And I've kind of broken these into categories to give you some background information. A lot of times, vendors are just going to offer a standard percentage discount off-list price. This can vary anywhere from 5% to up to 25%. Offer times will work with a vendor and they're hoping that there will be a lot of new subscribers. And if that's the case, they may offer a bigger discount off-list price if we're able to bring a bunch of new subscribers to the table. Sometimes if there's only one or two libraries that are interested in a particular product, which again is not unusual in a smaller state like Nebraska, they may say after we've promoted the product, offer the trial on it, they may say, okay, well, we'll give anyone who wants to subscribe 5% off. I'm usually fairly disappointed in a 5% discount. That's kind of the... Is it even worth the hassle? You kind of think if the subscription cost is low, 5% isn't very much money saved. If subscription cost is high, then 5% can be significant. 5% isn't great, but it's better than nothing and so that's when you sort of think, well, anything we can do, if we can help save a little bit of money, it's still worth the effort. 25% then you're really starting to talk significant savings, so it really varies. Oftentimes vendors do break pricing into tiers based on population served or number of students. This is where we can sometimes really negotiate on behalf of smaller Nebraska libraries. As I said, sometimes libraries, sometimes vendors will have pricing tiers that are way too broad or their lowest tier really is not conducive to our smaller Nebraska libraries. Maybe they'll say, any library that serves 1,000 or fewer students, we're going to charge this price to. A school that has 1,000 students enrolled usually has a much larger budget than a school that has 150 students enrolled. That's a case where sometimes we've been able to get vendors to offer special tiers that they just offer to Nebraska libraries. ProQuest has done this with their SIRS databases. They have for a number of years offered special pricing for school libraries serving fewer than 300 students. This has really been a significant savings opportunity and as a result we have quite a few Nebraska schools that do subscribe to SIRS products through us because they serve fewer than 300 students. And it's one of the few products that's really affordable to them in the state. We often do have vendors who are going to say that the discount is contingent on the number of libraries that participate in a subscription. This is particularly the case if they're trying to introduce a new database into the market. EBSCO is a good example of this. As a rule, I think EBSCO gives everyone a standard 5% discount off this price in the state of Nebraska just because Nebraska does so much business with EBSCO. Oftentimes they'll have a new product that they're introducing or a product that they want to promote and try to drum up business for. And so they'll approach us and say we'd like to offer a trial of this product and we'd like to also offer special discounting depending on a number of participants. And so they'll give us a scale, something like 1 to 5 new subscribers will give you the standard 5% discount, 6 to 10 new subscribers will give you 10%, 11 to 15, 15%, etc. And this is a model used by other vendors too. This model tends to be a little bit difficult to achieve in Nebraska just because finding, especially if it's a specialized database, finding enough libraries to enter into a new subscription at any one time and order it to achieve the higher discount sometimes is a challenge. I was wondering how many libraries do we really still have lots of libraries that haven't already jumped on to the databases that they already know about and need? Well, and that's the thing. Some of that sort of basic all-purpose databases already have quite a few subscribers and so some of these tend to be the more unique narrowly focused products which means again you're going to have a smaller pool of interested libraries. These discounts can also be a little bit challenging because you can't always tell libraries exactly what they're going to pay because you don't know how many libraries are going to subscribe so you don't know what your discounts are going to be ahead of time. And so there's a little bit more back and forth communication between me and the libraries and the vendors just saying, okay, are you willing? If we get a 10% discount, this would be your price. Who's interested? Depending on the numbers, we may have to go back then and say, okay, we only got 5%. Are you still interested? So there's a little bit of back and forth there. But again, that is the staff time we put in to try to make these deals happen. We're also able to sometimes piggyback on discounts that other library networks in other states have organized. If you've been around the library business for a while, you may be familiar with other library networks. For example, Lyrisis is a library network that provides services to libraries. Primarily, it used to be the southeast and the east coast, central eastern coast. Minitex is a library network based out of Minneapolis and they provide services to libraries in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota. There's also MCLS, which is the Midwest Collaborative for Library Services, something like that. And it started out serving just Michigan and now it serves Michigan and Indiana. In any event, these networks are usually nonprofit organizations that have been formed in order to coordinate services for libraries. They arrange discounts, they offer training, et cetera. So in some ways, many of the services that we offer, the difference is they're not affiliated necessarily with a state government. They're freestanding. Sometimes libraries have to pay dues in order to be considered members of these networks. These networks, although they're not nonprofit, they do have to generate income in order to pay for salaries, et cetera. And so sometimes these networks do also keep commissions. So a network may arrange a discount of 10%. This is an example for the Mango Languages discount. I think MCLS receives a 10% discounted off list price and then they pass 5% on to the libraries and they keep 5% for themselves, which is something that we as a state agency don't have to do. Nevertheless, it's still really valuable for us to partner with some of these networks on discounts that they've arranged because they are able to bring so many libraries together into a group that they're often able to achieve bigger discounts. The Oxford University Press discount is coordinated by Lyrisis, and that is one of those discounts where some of the products are available at 25% off list price to libraries. Lyrisis is already going to be keeping some sort of commission as a result of that discount, but libraries are still getting 25% discount off list price. So that's an example of why it sometimes behooves us to partner with other libraries because they've got a library network, because they've got a larger pool of libraries that they can bring together and therefore they can negotiate larger discounts. So when our small group in Nebraska libraries can link up with their giant group of states that they cover, yeah. And our members don't usually have to pay any kind of membership fee to take advantage of that discount. And we do benefit the network by contributing libraries to the pool of libraries that are subscribed. So we added their numbers too. So it can help them as well if it's one of those situations where the more libraries can get the cheaper everyone can get. Absolutely. And they only have to deal with us at the library commission instead of the multiple individual libraries. So we'll organize it. So we serve as that central point so they don't have to email back and forth with, say, 15 libraries. They just email back and forth with us and then we coordinate the communication on our end. So again, that works out well. Finally, sometimes vendors are willing to give us a price quote based on the pool of population served of all the interested libraries. And they then let us allocate the pricing. So for example, and this is not a real example because numbers never come out nicely rounded like this. But for example, say a vendor usually says, okay, if your library serves a thousand, zero to a thousand pop served, we're going to charge you $800. Say you've got four libraries that serve populations of 250 each, normally they each have to pay $800 because they're in that zero to 1,000 pop served category. So they each have to pay $800 in order to subscribe to a particular product. Occasionally a vendor will say, okay, if we just have to deal with you, just let us know the total pop served of all the libraries that want to participate. And so we'll say, okay, we've got four libraries and their combined pop served is a thousand and they'll say, okay, that's $800. And then we're able to proportionately divide it up and each library pays then $200. So when we're able to get a vendor to offer us a deal like that, that's when we really see some really low prices. So there are products out there that we have some libraries subscribing to for under $200 because the vendors offer deals like this. Those are situations where I kind of sometimes hope that the vendor doesn't realize how little some libraries are paying because that sometimes makes them uncomfortable. But occasionally we're able to get a deal like that and that then is really beneficial. That's one thing that I'll say about working on these kinds of discount deals is sometimes you don't know going into it what kind of deal you're going to get, whether it's going to be whether you're going to wind up with a really great deal or sort of a disappointing 5% off. So we go into it not knowing always sometimes we're really pleasantly surprised with what we're able to come away with. Other times we get the 5% discount and we take what we can get and we continue to work on getting better deals in the future. So that's kind of a snapshot of the types of discounting we're able to arrange and how we're able to get discounts. A lot of the information on this slide has probably already been touched on again, but I want to make sure that I point it out. As I said, if we can publish pricing on our pricing pages on the website, we will do so. If not, I will send it out individually by email to interested libraries or sometimes I can send it out over the trial mailing list, which I will talk about in a minute. Part of the discount program is us doing centralized billing if more than one library subscribes. So that's one of the things that we're able to bring to the table when we talk to vendors. We'll say if you'll offer our library's discounts, then we will do the billing and the order processing for you and then you only have to deal with us. So for instance, if we were going to do that for a vendor in order to get a discount for our libraries, we will send out all the subscriber agreements, renewal agreements to the individual libraries. We'll collect them from the libraries. We'll let the vendor know in one email here are all the libraries that are subscribing. When it comes time for the vendor to bill out the subscription cost, they send one bill to us. Sometimes they'll have it broken down by library. Sometimes they'll just send just one lump sum amount bill, not even broken down. We pay the vendors. They only have to worry about dealing with us. And then we turn around and we bill the libraries, the individual broken out cost. Again, it's us doing a lot of paperwork and administrative activity with the intention of it benefiting you. That also sometimes gives you a little bit more flexibility in terms of payment. Sometimes we'll have libraries that actually want to pay early. And so we can bill them early if they want to get some funds encumbered before the end of fiscal year. Sometimes they may need to wait a little bit before they pay. So of course, a vendor would send them a bill and want to be paid in 30 days. Sometimes we can maybe wait a little bit longer and let them get into their next budget period or something. So we are able to offer a little bit more flexibility that way. To try to keep our own sanity, we try to keep subscriptions on some standard terms. July 1st through June 30th has always been our preferred term because that's our fiscal year. But we also have a number of subscriptions that run on January 1st through December 31st term. Oftentimes, if somebody wants to subscribe midterm, we'll try to get them on prorated subscriptions. So they might pick up a subscription in October and then it'll be October through June 30th subscription with a prorated price. And then they'll be on the regular subscription cycle in the future. So we're able to do that. Sometimes our nice, neat subscription terms don't work out. And so we do have some subscriptions that run on odd terms. For example, Britannica Online is always on June 1st through May 30th term. That's just the way it is. So we do try to be flexible. But when we can, we push vendors to let us have everybody on the same term. Again, to reiterate, one nice thing about being a state agency is that we don't have to try to raise money to exist. And so we are able to pass entire discounts on to libraries, whereas other networks that do similar activities, discount programs, have to keep some of it themselves. So that's another benefit that we're able to pass on. Just to give you a little bit of an idea of what we do, I tried to capture the numbers of subscriptions, database subscriptions that we worked on from a January 1st, 2014 to December 30th, 2014 period. So a 12-month cycle. We processed here at the Library Commission 538 individual subscriptions for 161 unique databases. We had 128 different libraries participate in the program and the total cost of all those subscriptions was almost $2.5 million. Now the one number that we can't always easily track is how much money was saved since it's often hard to really pin down vendors on. What would you have charged outside of the consortium? What would you have charged? It would be hugely time consuming to try to pin that information down. So we don't know exactly how much is saved, but you can see $2.5 million is a lot of business going through us. I want to go ahead now and move on to books and supplies. This is a lot more static of a discount program with the discounts on databases. As you can imagine, there's always annual renewals, so there's always activity going on, new pricing coming in. We are constantly communicating about that program. Discounts on books and supplies is kind of more set, so you don't hear as much about it. That's a really good reason for us to be having this Encompass live, so I can promote it and remind people that it exists. Again, we've got a page on our website that has information on this program, so I'm going to go ahead and jump back to our live website. Again, I can come up here and go to the discounts menu on the left and go to books and supplies. The way this program works is that vendors for supplies or books will contact us and say, we want to offer a discount to your members, and they'll often use the word members, because they're used to dealing with networks like Lyrasys or Minitex, where you actually as a library have to pay a membership fee and become a member. We use that term member very loosely. In some instances, a particular vendor might only be offering a discount to public libraries. Sometimes this happens because of the way they break their business down and a certain division only works with public libraries, so they are not able to offer that discount through their channel to a school library. Occasionally, we interpret members as any library in Nebraska whenever we can. Occasionally, a vendor will be a little bit more specific about which market they work with, and that's just because of their internal business model. Again, sometimes we're able to partner with other networks, so here's the Midwest Collaborative for Library Services, and they work with 3M Tatl Tape Security Strips, and so there's information that lets you take advantage of that discount. We've got Baker and Taylor, Nebraska Barnes & Noble stores have a discount program that they wanted us to promote on this page. Broadart offers savings. One thing to be aware of is some of these discounts on books and supplies, they contact us, they send us information about the discount they want to offer, and it's not time limited. They don't have any sort of expiration term on the discount, so they send us the information, we put it up, the information's available to you, we try to publicize it. From that point on, you work directly with the supplier, so we are not involved in that process at all, and so we don't always, it's not in the front of our minds even as much as the discounts are, because we don't have an intermediary role once you start working with that supplier. And sometimes when they don't have a particular end date for their discount, we don't always know if terms change, so it's not bad if something's not working for you, if you contact us and let us know, we can sometimes touch base with the supplier again. Every couple years I try to go through and reach out to the contacts at these companies just to make sure that they're still offering the discount. Again, when you've got staff turnover sometimes, the person that I was dealing with two years ago is no longer there, and so I need to reach out to the company again and get updated contact information, etc. Some of them are really good at reaching out to me every year, including the updates, others not so much, so that's something that I try to do every couple years. In some instances, for example, we're looking right now at BroDart, they always offer discounts for annual term, and you'll see right now this particular one is effective through January 1st, 2015. I actually had, a month or so ago, reached out to the company and have been trying to get updated discounts and have been assured, for example, that they will continue to offer this discount until they get us revised information. They actually said that they've been out of the office so much because of the bad weather on the east coast that they're incredibly backlogged as far as getting new discounts out. I actually did get this information earlier this week, so I have it and I just need to post it up here. Oftentimes, these suppliers will offer a particular code, it might be a number, or something that you're supposed to reference to them when you set up your account with them so that they know that you get a particular discount, so that's something to be aware of. DEMCO, they've got a code for instance that you need to input on orders either on their online order form or if you're doing it by phone, making sure that they're aware of that. This program, like I said, I put the information up there and then it sort of takes care of itself except maybe annually when I need to update information or if I need to reach out to companies to double check to make sure they're still offering the discount. Again, it's not something that's as active as the database discounts, so I think sometimes we don't publicize it as much just because there's nothing new there. That's one of the reasons why this Encompass Live is good to be able to remind people that it's there. Yeah, I've already covered all that information, so this slide is there before review if you view the slides later. We also are able to offer discounts on information today conferences, so you can kind of assume if you're going to be attending computers and libraries, internet, librarian, that they're going to be offering a discount to Nebraska Libraries through the Nebraska Library Commission. This has been in place since obviously at least as far back as 1997 when I saw it. You first found the information, something about it. It was interesting because at that time the discounted rate to attend computers and libraries was $99. So that's interesting to see how cheap it was back then. But as you can see, there's absolutely no reason to pay the standard rate to attend when you can get the discount. It's over $200 off. It used to be over 50% off. The discount is not quite as steep now as it used to be, but still that's pretty significant. So when these discounts become available, I post them to the conference discount page on our website. Jump up here and discounts on conferences. So I will put the discount here. There's usually a promotional code that you have to input into the online registration form in order to get the discount rate. I don't put that on the public website, but what I do do is I will send out mailing list messages, usually to the trial mailing list and systems mailing lists that includes that code. I also post information on our Encompass blog, and I will say in their contact, if you didn't receive the mailing list message that included the promotional code, contact Susan nicely to get that code. I try to get that information out there so you know it's available. Those of you who've been around for a while know to look for it if you're going to be attending the conference. Staying informed, we do have a trial mailing list, and this is the primary vehicle we use to communicate about database trials that are being offered. Asking for libraries that are interested in subscribing after a trial, seeing what kind of discounts we can arrange. I will often post pricing to the trial mailing list. I'll post user names and passwords for trials on the trial mailing list. So this is really a mailing list that we encourage you to make sure at least one staff member signed up for if you're interested in taking advantage of any of the discounts. This is the primary way we communicate detailed information that can't necessarily go out on our public website to libraries. The trial mailing list is really, you really need to be on there if you're going to be participating in some of these programs. We also try to post information to the Encompass blog which is fed to the Library Commission homepage, so if you follow that blog and there's something special going on, I try to post to it, but I don't post every single little message that I post to the trial mailing list to the Encompass blog. That's really not the purpose of the blog, so I try to catch your attention on the blog, but within my blog posts I usually say to make sure you get information like this in the future, sign up for our trial mailing list and I'll point you to the trial mailing list from my blog post. I'm on the list just to keep track of what we do here and there can be quite a few. This trial is happening, this one started, this one's coming up, this one's ending, so let us know if you want it. There's a lot of reminder type things like that. You don't necessarily want to see on the blog as a regular feed, so we always try to post enough to the blog to catch people who might be new to the state, who might not have heard about the trial mailing list, but we really are trying to get people to the trial mailing list because that's where the most information and the most detailed information is going to go out. I've already showed you, we've got the three pages in our website that are sort of our jumping off points for the discounts, database and e-resources, discount page, books and supplies page and conferences page, and I think that you've seen the ways you can get to those through our menu system. I just want to clarify something to ask, this trial mailing list that we have is just for Nebraska Webber. The trial mailing list is just... We do have people that watch the show or do the recordings from elsewhere, this would be something that only Nebraska librarians would get on because it's just trials for our Nebraska people. And we do monitor who signs up for it. Occasionally we've had vendors try to sign up for it because they view it as a wonderful vehicle for communicating with all the librarians in the state about their particular products and we do not allow that. We're going to be the intermediary between them. We are going to be the intermediary. But again, that's one of the reasons why they will sometimes offer us a discount because they know that we have really good ways to communicate with all of you. So we will send out the information but sometimes we won't include all the superlatives that they include such as, oh, this is the best, most exclusive, absolute must-have product. Sometimes they'll send us that kind of language and if it's a brochure or something that's clearly something that is from the vendor and we send it as an attachment, that's one thing. But if we're going to be typing something into a mailing list message that they send us will often leave out some of the superlatives. What we always tell librarians is we really can't necessarily evaluate these products in terms of which is the best, which you should subscribe to. We try to give you opportunities to try them out but we don't know what your patrons need, what your curriculum is, et cetera. So we don't always have any specialized expertise. Yeah, we don't give an opinion or evaluation, that's what the trials are for. If you guys figure that out for yourself, is this going to work for my students, my users, or not? Absolutely, yeah. Finally, I wanted to list contact information. Debra Dabragos is the head of our department and so sometimes she is the primary contact, the first contact that a vendor will make. You don't contact her and say, we really want to work with you to make some deal available to Nebraska libraries. Depending on the situation, someone's Debra will negotiate with them until something's established and then she'll pass it on to me and I'll do all of the communication, putting information up on our website, getting it out to you, doing subscriptions, renewals, et cetera. Sometimes vendors just contact me directly because they've worked with me in the past and so they just go straight to me. The other person that works with the program is Jennifer Rampe and she helps me with sending out renewal agreements and she's also the person that does actual invoices so she's the one that sends out invoices to libraries. If you have questions after you've already ordered something and you want to know about invoicing or billing or have you paid, she's the person that's on top of that. When in doubt, I'd say call me. I'm the person that has my fingers in the most places and can get you the information you need but I wanted to make sure that you aware that Debra Dabragos can answer questions and then also Jennifer Rampe is also involved in the process and Jennifer's pretty good about actually knowing where I keep paperwork in my office too so if I'm out of my office sometimes she's been able to answer questions just because she's been able to poke around and find folders on my desk, et cetera. Just like Jennifer can sometimes answer questions about things that I work with, Jennifer does the invoicing but I can get into QuickBooks and see if she's invoiced to you. I can resend invoices. I can see if we have a record of you being paid or not. Even though we do slightly different things, there's overlap. But again, when in doubt, I'm probably the first person to call unless you specifically know what you're dealing with is something best addressed to somebody else. That's all I have today. If anybody has any more questions, I'd be glad to answer them. Otherwise, it's just great to have another opportunity to make sure that people are aware of this program. Great. Thank you so much, Susan. This is something we've been trying to do for a while, is get you back on to update if there's anything new or just get the information out there to remind people that we do this and we've been doing it for so long and all the great discounts. Even if we only had a small number of people attending, just the fact that we're advertising that we're having this, the recording will go out. Maybe send it to the trial mailing list. That's a good idea. The information's updated and out there and hopefully it crosses people's radar again that this program is available. Does anybody have any questions? Nobody really typed in anything during the show when she was talking, so that's good. If you do have any questions, let us know here. Type in your questions or you can use your microphone. I think it was a pretty comprehensive coverage of what we've been doing, history of it and everything. That was great. It doesn't look like anything urgent is coming in now. Well, if you do have questions, you know who to call. Absolutely. Susan, obviously. Yeah. Or anyone else, if you need to get attached to someone quickly, either Deborah or Jennifer as well. That, I think, since nothing is coming in. Oh, we just have that. Susan took it to 11. I guess that's good. Yes. It's probably one of the library commission staff that was always saying, I don't know if I've got more than 30 minutes, but I don't know if I can make it up. Yeah. And just some thank yous coming through. Yes, great. Thanks for the information. It's very useful. All right. So I'm going to pop back over to our website as well. So thank you very much everyone for attending. Thank you very much Susan for getting all this information out there. The show has been recorded as usual, so that will be available most likely later this afternoon. I'll get it all together and put out there. And thanks to Krista for doing all of the online webinar parts of the presentation. Yeah. Sometimes I do these on my own outside of Encompass, and it's much nicer when Krista has all of the controlling parts. I do it every week, and I just kind of mindlessly go through the motions, but just because I know it, yeah. And then we have the technical issues of the camera. Sorry about that. We usually do have a nice little picture of ourselves, so we can see us sitting here chatting. Yeah, I think so. So that will wrap it up for today's show, but I'm going to pop us over to our Encompass Live website here, just like Susan did to her sessions. It will be posted onto the website here, down here underneath our upcoming sessions is our archive sessions. I'll post the link there. It will have, let's see if this last one had yet. The recordings available, we put them up on our YouTube channel. The presentation will go up on our slide share, so all these slides will be there. And then all the links to the different places on our website that Susan mentioned will be available as well. So that will wrap it up for today, as I said. I hope you join us next week when it is our monthly tech talk with Michael Sowers. Michael is our technology innovation librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. And once a month he comes on, usually the last week of the month to talk about something more techy. And next week he's going to be doing a demo of the Amazon Echo. It's this little device that's a voice controlled device from Amazon that you can use to do all sorts of things in your house. And you can talk about that and other voice control type technologies coming up. So definitely do sign up for that. And any of our other shows that we have here on our schedule through April are all up here, all the different topics we have coming up. And if you are a Facebook user, Encompass Live is also on Facebook. Definitely do go over there and like us on Facebook. We'll post when the recordings are available there. I remind people every week to log in for the live show on the fly if they want to. So definitely give us a like over on Facebook and keep up to date on what we are doing here. Other than that, I don't see no urgent questions last minute have come in. So that's great. We are good for today. Thank you very much and we'll see you next week on Encompass Live. Bye-bye everybody.