 All right, good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Kristen Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Excuse me. Encompass Live is a commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show every week and it is then posted in our archives for you to watch at your convenience. And I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of our archives. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think that might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries here in Nebraska, similar to the state library in other states. So we provide services to all types of libraries in the state. So you will find things on our show that will be for all types of libraries. Public, academic, K-12, museums, corrections, special libraries, anything and everything you can find something on our show. And we do a mixture of things here on the show, book reviews, interviews, many training sessions, the demos of services and products. We think that may be interesting to libraries. We sometimes have Nebraska Library Commission staff come on and do show presentations about things that we're doing here in Nebraska locally or here through the Nebraska Library Commission. But we also bring in guest speakers from around the state and around the country to talk about cool things they're doing in their libraries. And that's what we have with us this morning. Before we do get into today's show, I just want to make a brief little introduction. Talk a little bit briefly here for our Nebraska libraries. We here at the Nebraska Library Commission have been monitoring the COVID-19 pandemic that's going on right now. And we do have some special resources on our website for our Nebraska libraries. If you're in another state, check your state library or your state library association. They may have some of the same resources available to you. We have a list here that is updated as we hear from libraries or we find out what's going on with libraries. If they're open, closed, what special situations they have going on in their libraries, any specific blog posts are pinned to the top of our website about pandemic resources. And if you go to the specific page here, we have, if you're in business, what are you doing with, what can you do with your kids, unemployment? But for libraries, we have a subpage here, a lot of different kinds of things you might be dealing with as a library. Were you closed? Are you reopening? What are you doing about summer reading? There's some videos or webinars recording things available on here. We're always adding to it as we hear about new things and that are available from us, from our state government, from the CDC, World Health Organization, whoever. We try and keep things up to date on here. Also for here in Nebraska, you may have seen here, we do have just opened up on Friday, our CARES Act grant is now open and available. We did receive funding from IMLS, excuse me, as did other states. So if you're in a Nebraska library, go ahead and apply for our CARES Act funding. If you are from another library or another state, as I said, check your state and see if they do have anything similar. So on today's show, I'm going to go to our, this is our Encompass Live page, I'm going to, Christy, I'm going to hand over presenter control to you and then right now so you can get your slides up and then we can get into your presentation. So you should see that pop-up. Okay, one second. We're not seeing it yet. Did you see the pop-up for handing over presenter control? I did not. Christy, can you drive? Hang on a sec, let me switch here and then I'm going to try again here. Hand it over again. Do you see it yet? There we go. Now you guessed that. Yep. All right, there we go. All right. So this morning with us, we're going to be talking about automating virtual student library CARES. Many libraries have wanted to do this and especially now with COVID-19 and it may be useful to know we're trying to at least get virtual or online only library CARES out to people so there's going to be some good resources here. This is a school and county library got together to do this jointly in, so they are going to talk about how they pulled it off. I guess is what we're going to do. And I'll just hand over to you guys to introduce yourself and tell us all about what you did there. All right. So as Krista mentioned, my name is Christy Rieger and I am the Technology Manager for Scott County Libraries which is located in Scott County, Minnesota. We are just a little bit south of the Twin Cities. Shakopee is the biggest town that is located in Scott County. I'm joined today by Sandy Reishas who is the 6th through 12th media specialist for Shakopee Public Schools and by Nathaniel Strauss who is the IT Manager for Shakopee Public Schools. If you have any questions for us after the presentation, our contact information is located on this slide so feel free to reach out to us after. And I also would like to mention that today we're going to be talking about some techie stuff so some technical notes that might be helpful for you to know as we're going through the presentation today is that Shakopee Public Schools uses infinite campus for their student information system which we then was able to build a connection to into our Cersei Dynex Symphony workflow system. We are a SAS hosted software as a service hosted library so that may be helpful information for you to know. And without further ado, I'm going to pass it over to Sandy to talk about why virtual student library cards. Good morning. So our biggest goal with this partnership was to create more equitable access for students to the public library resources. So students have always been able to sign up for a library card by going into a public library branch but we wanted to eliminate that step because we felt like it could be a barrier for many of our students. And with the partnership in place where all students have a virtual library card it means that as a media specialist who works with classes on research instruction and literacy promotion that I can promote those public library resources to classes and students knowing that they all have access. Another goal for the partnership was to give students more choice in the books they read. We know how important choice is for helping students become strong readers especially those who may struggle with it a little bit. And as media specialists we're proud of our print and our digital collections within our schools but we were thrilled about our students also being able to access cloud library and the print collections of the public library in a way that was really convenient for students. And as we dug into all the digital resources that the public library offered that as a school district we could probably never afford we came to realize that books were really the tip of the iceberg. So we first explored the idea of having a library card number printed on the students ID cards but it didn't seem cost-efficient or practical. So we quickly changed course to a virtual card with a format that incorporates the student ID number and is really easy for students to remember. And then with our district being a one-to-one environment we really felt like the partnership could help to create a bridge between home, school, and public library. I'll turn it over to Kristi. All right so like Sandy mentioned the school district approached us and we put together a partnership planning team. So you'll see on the screen here that I've listed some roles in some folks who've had a role in the partnership. So at the school district level your superintendent and school administrators conversations were had at the top level to make sure that leadership was aware of the program and what its goals were and also to help communicate it with the school board and other stakeholders to make sure that everybody was on board and making sure that we have the ability to transfer data back and forth. The media specialists who shout out to Sandy and all of the other media specialists in the district they are really the real champions of this project. And also to Nathaniel who I'm going to talk about who we'll talk today about the role that the IT department played to help automate the process. And then over at the library here so obviously our library director was involved. Our technology and technical services department which I oversee had a big role to play. Our learning outreach manager and also our branch library staff. So really you're probably thinking to yourself that's a lot of people but I'd like to emphasize that it does take a lot of people to work together as a team to make sure that this is a successful project right off the ground. So in preparing for the partnerships we did a couple important steps that if you are considering making this kind of partnership with your school libraries and your public library systems that might be helpful for you to think about. The first thing that I think is really important for everybody to think about is to establish a student data agreement. So what is that? What that is is an agreement between the public library and the school district to transfer children's personal information. We all need to be good stewards of children's private information. Obviously we are not passing along specific pieces of identification that the school holds on to. It's more about things that you just need to create a library card but keeping that front and center is really important I think. The next thing that we did is we defined the partnership with a memorandum of understanding. So what did we do there? We decided to think about which grades would be included in this. We started out with just our high school students but maybe some folks want to start right away with K-12. Some parents may have some thoughts about having their child's ability, having their child being able to access the full gamut of all of our ebooks. Those are some things that you want to think about. Also what is the long-term relationship? What resources and time are each department going to commit? I think one of the learnings that Nathaniel and I can speak to is that both of our IT departments had to work together to make sure one that the transfer of data is smooth and continues to be smooth and also just to be able to continue to work together to solve technology problems and both parties need to commit to doing that. So those are some things that you can include in that memorandum of understanding. The next thing that we did is we designed a pilot. So as I mentioned earlier we started out with just our high schoolers and the reason why we did that is because we wanted to start with a group where if something went wrong that the impact on instruction would be a little bit less minimal. We started in May of 2019 last year. We also designed an opt-out process for families to be able to say I don't want to be involved in this so please don't share my child's data. I'm pleased to say that that's actually less of a concern but we'll talk more about that later. And also just for the two technology departments to be able to figure out what kind of ongoing technical support is needed at both the school and the library systems level. So I'm going to pass it over to Nathaniel to talk about how we started out getting our accounts made and also what the opt-out process looked like. Yeah, thanks. So I'm Nathaniel Strauss. I'm the IT manager at Chicago Public Schools. So one of the reasons that we decided to go with opt-out versus opt-in is that we already had a policy in place for marketing releases and so your school district might have something similar is that in most states the way it works is that when you register your kid in a school you have the option to basically opt them out of the school using them for marketing material. You know if you think about like those marketing materials or community ad brochures or pictures on the school website those are all things that we use to market the school district and as a family they have the option to opt out of using their children for those situations. And so we basically just use the same policy in terms of the library part opt-out saying that if you didn't want us to transfer your data to a third party organization in this case the Scott County Library we were not going to do that. So we collected that information in one of two ways. So right now really the only way is for parents to fill out a form or a paper copy. So paper copies were sent home to parents and then also there's a Google form that parents could fill out to opt out and what we've added is they're during online registration when a family first enters the district there's a checkbox that they can check to opt out as well. Interestingly enough what we found is that when everybody went to distance learning due to coronavirus a lot of families realized that they wanted this service they didn't actually want to opt out and they changed their amount of the opted back in to make sure those resources were available to their kids. So it was kind of interesting to see that shift. Of course data privacy is always important with schools we need to get better at that in general when we're dealing with student data and we're now rolling this out to K-12 which means that there are a lot of students under 13 involved as well. So at every point during this process you need to make sure that data is being transferred securely and that we keep in mind the safety and the privacy of our kids. So as an IT department we basically just get a report of who opted out every few days or a week and we would just manually do that in our information system we would opt them out and they just wouldn't be part of the report. I think Sandy and the other media specialists really had a big part to play and making sure people are aware of the opt-outs. In terms of communicating messaging and marketing this whole program it was really on them to get the word out to families and to students as to how this is all going to work and so opt-outs were a big part of that. We didn't end up getting too many simply because people want access to these resources but again it's important that we listen to the wishes of the families who don't want their data transferred and so we just made sure that was a priority for us. And the only other thing that maybe is not my specialty but when students do opt out you know teachers are using these resources as curriculum on their classrooms and so if a family does choose to opt out that's their right and so teachers just need to make sure that they are able to identify those kids and know who those kids are and then the day that they use those resources they have an alternative activity they can use in the classroom. Kisky can you go to the next slide? Yep. So just you or this me? I think this is me here. All right go for it. First steps was to determine what students would have access to with the account and we decided that the virtual student library card would allow students to access all of the digital resources and then they could also check out up to two physical items at a time with no overdue fees. And like Kisky mentioned one thing that we're really transparent about in our communication with parents is that this account does allow students full access to the Scott County library collection because we're not able to filter the content for age appropriateness but we really haven't had any issues come up with that. Yeah so when we were creating the accounts Sandy and I talked through what again what students we wanted to have what we wanted the students to have access to but also how we were going to create those accounts in our ILS. I worked with our tech services department to design what that looked like in our ILS. I have a background in schools and one of the things that I remember from my experiences as a library media specialist is that logins can be very painful when you're working with students. So obviously Sandy and I talked it through and we decided first that a shorter login number would be better for kids. So our ILS our regular library cards we have a 14 digit library cards so we decided to shorten the number of digits. We also decided that it was still important for us to use a pin number to help us continue to protect the child's privacy and also just to continue to help students learn good privacy protection practices. Another thing that we did we'll talk a little bit more about this later is we did a lot of testing with different databases and also with cloud library which is our ebook platform RB Digital. We had to figure out how a lot of our databases authenticate with the cards and also working to figure out where barriers might be encountered and try and remove them for the students wherever we could. So you're probably thinking to yourself okay so how do you create that many accounts? You said kindergarten through 12th grade right? The answer is yes. So that was about 8,000 or so accounts that we needed to figure out how to make. So the first thing we thought of is oh we could physically make them one by one at the branch level? Probably not. So we've decided to automate this process. So the first thing that our our tech services team worked on was to figure out how to mass create accounts in our ILS. So as I mentioned is we are a Cersei Dynex library. We use symphony workflows. There is a special report called the load user report that allows you to mass upload accounts. The other thing that Nathaniel and I had to figure out was how to get that information between the school's IT department and us. So and part of that is also just figuring out how to transform that data to make sure it can smoothly land in our ILS. So I'm actually going to pass it over to Nathaniel to talk a little bit about what that process looks like because it starts with the school. Yeah so this was probably our biggest challenge and actually along the way there are a few false starts to this project only because we couldn't really figure out how to get the data out of our student information system and transfer it over to the library system to create these accounts. And the reason for that is because you know I'm kind of foreign to the library world. I'm really most of my experience in the school side of things. And so you know even the word ILS and definitely Cersei Dynex were totally new to me. And so when I looked at the way that Cersei Dynex processes data it was it was kind of weird honestly. It was not something that I was used to. It wasn't like a regular database or a CSV or a tab separated. It was just its own thing. And so I wasn't used to that and they did have an API which we could integrate with or we could interact with to get the data over. But Cersei Dynex is a policy where to use their API you need to go through their training courses. So that would have been a couple thousand dollars we didn't really have you know coming from a school background. When we look at doing a project like this we try to do it on the cheap you know like we're looking for the best bargain possible. So that wasn't going to work. The only other option that we found is that they do have what they're calling an ASCII formatted data format. And that's what we ended up using. So the big challenge here was trying to figure out how to take the data that we had already convert it into a data format that Cersei Dynex understood and then load the users from there. So Christy can you go to the next slide? All right so here's a CSV example you know this is just a spreadsheet nothing fancy. But this is the sort of data that we can pull from our student information system you know things like student ID, first name, last name, grade, all those things that we need to actually create a library card in the Scott County Library system. What's important to note here is that the opt-outs are done at this point in time. So we're not opting out with some sort of logic and our code later on we're actually using the report from our student information system in this case Infinite Campus to not pull that student record at any point in time if they're marked as opt-out. All right next slide. And this is what the Cersei Dynex format looks like. So this is what they call their flat ASCII LD user format. And again this is something that was brand new to me it's honestly really weird because we don't have API access we had to fall back to something that is kind of old school as far as I could tell. Maybe people in the library world are more used to this and I just had never seen it before. But each new record is demarcated by this document boundary line. So if you look at the very line one it's the three asterisks with document boundary. So that's what one record is and then everything after that is piped delimited. And so you have these again it's just very bizarre to me. I have these fields where it starts with a period then the field name so the first one be user ID, another period, a tab, a pipe, the letter A and that's where your data starts for that account. And so there's a source down there if you want to look at the presentation later this is all documented by Cersei Dynex. And maybe you know people who are more used to library databases and how library data is formatted this would be more familiar but to me it was brand new. And so my solution to that was to write some code to transfer our CSV data to this format. So can you go to the next slide? All right so what I did is that I have some Python background so I have a little bit of code ability and so what I did is I wrote a script in Python to convert CSV data which is being reported directly from our SIS to the Cersei Dynex flat ASCII format. And so the project is totally available out there. I forget what I licensed it as but it is basically free for everybody to use. I'm not saying that it is going to be perfect for your exact situation especially if you're not using Cersei Dynex but it is a good template to get you started as to how you can convert this data if you need to. You're welcome to I'm not going to go through it now but you can go to that link and it kind of walks through the entire process of how to get set up and how to get started. But yeah this is this was our solution basically is instead of you know manually typing in or manually creating all these accounts what we do is we have the script convert the data for us and then we pass it over to Scott County Library. So I think there is a example of that in the next slide. Yeah so here's kind of an overview of how this process works. So every morning at 3 a.m. our SIS will automatically generate a report with all the students that are eligible for library card excluding the opt-outs. That data is then passed to an FTP server that we host. We then have a scheduled task and you know people who are familiar with Windows servers or maybe a Linux server with the crown job it's really really basic we're not doing anything fancy. Every morning at 3 30 a.m. we're then taking the data that our SIS put in our FTP server we're running the script against it and converting it and then we are using that script to upload to Scott County's SOTI Dynamics folder or their their SSTP server and then after that SOTI Dynamics will on a schedule run that load user report that Chrissy talked about earlier. So that was a really quick run through but the overview is that we export our data we convert our data we send our data out to Scott County Library and then they use their load user report to create accounts as needed. Awesome thanks Nathaniel. Yep you're welcome. Alright so the next the next thing that we did in the process after figuring out how will how were we going to transfer and transform all of the data on a regular basis over between the school systems and the library system was to do some testing. So the first test that Nathaniel and I ran was to test uploading a fake student into the ILS if you want some more details about how we did that you can talk to us about that on the side. The next thing that we did with that test student was to start logging into things both at the school and at home. We wanted to check that our library databases and other online resources wouldn't be caught against internet filtering which can be a barrier in the classroom for the teachers. So it's really important to do that with a real student device. So we actually went on site into the school grabbed a student iPad and a student MacBook and did some practice logins into different databases and then we also went and tried this at home with a student device to make sure that we wouldn't be experiencing anything different with the filters. And as I mentioned before we did a lot of test logging into the databases in the catalog. So Sandy created a checklist of resources that we knew that would be really important and interesting for the school library media specialist to deploy in the classroom. So that helped us pick out some priorities with testing and then we were able to go one by one and make sure that each one in the testing process was good to go. And then obviously doing that with our ebook platforms. And I can't emphasize enough how important testing is in this process. It is really unfortunate to get really excited about a project like this and then deploy it with a group of kids and then hear that it doesn't work. I can't log in which can be really frustrating for the teacher. It can be really frustrating for the students. It can kind of help lose momentum on the project. So definitely definitely make sure that you do some testing. I just want to add there really quick. In general schools are required to filter. So e-rate funding is tied to the internet connection being filtered for students in particular. And so what I noticed in the library world is that there are a lot of proxies already being used either to proxy the connection for the database or to proxy the connection for authentication for SIP. There's a lot of proxies being used all over the place. And so it's really common that proxies don't like to work together. They often fight each other. But almost every filter that a student device has will also be a proxy in some former fashion. And so it is really important to make sure you test those things. The school district can probably help you. They can probably whitelist some things to make sure that your proxies get precedent that we're not double proxying that traffic. But it is really important. Coming from a school background, libraries work in a lot of similar ways. But it's kind of, I'll just tell you that most school IT staff will not be very familiar with how libraries work, even though it might become a practice in the library world. So just having somebody explain to school staff, oh yeah, actually we proxy this connection because we need the database to look like it's going from this place, is an important thing to explain to the school IT staff. Yes, it is very important for both the library's technical services staff and for the school IT staff to be working together on a project like this. So I know Christy had said that the media specialists were the champions of this project, but the partnership really wouldn't have happened without the collaboration and the technical expertise of Christy and Nathaniel in those two IT departments. So I would again echo that, that collaboration is so key. So once we had the technical pieces in place and we knew that the partnership was a possibility from a logistical standpoint, we needed to get approval and buy in from the school system. So our Scott County Library director met with the superintendent and then our district's IT director and I presented to our school board for approval. Then we also presented to building principles for feedback and for all of the groups after we covered the resources that students would have access to, they were so excited about the partnership. It was really fun to see. We also presented to the public library staff and the media assistants in the schools because these are the folks that have the most direct contact with students on a daily basis. So we really wanted to make sure that they were familiar with how it worked. So to prepare for a rollout, we worked with the superintendent to draft an informational letter for families. And we also worked with our district translators to get translations of the letter in the most commonly spoken languages in our district. Christy updated the Scott County Library website. I updated the school websites just to make sure we had the information on the partnership in a specific location. Nathaniel, he made the apps for the resources that we thought the students would use the most available in self-service like Scott County Library app, cloud library, homework help. And then the learning and outreach manager from the public library and our media specialists presented at building staff meetings to let the teachers know about the partnership and what kind of resources the students would have access to. Kind of a train the trainer model. And then Christy if you'll go to the next side please. So in Shakopee we did a staggered rollout and our soft launch happened last May for the ninth through 11th graders. And then our official launch happened near the beginning of the school year with all the six through 12th graders. Things seemed like they went really smoothly. Christy, Nathaniel and I continued to check in throughout the fall just about how implementation was going. Like Nathaniel said we monitored for those opt-outs. And then we planned with our elementary district media specialist to figure out a plan for the elementary rollout for last December. Okay Christy thank you. So our next part of the implementation was promotion. So our promotion to families included that informational letter from the superintendent. We sent that out through mail at the elementary level and then 612 through the student management system. We also provided information at open house, parent-teacher conferences and then through other district communication channels like social media and newsletters. And then for students we sent out a two-minute promotional promotional video that was shown in advisory that just sort of highlighted the resources that we thought students would be the most interested in and basically just how to use that new virtual card. And then I also did in-person presentations for classes like freshman seminar, avid EL classes. And then for any class that I was working with for research instruction or literacy promotion, I threw in information about the virtual student library card. And then after those initial building staff meetings, then throughout the year I met with smaller groups of teachers like PLCs or departments or specialized groups like counselors or equity specialists to talk to them in a smaller setting about the kinds of resources their students might be most interested in. All right, Christy, if you could go to the next slide. Thank you. So one thing I've noticed as we rolled out the partnership is that the instruction on the resources that students have access to through the virtual student library card, it just fits so naturally into what I'm already doing. You know, whether it's instruction on how to use a database or book talks. And at the beginning of the partnership, I used to keep this spreadsheet recording each time we promoted the partnership to a group of students or teachers. And around winter break, I stopped keeping track. We had reached about 200 groups. And I realized like it's just become such a natural part of my interaction with students and teachers. And so it's really become a seamless part of our media instruction. And then one result of the partnership that we've is that we've been able to repurpose some of our spending. So for example, we used to purchase the facts on file issues and controversies database for all three of our secondary schools. A lot of teachers use that for argumentative writing. But because the public library already offers this database, we decided to give up the subscription. And with the money that we saved, I purchased spring share live guides for the secondary schools. And it's been this amazing tool for creating research and reading guides that synthesize the resources from our school collections and the resources from the public library. So Kristi, if you could navigate to that example. So an example of this is a live guide I made for a middle school reading strategies teacher during distance learning this spring. So for her students who struggle with reading, she was looking for ebook and audiobook pairings. And Kristi, if you could navigate to the realistic fiction and humor tab at the top. And our school digital collection has a good number of these, but it really wasn't anywhere near enough to support all six of her classes. So because of the partnership, I was able to put together a live guide that showed these pairings from both Mac and via our school's digital platform, and cloud library from the public library. And I as I made the guide, I was just amazed how much cloud library offered our students. And then because the students in her classes are middle schoolers, they have school issued iPads, which are great as e-readers. She does have some students who really prefer print books. So Kristi, if you could navigate to the last tab there, I added a tab with information that Kristi sent me on how to do curbside pickup from the public library during the time we're in now where students can't go inside a school or public library to check out, check out books. So, you know, overall throughout the year, this partnership has been so valuable to us, but it's been particularly valuable during distance learning. I'll turn it over to Kristi. All right. So the next thing that we did was to create an opportunity for the teachers to get library cards. Obviously, Sandy and the other media specialists are the champions of this project, and they're using it in their instruction. But we also wanted to empower teachers to be able to use these resources independently. So we at the the public library level have something called the educator access cards. It's actually a digital resources only card if the teacher is a Scott County resident. We just make them a regular card. It's a nice courtesy service that allows the staff to access online resources that their students have access to. So they're not left out in the process. Our learning and outreach manager and Sandy visited teachers, PLCs, and staff meetings and other opportunities to talk to them about this. And basically, we created a form that allowed the teachers to sign up. We did not automate this part because I believe that there is a law about your employer sharing personal data. So it was more of an opt-in process. But I'm really pleased to say that we actually, for an entire school district, were able to create about 160 or more new educator access accounts for the teachers. So it's really exciting to see that it's not just living with one teacher or a set of teachers, but rather that this is going to become a part of instruction overall. So Sandy's going to talk a little bit more about what that's looked like on the ground at the school. So overall, because of the partnership, students have had greater choice in what they're able to access, both for school and for personal growth. And this year, throughout the year, we've noticed that a large number of students are using their virtual student library cards, which has been wonderful to see. And the resources that they seem to be using the most are Cloud Library for eBooks and audiobooks and Homework Help Now. Homework Help Now is a service through the public library that provides online one-on-one tutoring in all grades and subjects with certified tutors in English and Spanish seven days a week from 1 p.m. to 11 p.m. So students are able to get help with homework outside of the school hours. And even before distance learning, I noticed teachers really promoting this with students and taking advantage of this service. And I can imagine during distance learning it's been even more handy. So it's really fun to see students and teachers excited about the partnership and actively using it. Yeah. So some important takeaways that we wanted to share if you were considering this kind of partnership to help you be successful is first, you're probably thinking, wow, that's a lot of technical stuff that they talked about. That is for sure. So the first thing to know is that your school district IT department will certainly have a large role to play. I could not have done this project without Nathaniel and his team helping out, doing testing, making sure that the project was very smooth, making sure that we could access what we needed to access and remove any technical barriers for children and for teachers. As I reiterated before, test, test, test, make a list of all of the resources that you want to use and be very intentional about making sure that you walk through the process from the point of view of a student. Another thing that I wanted to share from the point of view of technical services is that we wanted that there were some blind spots for us about authentication. We needed to make sure that, again, the students would not encounter any barriers, so knowing what the student is going to experience when they're trying to log in is really important. Also, continually marketing partnership, I think it's really easy to get excited and then sort of watch this sort of fade into the background or perhaps not be as excited. So we continually market the partnership internally and externally. I say internally from the public library's perspective, like Sandy mentioned earlier, we made sure that our branch library staff was really aware of this project, so that way they could help us encourage at the branch that if a child comes in and wishes to use a library resource or is not sure whether or not they can take something home with them, that they can help us continue to say, hey, oh, you're in Shakopee, right? You can use your student library card and just help us continue to verbalize that to families and to children to make sure that they know that this resource is there. And then finally, to make sure that the school district's IT department and the library's technology and technical services department are continually communicating. I think that there have been times, for example, when Cloud Library is having an issue and it's important for me to communicate that to Sandy to make sure that her lessons don't have an issue or that a specific database is down or something like that or to identify, hey, when a student clicks this link, they're not really getting to where they need to go. Can you fix that? And just knowing that we have a commitment to each other to make sure that this continually benefits children. So this is a really, a really wonderful, robust partnership. So with all of that information, we want to know, do you have any questions for us? Yeah, all right. Yes, people, if there's a couple of questions come in, if anybody does have any questions, go ahead and type them into your questions section of your GoToWebinar interface. All right, someone has a question. I don't think you mentioned this. If a student already has a physical card, but the card was blocked or expired, were these students able to apply for a digital card as well, or does that blocking and expiration come through when you had that it transferred the information about the students and their accounts? I can speak to that. These digital library cards are completely separate. So we recognized early on from the technical services standpoint that there would be some duplication in the system that there may be a child who has a regular library card. It might be blocked. It may be in some specific status. And we decided we were fine with that. It's okay. What's most important about the virtual student library card is that the student is able to access things at school. So no, those statuses do not come through. Those are totally separate from these cards. And one thing I can speak to from the school standpoint is when I went into classes, usually at the beginning, I just do a show of hands of how many people are active users of the maybe the standard card that they had applied for at a younger age. And it was usually only a handful of students in each class, which really illustrated how many students the partnership was reaching. Maybe, yeah, you think, oh, it's gonna be everyone and we'll be good. And it's not always. Yeah. Okay, another question here says you said that you choose the library card number as assigned to students. How did you communicate that card number and pin to the students? So their library card number is the district's number. So it's set where it's independent school district 720 in Minnesota. So 720. And then the student six digit library card number or library card number, their student ID number. So it's a nine digit number, not a 14 digit like our normal one. And then their pin number is the last four digits of their actual library card number. So I'm actually going to exit out of this one. This is just all information numbers that the kids would already know. You just have to let them know, look at these particular numbers to figure out what yours is. Yes. And Sandy made these really awesome graphics that we've been trying to put on all of the different marketing pieces to help students continually remember what the number is. Because again, these are kids. We know that logins are something that they continually practice. So and also it can be a barrier. So we decided to try and make it as easy as possible for them. Something they already have. Yeah. Especially at the younger grades, this can be an issue, but they're already using that student ID number every day for lunch and for book checkout from their school learning commons. So it was really nice to be able to incorporate their student ID number that they're already very familiar with. Right. Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. And this goes along with it. As far as communicating it to them, this is what you're just talking about there at the end, that communication is key between all parties involved, the school, the library, the public library, the teachers. I'm sure all helping to get this information to the students. They know how to use it. Yes, definitely. And someone says, thanks. That helps a lot. And someone has a question. Does the student have the option to change the pin number, if desired? Or is that a locked in? It is. So the answer is yes, they could. But every day when the report that Nathaniel mentions runs, part of his script is to re-upload the pin number. So it will just get the default back to the original, no matter what they try to do. Yep. Yeah. And that makes sense. If there's anyone who's like, I don't remember, my niece, even the younger kids, it's better than saying, well, what did you change it to? It's going to always be, yeah. That's exactly right. It is kind of a quirk of Cersei Dynex. But we kind of realized, oh, that's maybe not so bad after all. Yeah. It solves some of the very common things that librarians deal with, with many of their patrons that come into the public libraries of not knowing what their logins are. So there's a place where they could do this. I mean, I'm hopefully it's, I'm hoping it's not like right in their face. Like in many places it says, click here to change your password right in your, right out of the bat. Yeah. Yes. And I think that we've done a pretty good job of communicating to the students that they don't need to change their pin. It's difficult for my standpoint to turn off or hide the reset pin because it's a major function, as you mentioned, for the rest of our, the rest of our patrons. Yeah. And if you're constantly promoting and giving out like this kind of documentation saying, this is what it is, they're going to have to know, well, if you've changed it, it's, it's going to go back. So yeah, let's round with things. Yeah. So we have a question here, which actually I think you did mention earlier, Nathaniel mentioned earlier when you were talking about the coding and whatnot related to it. We have a question that says, we don't have, have Dynex, will this, will all of this be feasible with other systems? That's a good question. So it really depends on your ILS, right? Actually, it depends on both sides. It depends on what systems you're trying to integrate together. So in this case, our student information system, it's really easy to export what they call ad hoc reports into a CSV format. So basically, you get a spreadsheet of data, and then you can use that to convert to whatever format the other system understands. So my, my answer to you is what I wrote in Python was very specific to our situation. And I think that unless you are a Cersei Dynex library with the same setup as Scott County has, and that also your school district you're working with is an infinite campus school district, that it probably will not work for you. But the concepts are the same. And so I think that at that point, it's just important to find somebody in either organization that is familiar with those two systems and see how they can integrate. You might not need any code to make this work. In our case, we did because of our limitations. But depending on how your systems can talk to each other, it might be a lot easier. So this is like for people who are not doing, don't have Cersei Dynex. It's a proof of concept and take it to your, whoever your tech people is in both places and say, here's what we want to do. How does it, how does our system, how can our system do it? Yeah, absolutely. But the, I mean, most of the script is just like text manipulation, just moving one piece of text somewhere else. So the other system can identify how to process that data. But again, every system is going to be really different. So it's really a case by case basis. Sure. Sure. And just could we use Excel? I mean, I suppose that's what your system can work with. Yeah, a lot of systems will. Yeah. And I would like to say that to the question asker, I'm aware of a, actually it's St. Paul Public Library who has made this happen. I'm aware of some other schools or some other school districts and public library systems who have used systems like Cersei Dynex's Horizon have used Polaris's system or Innovative or any of the other ILSs. So I'll, if you want to send me an email, I might be able to connect you to somebody who you can ask as well. I think that's what librarians do. We try to find the answer for you. Sure. Sure. Great. Sure. Thanks. You'll probably hear from Jean. Another question here about the cards themselves. How are cards expired when a student leaves the district if they graduate, of course, or if they move? I can answer that. So we have July 1st as our first expiration date. So it is based on in our system, based on their graduation. So it is going to be something that I and the technical services staff run a report on to say, you know, any account that's within our Shockbee Schools group with this particular field, which is their graduation year on July 1st. We're going to expire it. I don't want to bore people with the details, but I can also, if you want to email me separately, I can talk through what that looks like at our level as well. Sure. But yes, we do have an expiration included, and then we'll probably purge the accounts afterwards as well. Right. And then if someone like in the middle of a year, though, moves or leaves that particular district, I suppose that would be something that would be, everybody involved gets notified of that. And it comes out when you're in some ways figured out. Yes. Like if they're not graduating, but they just like moved out of district or somewhere. Yes, I think that we this. We're not accounting for unenrollments right now. That's something that we're looking to approve on later. At the moment if a student were to leave the district, you know, have it through the year, their account would remain active, because we're not marketing them. We're not the data we're sending to Scott County is not marked as unenrolled. It's just that they don't exist in the poll anymore in the data poll. But Scott County will not remove their accounts because they don't exist in that data set, if that makes sense. So I think it's a manual cleanup process. I think our focus was more on making sure people have access rather than taking the excess away. Sure. And then when you do that July expiration, that's when full cleanup can be done of anybody who has and removed. Yes. That's our summer school rule over too. So we will graduate students into the next grade on July one generally. So that's kind of our our regular drop dead date for when we do cleanup as well. You're already doing it for other things. So now you just do it for this. Yeah. One thing I'll mention too is that we'll be sending some messaging out to graduating students, letting them know that their account is expiring and now they can apply for a standard issue card. Sure. I've seen I've heard of other places doing that when this when they've had this kind of joint thing with the public library. And then now you get to have just that card. Yay. Congratulations on graduating. All right. All right. That was the last question. Have anybody else have any other questions? We did just hit 11 a.m. by my clock, which is our official end time of the show. But if anybody has any other, we did start a little after show. Anybody have any other desperate questions you want to ask of our speakers today? Type it in the questions section and we can do that. I say this is a great presentation. Glad I was able to get you guys on the show to talk about this today. Even though I am not as a as computer techie as you might be Nathaniel with all this and I did understand what you were explaining. So to actually like talk to somebody about it in the basic terms at least. Sure. And like I mentioned earlier, if you have any follow up questions for us, I just put this the slide back up of our contact information. So please feel free to reach out to us and we'll try and answer your questions to the best of our abilities. Great. So that's great for you guys to be available to everybody. All right. I don't see seeing unless somebody's typing. Doesn't look like there's any last minute desperate questions right now. So I think we can, if it's wrapped up for today. Thank you so much Christie, Sandy and Nathaniel for being with us this morning. This was a session I didn't mention at the beginning but all of them and myself, we were originally supposed to be presenting back in March at the Library Technology Conference in St. Paul and that was canceled due to COVID-19. But many of these presenters I'm having come on in Compass Live to at least get this, get the word out so that we can get some of these presentations shared with everybody. And I hope we'll have some more of them. So thank you so much, all of you for being here today with us. Thank you for having us. Yeah. I'm going to hold presenter control back to show my screen. Again, there we go. All right. So this is the session page for the show today. As you can see here, I do have the presentation linked here as already and this will be included. So it's on there right now. It will be included when we do the archive recording page as well. So all those slides that you're just watching all in addition with the contact information for everybody is available right there for you afterwards. And I'll go back to our main in Compass Live page. Here we go. So that will be for today's show. The recording will be available. It should be real by the end of the week as long as go to webinar and YouTube cooperate with me. And it will be here's our upcoming shows, but here's where our archives are right underneath there. Most recent show is the top of the list. And this is the one we did last week. And it will just have the links. There'll be a link to the recording and the link that's already there to the presentation will be included. Everybody who attended today's show and registered for today's show will get an email from me letting you know when it's ready. And we also push it out to our various social media out on Twitter for Compass Live. We also do have a Facebook page for it. So we posted there as well. So if you are a big Facebook user, do give us a like over there and you'll get notifications of updates to things going on within Compass Live. Here's a reminder that posted this morning to log in for today's show. When our new shows are coming up, when recordings are available. So a couple times a week, you'll get notifications on Facebook if you would like to give us a like over there. And I'll mention while we're here in our archives. For a lot of people who are looking for professional development or just learning more about things, you can watch any of our archives here. You can, there's a search feature here to search the entire show archive. And you see, we do have an option here to search just the most recent 12 months. That is because this is the full archives of Compass Live. We brought the show premiered in January 2009. So we do have 10 years worth of archives here. I'm not going to scroll all the way down and make you go dizzy with that. But if you want just recent info, limit to the most recent 12 months. But you can search the entire archive for any topic you want. Just pay attention to the date when it was originally broadcast. Some things, some sessions will stand the test of time. But some things may be old expired. Information might be wrong or different now. Some services or products might not exist anymore or not exist in the way that they were originally presented. But just do pay attention if you are watching any of our archives. But we are librarians. We do archive things for historic purposes. So we will always have the full archives there. Just pay attention to when things were originally broadcast. So that will be for today's show. I hope you join us on our future shows. Here's our June dates are filled up here. I do have a couple of July dates that I'm just getting on the calendar soon. I'm just finalizing some information. So keep an eye on our schedule for those. And I hope you join us next week when our topic is Identity and Imposter Syndrome in Library Maker Spaces. I feel for this in many ways. This is another session that was originally to be broadcast. It was supposed to be part of the Library Technology Conference in Mark. And Leanne will be with us to talk about how you can overcome that. So please do sign up for that show or any of our other future shows and Encompass Live. So thank you very much everybody for being here. See you next time. Bye bye. Bye bye.