 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. Yes, we are a webinar. You can call us that. We won't be offended. It's what we do. We host these sessions live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time, and they are recorded. So if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. You can always log on to our website and go and see all the recordings of our previous, our archive sessions of all our previous recordings. We do a mixture of things here, presentations, book reviews, mini training sessions, presentations, basically anything library-related. We want to have it on the show here. We have guest speakers that come on, and we have Nebraska Library Commission staff that do sessions, and this morning we have sort of a mixture. Once a month, we do a tech talk with Michael Sowers, who is our technology innovation librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Morning. Michael's here. He's sitting right next to me here. And he brings on things that are leading more towards the techy side of things. And so I'm just going to hand over to you, Michael, to introduce who you've got on with us this morning. Thanks, Krista. So a little bit of background about how we got to today. One of the things I will readily admit I don't pay a lot of attention to directly is ILS, Integrated Library Systems. There are vendors out there that a lot of libraries use in Nebraska, so the kind of the big iron, so to speak. Then we have here in Nebraska, the Pioneer Project, which uses COHA, the open source system, which has got a whole handful of libraries in Nebraska. Using it right now, can't think of the exact number. It's well over a dozen, I'm pretty sure. And then in the Connected Project, we do Nebraska Libraries on the Web, which is hosted, WordPress hosted websites for public libraries in the state. And so our guest today, Beth Koulash, was emailing back and forth with me about setting up her library with our WordPress system. And in one of her emails, she mentioned or implied something about Linux. And I wrote back and I said, oh, you use Linux? And she's like, yes, I do. I use Ubuntu. And I was really happy to hear that. And then in the process of that conversation, she said, I pulled up the email here. Yeah, I developed our lightweight cataloging software on Linux last winter. And I read that email and I kind of did a double take. And I went, wait, you wrote your own ILS? And so immediately I thought, OK, this is somebody that we have to get on the show to talk about that. So, Beth, you're on the line? Yeah, good morning. All right, so yeah, go right ahead and tell us all about your project. OK, as Michael just said, we looked around at computerizing our library. And this is a very small town. We've only got 128 people actually in town and about 300 in the zip code. And the ILS is that we could find and computerize it. We're just playing monetarily out of the question for us. And we were in the process of moving our library from an old building to a modernized updated building now. And we were volunteering to help the former library director pack up the books. And she was also cataloging, you know, you know, cataloging, you know, cataloging, enjoying what we had and what was, what and what about this. And look at this and say, wait a minute, this can't be that difficult. You know, that even though I've been, you know, I've worked in software and studied it, I never worked in database design. But I'd been taught it and I could get the books out and figure it out again. So that was what I did over my Christmas holiday. And my background is I was a software engineer for a 4,500 company. I mostly worked in software quality assurance. I ran my own software company that went from everything from concept to sending out to customers and customer support. And, you know, I mostly worked in software quality assurance, but I couldn't also write code. And I eventually ended up in small town in Nebraska. And I was urged to get my provisional library certification from NLC. And level three is a result of having the degree. And so I became a director of the small town library with no computerization. And like I said earlier, the software, commercial software that we could find was completely out of the reach of the budget. And so it was pretty obvious this was a simple database application. But it kind of grew like, but it kind of grew because there were obviously some things that we needed. So the first thing we did was update cataloging materials. To be sure that we have the right kind of cross-section of materials and we're updating the catalog and weeding and adding new things as appropriate, we need to find out what we have. And the catalog should be searchable. As a kind of a side, I saw, I thought a notebook when we were moving in here, Dave, 1952, was a previous library director who had essentially done the same thing, but she didn't have the software tools available. All she had was a notebook and a numbering system and she was essentially doing what I did. And the other thing we wanted to have in there, besides being searchable, the value of the material. If a patron loses an item, what should we charge them to replace it? Or if there's a disaster, we'll lose all the part of the library to get properly insured. And the other thing is our patron privacy is of utmost importance. So some of these software things that I found, I wanted all kinds of information about your patrons, personally identifiable inspiration or the checkout and what their needs and wants are. And it was pretty clear to me that was a way to market to them, which is certainly something that highlights every concept of libraries that I've ever heard. And we certainly didn't want that. As I said earlier, the commercial cataloging software was financially out of reach for this small library. I found some freeware, but which would require you on your local server. And this is not possible in a local area either because it's, you know, we do have a very slow high speed internet connection here. And we've only had those for a few years since the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pretty much assisted putting it in. And as I said, I volunteered to help inventory, but we packed in the move. And doing what I was doing there was certainly not complex and I certainly have skills to do it. And then there were some considerations that we couldn't use in the applications of development software requiring royalties for government or commercial use. Or we couldn't use images or text or rely on other applications under copyright. And as Michael just said, I'm a Linux person and Linux is a free application free for any user to download and use. And there were a lot of applications available in it, some of which led themselves very nicely to assisting with software design. Which brings us to the last one here today. So we have it up. We're using it. You know, we've got almost 6,000 items in the library. And I know the other libraries have the same problem with getting a computerization as we do. So I have this lightweight solution. Now, it can probably be used for other small libraries. It's probably not appropriate for a very large library. For them, the commercial applications may be appropriate. So we have something that works well for us and so you don't have to reinvent it. So I'm distributing this to everyone who wants it for shareware. And we're just asking for a donation to reference the library group. It could be used in a small library, in a public library, in a small business library. Or even an individual with a lot of books could probably use it. And small libraries are an unfilled niche for corporations. You know, this is just not an area that they can probably feel like they can make any money at. So here's what we wanted. At the very basic, we wanted a searchable card catalog. That if somebody comes in here and asks me, do you want to have any books by lowering them more? I can say, oh yes, we have this many books. And this is where they are. And information on location of material. It's kind of not appropriate to say, yeah, I know we have that, but I can't think of what it is at the moment. I may not be thinking wrong of that line at the time. And statistics of how many of what type of library we have for reading and collection development. And patron privacy is an absolute must. I fully support all of the ALAs, things of freedom to read, and freedom to not be harassed by what you're reading. And more information concerning the value of each item in the collection. If somebody loses something or it's probably ensured in case of a disaster. And these are the other things we wanted those to be nice to have, which is 24x7 online access. And the circulation system that didn't know why you don't change the book cards, the ability to place a whole lot of items, check for overdue items, notify the patrons that they have items available, that they have items that they've had a little longer than they should have. And a favorite topic. So what can this for reading? What has it been circulated? And maintain a list of items that need to be replaced. They were lost, damaged, gotten old. They were very popular when they had more than one. And here are the non-goals. Things that don't do, isn't designed to do. We didn't intend to do anything with magnetic stripes and scanners. Scanners, going down the cost quite a bit over the last few months or a year, this might be something to revisit. But as of right now, there's no intention to do anything with magnetic stripes or any kind of scanners. We didn't want to place any restrictions on hope to check out certain things. If there are things in your library that you don't want, say children to check out, like, say, animated movies, that's after the library staff and, you know, for PG movies, you know, for a little bit of information. And we didn't want to place any limits on freedom to read. And a small library is better to do a personal recognition and judgment than relying on software. We didn't want to start installing historical learning patterns or a case of any patron or calling for them for any purpose. Which is both good and bad. There were people that kind of wish we kept track of what they checked out. But as of right now, we're leaving that up to them. They can write it down any way they want. And we didn't design to make a compliant response throughout the world. You know, I designed it for my library that's in Nebraska, the United States. And if somebody else can use it, that's great. But it's not designed particularly for them. I developed it under Linux. And I used all the free tools that are available in Linux. And I used it in an industry that's really available, tools like HTML, PHP, MySQL and JavaScript. And I developed it locally, working as a volunteer. I was named director until well after I had it done. Of course, that brings up the idea of whether or not software was ever really done. And I used a great deal of free help on websites and books and forums and software developers that I know. And I borrowed some code and it was uniquely available with free use of commercial nonprofit applications where it was published, attributed to the source or attributed to the person that gave it to me knowing what I was going to use it for. The question involves coffee, diet coma, pizza and civil use books. And I got a lot of help from software engineers. I know I met through software forums in late nights. I got some help from one of my volunteers who is not a software engineer, but he told me just how I could use the, what I have already had set up for books to catalog movies and videos. That was great. So I developed it on a bunch of Linux computers using the free tools. There's a code editor there that is wonderful. And no Microsoft products were harmed in the development of this application. So how it works. Patrons are identified by the card number. Identifying information about those patrons is kept in a paper notebook and library. It cannot be hacked. The way you could get to it would be to physically break into the library, which is an issue that we can't completely solve, but it's a lot easier to identify and catch the bad guys that way. We're identifying the books by the ISBN or ASIN numbers. So they have a unique identifier. That our library has a policy of generally not to have duplicate copies of books, or if they're donated to put one of them on a book sale table. Other items like videotapes, videos and tapes and CDs. They're identified arbitrarily. And there's a password database. And privacy concerns. If only suppose that the Freedom to Read Foundation and the LA. We don't keep any information about what people with card number have checked out, what material after the material was returned. You know, as soon as they bring it back, it's checked in, the record is erased. So the only thing we keep is the date of the last checkout. That's for the, you know, for the checking it, for the evaluating it for reading candidates. And I brought that up for the, even Hacking can't tell you who, you know, who card number 333 is in my library. So intellectual property and copyright. And as librarians, we're all quite aware of those things. And so, you know, I developed it locally by myself and we used it where the author or the author of that code offered to be freely used in whatever credit they author wanted. And it's listed on the About page. And please, please, please read the About.html file there. There's an awful lot of information there. In fact, a good bit of what's on this webinar is, probably down there. And software that's used is part of the web host services. It's an intrinsic part of the internet, according to your browser. It's kind of hard to be using it in a lot of ways. You're not using it. If you can't use HTML or PHP, my sequel was part of the web host services. And it's been tested and worked with most computers. I tested it with various browsers and various operating systems, versions, various computer types, and various ages of computers. Some of our patrons are using some very old computers. And that's fine. And it will work with them, including it being very lightweight, very memory, you know, not memory intensive at all. People with a long amount of memory on their computer can use it. And I've got several people that put on usability of things. And there are then just patrons. They don't need to make a special trip into the library to find out if the library has a particular item, or find out what the library has on the subject of airplanes or if we have anything by Alice Miller. And we have categories for special needs items, audio books, and large type books. And ease of use. We've got menu items, input items, have a short hop attached. When you hover over them with your mouse. And even if you have a very little computer experience, you can people can pretty well search for what they want. They may need a little bit of hand holding to convince them that they can use the computer. You know, how to use a browser, how to connect to the Internet. The idea was to not make it so you had to be a software engineer or tech whiz in order to use it. I wanted to make this available to anybody who wanted to use a card catalog. And you can search for items in the library under any number of criteria. Here's an example of it. We can search for books. We can search for things like this. We can look for mysteries. We can look for humor. We can look for large print books. In the future version, I'll be able to do multiple. I guess if you want to find a large print Western, you could do there. Let's see how this is. There's very many of them. I don't have very many VHS. I feel like a few VHS tapes. This one is an old version. Let's look for a genre of humor. I'm finding that one here. That's what we have in the way of nonfiction. If you want to find, you might be able to do it. Meet General Grant. We're in the 900s. We're still working on getting a Dewey decimal system up here. One thing at a time here. And some way of the question. I'll give you an idea of how many types and genres are in the collection. And there's a user and staff version of this function. I'll show you the user version in a little bit. You can tell a potential user or realtor, somebody who's thinking about moving into the area, what you have in your library, how many volumes, what sorts of things you have. And it gives you what the collection has. And you can better ensure your loss. Some way of the question. This is all done on the server side. We can see what we have in the way of results books. Young adults and children's. This was a fairly early copy of our library's collection. It gets broken broken down like this. You've got the value of your collection for somebody who wants to insure it. And if there is a loss, the thing is that this is stored off-site at the place where the boy post is. It's unlikely that they're going to be hit by the same disaster. So we'll have the information. The insurance company says, okay, how did you come up with your library being worth $10,000? And we say, okay, we have these 1,500 items and this is how they're broken down. This is what we have over a different form of different types of books, types of materials. So now let's look available on the back end. There are user functions and there are webmaster functions. For user functions, we should all be familiar with this. You know, setting up our library website. Here we have our catalog. And this is the user version of it, the same screen. And if you do a... You don't have nearly all the functions available. One of the funs is a lot of things that a user, a patron, a curious individual shouldn't be allowed to do. We'll have to look at some of them. But in this case, they don't have any information about what it's worth. This is a real library as it stands today. We're still working on organizing everything. I still have a whole bunch of children's and young adults materials to put in. But you can see, gee, do you have any Western books? Gee, look at that. The library has any Western books. Yeah, they have. It's one of them. Or large type books. Or audio books. Different people might be interested in those things. So not anyone, I don't know. You only have a unique identifier. ISBN, ASIN, LLC, arbitrary numbers. I talked about your library. This one, this was a key. You can look for things by an arbitrary number. But the DVDs, every movie house set all up in a different way. Every publisher sets them up in a different way. So I just said arbitrary numbers in 1, 2, 3, 4. And that's perfectly fine. You need basic info like your author, your creator's name, title, and the copyright of the release date. And the age group it's targeted for. And what kind of an item it is. It's just a book, or an audio book, or a CD, or if there's a performer or a reader. And you need to decide whether or not the item can be removed from the library. That we have special collections. We have reference books. We just don't want you to move off the library. And most of it you can. And the price for the item, or the value of the item. There's a lot of ways to value it. It can be the retail cost of a new item. Or the cost shipping of a new original value. Or some other method. And if you don't enter a value it'll only set to zero. And if it succeeds it'll give you success. I'll show you how to do this. This is my sandbox. I'll let anybody play in. I'm going to enter a book that I have sitting here that was donated. My ISBN is where we're going to put this and what we're going to put it with mysteries. And we have those outside of the library. So what are we going to say about this? The Susan Henshaw Mystery. The Copyright Gade. I'll put it up in there. It's an adult book. What genre is it? It defaults to general fiction. But I'm going to say it's a mystery. What kind of a thing is it? It's making a book. It's going to read a performer. And we can usually get these things from our portfolio. So we've entered one into the database. And we can quit. Thank you for doing it. Search for it. We can find it. That's the book we just entered. We'll get to doing other things with it. We can quit the errors. We can reclassify or revalue it. We can also, in the update function, you also have an option to delete an item. And in version 1.0, it doesn't have anything in place to keep track of any items that you want to replace. So you'll have to keep track of them somehow outside of the program. And it'll display the entire database. But it can be very long if you've got even our little library and we're not even done. It has almost 6,000 items, which is going to be quite long. And you can make a backup. There are better methods than to just put it all out. Now circulation of materials. What would you want to do for me? Let's go back to the main menu. That got me a user menu. That's called what I named Alt-T. What's updated both years? We should search on it by the same things. We could do it on search. But seeing as I have the ISBN number in my Facebook, I don't know how to use it. This is the information we have. What's updated? How are we going to update it? This thing is worth a lot more money. Let's say it's worth $50 and $0.28. Let's have a reader here. We'll have George read. We'll have George read the reader for this. So it's updated. I have a lot of this computerese things. I'll get to that later. But if you give me any bug reports, I'm going to want to see that. I'm going to want to know what's in there. Let's search for the thing again. We're getting in to circulate. Which is one thing that we do a lot of in the library. You can circulate. I've actually only got the checkout date for two weeks. And it uses some things available in the database software to circulate the U.S. holidays. And the success screen for checkout is before you do date. And you can inform the pre-trainer and put a brief label on the book. Let's check out the book I just entered. I've got it checked out now. And we can go back to the main menu. I'll go into the update screen so we can see what it looks like now that it's checked out. So in version 1, renewal is a staff function. But they can contact the library staff, request them to be renewed. They can do it by telephone, by email, in person, whatever they want to do. And it's actually not renewed if it's not home by somebody else. And it'll inform you if the thing is already overdue. And whatever you want to do, post review policy. If a person has a book that's already a month overdue, you want to let them renew it. Well, I don't know. That's up to you. And holds don't expire. But you can remove a home. Let's go back to search and write books. And putting a home alone item is in here. Let's see. Oh, we'll check our own item. So we'll check it in. I don't know that you want to put a card number in for check-in. You don't have to. Even check it in. It's okay. We checked out by 333-1234. Here's the book at home. If you want to check the book out, I'll show you how that doesn't work. I'll tell you the books on hold. This other user can't check it out unless you remove the home. But maybe you've ever seen 1234 for a while. So let's remove the home. And now anybody else can check it out. And this version doesn't compute the whatever finds are available. I'll tell you that the item is overdue. And what it was due, and you can figure a fine and charge a fine according to your library policy. Or some libraries don't do fines. And some of us are in the process of reevaluating that policy. You can search for items that are overdue. Why don't we check out the other book? I want to do something with it in a bit. So here's one of our hubby screens. Once on this date, you want to hear about it. And show you the format at once in a minute. Let's say I want to hear from everything about that was due everything from the first month. I don't want to hear about anything that was due before August 1st. We'll do say we have some things that we checked out that we can contact these people. And here you will see that there's a replacement cost for them. Here y'all. You got you contact 789 and maybe tells you it's lost. The replacement cost for this is two dollars and a half. I'll get to readers and performers. We have performers on CDs and DVDs and audiobooks. That could be interesting to a person who has difficulty hearing that they might be able to understand. A man's voice better or a woman's voice better. Or there's just certain readers that they might or don't like. Somebody comes in and says, gee, I checked out that book and I left it on a bus in Albuquerque. And no chance of getting it back. Well, you look up the book, the really different database. And then you assess the cost of the patron and then put it in your list of things to replace. That's the multiple function thing. We can maybe do it on one function in another group. Another release. Okay. Here we go. Our favorite topic, weedy. Give you some assistance. It just tells you what items are not circulated. But no piece of software can tell you everything. But you probably don't want to read the non-circulating book of it. It's part of a special collection and is not available for circulation. It will just give you a list of things that just haven't circulated in some time. You might want to look at those. Like I said, we had no restrictions on what the project brought out. The intellectual freedom ideas. And here are your requirements. You need to have a website. I have a web host. It's on websites. Or possibly the government library that supports your library. The city or village or county. It must support my SQL and PHP. Most of the commercial ones do. Watch so you're not paying for things you don't need. You don't need a shopping cart or credit card payment processors. But you might still like playing the plus-cost. You choose one that provides them and just not use them. And you need to have a person to act as your webmaster. And who's your webmaster? Well, I'm not sure. Maybe somebody in your community has a blog. If they have a blog or their own website, they may be able to help you set yours up. Students or the other society members might be able to help you. Especially the computer science students. It's not incredibly hard to do at this level. You may be able to develop the skills yourself. You may be able to find somebody who hopefully would have them. Might be able to get help from the library commission. Sorry, Michael. You might be able to contract to hire one for a short time. You're used to certain tasks. And so this is all for buying for librarians. We're going to all recommend you some books. Building a website for dummies. The really, really easy step-to-step guide to building a website for absolute beginners of all ages. And building a website for free. And you can find those books online or in your library or maybe in your library alone. You need to find a web host that minimizes both my sick wall and you need to download the database. For the broadwaterftl.org. And click on Get Web Database. And then there's a version to download for Windows. It will automatically download and put things in the zip folder. Please read the readme. And if you like it, please support it. All I'm asking is a $10 donation to our friends in the library group. And all that money goes to support our library. And you'll need to customize. You probably want to have your own thing. I have included my logo which is that faded picture of a bookshelf. You can search your own. Just watch for copyright on it. Take the picture yourself. Get a legally free source. A few things you want to be sure to update. I'm going to... I'm a notepad here. So let's open it. This one was downloaded earlier. You want to do a connectDB. You want to... This is your nonproperties account. This is what it is. It's a passport user. And a password in this case is password. You probably want something different than password. You have a secured password. In this case, we have secured password. You just probably know what you want. But set that up yourself. You don't want to remain. What you find... What you find in the things that you look for... You want to find a thread. And there's your database. You're putting your own library name there. In the Inetown library, our telephone number is... The telephone number. And your library's email address. Whenever you're getting your email. And you give your address... Give your address to the library. There's a message to it. I'm going to put in... This is what you remain. Hours of operation are... What do we want to say? 26. And we're done. So we save it. And here's the one we just opened. We just opened it with Google Chrome. Just to show you that... The things I put in there are really there. These are the things I put in. Sure, you have customization. You probably want to get your own live logo. You can use mine. Or just take a photo yourself. Be aware of copyrights and who owns the rights to them. That you've got a copy of it. Keep track of it. Databases don't work for databases file. Database is just a specific format. Don't get caught up in the computer ease. So this is what the schema looks like. We have a 13 character. A field for an ISBN. Can you imagine that? That we're keeping track of the holes. This is all the information we're keeping. And... It's pretty... I stripped down the basic. But privacy is guaranteed. It doesn't store anything like that. The real thing that you have to have is... The ISBN. That must be a unique key to find the item. That's how it's organized. Some of the information is required by my database, but not my SQL database. And... And I've got this file on library.sql. Which says that you can use phpMyAdmin on the waypost. If you log into cpanel, I may be getting a little bit into the techie realm here. This is part of the screen that you will see in databases. And just click on phpMyAdmin. And from there, you can run library.sql, and it will set up for you. You'll still need to set up passwords. Which can and should be unique to your site. I already said this. If you customize the details, and the logo has to be off of the... You don't want to get in the copyright, or copyright infringement, or anything like that. Then populate the database. And it's a big job. And I don't know where it would be if I didn't have volunteers. There were some people who were extremely helpful on this. And here is a few words of advice. Back up the database from the website frequently. And store multiple copies of it in multiple places. Put them on different computers. If you have a cloud storage, put one on there. And you can power them by different suns. Do that. You don't want to go through all of that work again. So the implementation is... It's 1.0 implementation. It looks good at my library. It's got some limitations. There are some things that are not yet developed. It helps that the designer of the library directs you to the same person. But there was also a disadvantage there that I had to require my volunteers to tell me they didn't understand something. And most of them were not familiar with it back in the websites. They were only using a computer and never gave them a web. And they gave me some suggestions to clarify the menus and gave me the... the help that's available on... what they wanted to know for the mouseovers and all the screens. Some of them like to have... I never meant it. We like to set the library policy in the same period. And then different home periods where you have items, have a better security system, possibly for each user, change the theme and the color and the font. Those are nice to have. This shareware with the creative commons at attribution insurance license. Please share this. You know, use it, copy it, give copies away, modify it. You don't need to encode your name with the credits for what you modified. All I ask is that you don't charge for it. Or at least not more than it costs you to make copies and mail them. And please don't commercialize it or try to sell it. And all we're asking is that you send a $10 donation to a friend in the library when you can and when you feel like you want to use it, you're comfortable doing it. And please with documentation with the about.com that appears on the website. That's how you get to it. What any page says about. A good bit of it is it tells you how to send me a bug report. And I told you about those computer-based stuff. If there's a bug in it, please give me that too. It's there. And if you have any suggestions then I'm only an entertainer. If you don't like it, tell me what you don't like and I'll see if I can modify it in the future. Because if you've got a problem or a chance there's somebody else does too. And if you install it, please register it. It's not going to put you on any mailing lists. It's not going to put you on our mailing list so we can tell you there's a new version of it. And obviously we're not going to to sell you data or anything like that. It's just for our use. And if you don't want to use it, just don't pay for it. And the little bit of legal things keep me out of hot water that we can't give you any warranty or any specific warranty or any virtuality of purpose. And I developed this with the hope of a useful hero offering it with the hope it's useful to somebody else. I can't guarantee much of anything. We're not a major software company. So we're done. Alright Beth, that was wonderful. Chris and I were sitting here just being more and more impressed every next slide and demo you got to. So Chris, do we have any questions from the audience? Yes. Yes, Beth, we had a couple of questions that are very similar. So I'm going to kind of combine them into one for you. Going back to when you're actually adding items into the database, adding the records for the books and whatnot. A couple of different questions. Can you choose multiple genres for one book? Put it in multiple categories? No, but that might be a suggestion for the future. If you have a Western romance or a funny mystery or something like that. That might be something that we could add in the future. And can new genres and formats be added to it? So can somebody add in other ones that aren't already in there by default that you created? Is that something someone could do with the software? Add in their own genres that they have at their library? You'll have to be able to write into the PHP code and the HTML code. But yes, you can add your own genre if you want it. That would be fine. We have someone who works as a volunteer at the Nature Center in a church and he's thinking that they're interested in doing something to catalog their collections and they might have other categories that aren't the same ones that you'd have in a public library, so he would want to tweak it for what they're doing. Yeah, I can see that that Nature Center probably wouldn't have a lot of books on poetry or books on American history, but they might have things on ornamental plants and food plants and things like that. But yeah, that could be customized too. And the other thing is that you would have to, after defining a particular type of you know, a letter for it and just not having any duplicates in it anyway. But if you're going to get rid of some of my some of mine because you probably don't want to have a romance in a church let's say that you could have things like Renaissance or things about people in the past Sure. Someone did ask and I'm going to actually answer the question for them how to get the software. In the show links I'm going to be including a link to where you can get the live database software that she has so when afterwards you'll have that link from the library's website from the friends and the library's website so it will be on there. Beth, I just had a couple of really quick questions and maybe one suggestion I came up with. First the comment that both had was that summary of the collection would be great for like reporting to the board, reporting to City Council, Town Council whoever funds you I could see a real use for that my suggestion based off of that was like it said we have 125 Westerns being able to click on that 125 and then getting a search result of all the Westerns that would maybe be a way you could go about it. That might be a suggestion for next time. And then the one question I had was if you would estimate for us how much time you actually put into this project or do you not want to think about it? Oh, a couple hundred hours I may be off by a factor of two or three hundred percent. Sure, okay. But you didn't do this in a weekend. I mean that's... No. Things on it grew that there were suggestions to do this and you know even on the database everybody I talked to one of the things played in a different ordering format so I said okay I just have a screen and you can start with you can order it any way you want to which is... Okay we have a question that has come in from the audience and see if I can rephrase it a little more generally a little less specific than it came through did you look at some of the existing open source products like Koho or Evergreen and why why did you decide not to go with those? I looked at Evergreen and everything I so wanted required me to have my own server and like I say if that's not really possible there would have to be someone that could maybe set the server and I'm much more willing to spend time developing software and putting it up on a professional web server than being around having somebody around and it's capable of bringing up the server with a crash 24x7 and I'll add even Koho or Evergreen which may be free up front are not necessarily free in the long run and just even ignoring cost for a library of a certain size even one of those could be overkill and it seems like what you've done gets the job done for you with your size of library like I say this is for a library like Omaha or even Scottsboro you know it's probably not appropriate for them for other libraries that can number the community they serve in the hundreds it probably is it's not it's a matter of what you want you don't need to be able to kill sure all right well Beth I will say I almost want to download this and start playing with the code I'm just not sure what I would do with it but you have intrigued me that far I'm severely impressed by the work that you've put into this and it looks like a wonderful project and I hope some of our listeners whether live or recorded will take a look at it and download it it's not like we had one or two people that were interested in possibly using it for some small projects so Beth I just want to say thank you very much for being willing to do this and share your project with us and I think at that point without any other questions from the audience we're going to go ahead and take back control for just a few minutes here and do one piece of news and then wrap up the show for the day just one thing if you look at it go ahead if you like to look at it you can go to my sandbox web-metric.com capital lot M-A-I-N HTML and that will give you a staff view of the database and it's based on an older copy of our database but you can check things out check things in, put holds on it if you mess it up too badly I can just go and hit the like key or something for those of you who missed the URL we're pulling that up now at our end we will include that in the show notes and make sure everybody can get to that so thanks Beth once again and we're going to go ahead and cover a little bit of news and do that so I just really have one bit of news that I want to mention and share at this point we've talked about 3D printers and 3D printing on the show in the past the next stage is happening and I'll just quickly pull up this brief article here from BBC News MakerBot Industries the folks who create the MakerBot printer are actually now selling for I will admit $1400 so it's not cheap I'm not buying one myself tomorrow a 3D scanner we're all familiar with the concept of scanning a piece of paper on a flat surface what if you want to scan a 3D object to then reprint a 3D object they are now starting the 3D scanners have been around this would be kind of the first one that would in theory supposing you have $1400 to spend one that's a little more available for the public to purchase and it says it takes about 12 minutes to scan a small simple object so these things are not fast these things are not necessarily cheap yet but they are coming they are now available something that theoretically you could buy for your home or for your library if you wanted to scan a 3D object for reprinting a 3D object so that's kind of my one piece of news for the month and I thought I wanted to share with everybody so I'm going to wrap up Tech Talk here and hand it back over to Krista all right great thank you thank you Michael thank you Beth that was really cool yeah it just shows the basics of an ILS are pretty simple basic the core functionality the core functionality of an ILS is you know she still says she spent hundreds of hours I mean so but at its core it doesn't necessarily need to do a lot everything past that is gravy I guess so you know just to see what you can do with it yeah alright so that will wrap us up for this morning the show has been recorded as usual so the recording will be posted up later today or tomorrow I hope you'll join us next week when our topic is the Affordable Care Act resources for libraries October 1st October 1st is the date when the healthcare marketplace goes live and libraries are where people are going to go in looking for help and assistance as they do with many things coming to us so we are going to have some resources and things available to you Mary Sowers the government information services librarian here at the library commission will be updating us on all the new things that have come up we did do a session on this in July about a month ago yeah and things have moved along definitely you know that was we were just getting and just heard about it at ALA but now there's a lot more resources and things out there that you can use so we're going to be sharing that with you so please do sign up for that it will be there will be some Nebraska specific things in there but will also be some things that are just broad for any library in the country who's trying to help their patrons get up to speed on this and get enrolled if you are a facebook user please mccompass live is on facebook so please do feel free to like us there you will get notifications of when shows are starting here is a reminder out this morning login on the fly and when the recordings are available reminders of when the next shows are coming up so if you are a big facebook user please do go ahead and like us on facebook and you'll keep up with us there then that we are done for the day thank you very much and hopefully we'll see you next time and in the future on encompass live bye bye