 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly online event. We are a webinar, a webcast, an online show, as I say every week. The terminology is up for debate and still nobody has come up with what they want to call these things. There has been no consensus, so I just keep saying we're any, we're whatever you want to call us, but we're here live, online, every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. Call us what you will, mostly Encompass Live. The show is free and open to anyone to watch. If you're not able to join us here on Wednesday mornings, that's okay. We do record all of our shows and I'll show you that at the end of the show where we have all our recordings going back all the way to the beginning, so if you're not here on Wednesday mornings or if you see a topic you want to watch but you missed it and you want to watch it later, share it with friends, colleagues, in our archives you can always watch the show whenever you like. We do collect any websites anybody mentions during the show, so the URLs will be available for you there. If they have presentations or handouts or documents related to their presentation, we put them on the archive page as well. We do a mixture of things here, book reviews, interviews, mini training sessions, just presentations about new and interesting topics. Basically anything library related, we are happy to have on the show. We do bring in guest speakers from outside the Library Commission sometimes but we also do Nebraska Library Commission focused topics and that's what we have this morning. Today is our NLC's library development sampler as what we've called it. I'm back and forth on a few. It's a box of chocolates. Yeah, hopefully it'll be good chocolates, that's the idea. I am part of the Library Commission's Library Development Department, Library Development Services team now. Almost a year. It's April, June, July. Are you doing your talk now? Sure, yeah, no. And we decided, Richard, who's the head, and we're going to go through some introductions in just a sec here, we decided lots of things have changed in the last year or so or even a little more than that in Library Development. So it'd be good to do an update on what's going on with us and our people in this particular department of the Nebraska Library Commission. So we're going to start with just introductions of who we are and we're just going to do a around the room here, starting with me. So I'm going to try and adjust the camera a bit. There you go. How's that? Eh, looks good enough. Sally's our camera operator. Yeah, at the moment, yeah. So as I said, I am Krista Burns. My, and I said I moved into Library Development last summer and officially it was July. I think that's correct. As of July of last year, as the Library Development Consultant is my new title, which is just as vague as my old title previously. I was in our Technology and Access Services Department as a special projects librarian. Before that, I was the OCLC member services coordinator. So things have changed for me as in my positions here. As Library Development Consultant, I'm doing another mishmash of things that we'll talk about today too. We're going to talk about all the different things we do here. Before I came to the Library Commission, I was, I'm from New York. I am, anyone who doesn't know that by now. Most people hopefully heard me talk about it. It doesn't sound like it. I'm from upstate New York. I should specify then. No, you will not hear much of a New Yorker accent from me. I worked at University Library in New York for eight and a half years before I came here to the Library Commission. So my background in actual library work is on the University College University side. And that's something I'll be doing more of in Library Development, hopefully working more with universities and colleges in Nebraska. Anything else I should say? I'll get more into what I actually do in Library Development throughout the show. And next up is Holly. Go ahead, introduce yourself. Okay, so I'm Holly Duggan. I am the new Continuing Education Coordinator taking over from Laura Johnson who retired. I've been here a whole month now. And so I'm just getting my things figured out and I'm ready to tackle some of the big projects that we have planned. And so I'm just, I'm from North Platt originally. I went, I got my undergrad at Carney and I just started working at the library there. And then I worked at Love Library here in Lincoln. I worked at Public Library, Gear Library here. And most recently I came from Concordia in Seward as the distance librarian. Background kind of includes, I got my library degree from Missouri. I have education and technology degrees. So I'm just really excited about the opportunity to be here and kind of tie everything together and work with all of you wonderful people. Hello, I'm Richard Miller. This is one thing that hasn't changed since the last time we did this. Little bit of background for those of you who don't know. I've been here at the commission almost 20 years. Came from a short stint at Southeast Library System. I was there for 17 months. Before that I was at Montana State Library and before that I was at Missouri State Library. So I mainly worked in state library agency all along. And now the commission, which is a state library agency but it's called the commission in here as well. My title is Library Development Director. We're very happy to have on board the two most recent people, Krista, who transferred over. So she's not a newbie and especially Holly to have her on board. She's really gonna do great things for her. She's already doing great things. So that's great. I do wanna show you a season ticket because we won't be able to see this later on. We're not gonna change the camera but this season ticket is for boards, library boards, library foundations and library friends groups. And we have an annual membership that we have with United for Libraries so that every public library and all four of our system offices have access to these things free. So you don't have to pay for them. There's some really good stuff. We'll be talking about that later. My background, undergraduate degree from Grove City College, which is in Western Pennsylvania, master's degree from Drexel University in Philadelphia. And I think that's about it. So over to Sally. Hello. I'm the children's and teen library services coordinator for something like that changes from day to day. And I've been here at the library commission for 31 years. So I'm the oldie in the room. Don't say anything. Not chronologically, however. So I started here in 1984 and I worked in the talking book in Burrell Department, which at that time was called the library for the blind and physically handicapped. And then after I was there for two and a half years, I started working with the federal grants that we were giving the LSCA and then the LSTA grants that went out. I was keeping track of the paperwork on that. And then in 2003, I became the children and teen services coordinator. So that's all of my jobs have been great. This is my favorite job. Just saying. That's who I think you said. And I started, I got my undergraduate degree at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Then I went to Colorado and ended up working at the public library there thinking, well, I should get a library science degree. Well, that should be till 2006 to actually get my library science degree because things went by the wayside for a while. I got my master's in public administration in the late 80s. So I've been busy off and on with school, but I'm done now, I'm not saying I'm done. That's for me. Really enjoying everything that's happened in here at the commission. Yep. Back to group, huh? Yeah. Can you grab that mouse over there? I'm going to start out talking and we're going to move this mouse back and forth as each of us talks with various things that the format we're going to use here is that we're going to show you, we figure this is kind of double duty, we're going to show you our website here at the commission, which I'm sure many of you are already familiar with, but we want to talk about specific sections of that website. That's why we're going to be jumping back and forth. We're going to start off talking here about accreditation and certification. I'm going to talk to you a bit about board certification then Holly will talk about librarian certification then I'll be back on and talk about library accreditation and we'll work our way down these fly out menus here. Board certification, I showed you this season's ticket ahead of time, okay? That's very important for your board certification. For those of you who work in public libraries in Nebraska, you know that library boards have to earn 20 hours of CE at least within a three year period. They have three years to do that. We keep saying to people there's really no excuse not to be able to earn those 20 hours within that three years because if, for example, the board decides to do some CE during a board meeting and it goes for half an hour, if five board members are there, that's two and a half hours of CE and you've got three years to do this. So we accept no excuses for not earning those 20 hours. There's information here if you go to the about, about board certification which you can look at. There are, there's information here and Holly is gonna be working on this as she gets more into her job but there's information here on various resources. We have the trustee academy which was produced by United for Libraries. We have short takes for trustees which is the more recent thing produced by United for Libraries and what's really handy about this is that these videos go about 15 minutes. You could show them for 15 minutes at your board meeting, have 15 minute discussion and boom, you got two and a half hours of credit. So that's a really good thing to do. These are up to date, Sally Gardner Reed who is the executive director of United for Libraries is involved in most of them does an excellent job. So look at those. There's other information here on video series that we have and every month, Holly takes a list of free videos that is produced by the Wyoming State Library. She massages that, increases the value and then that thing is posted web junctions website. So you can see it there later on but what you'll be doing is you'll be categorizing those videos so that there'll be a section for example if you're talking about your friends group or your foundation or your library board you'll be able to choose from those webinars that are kind of pre-sorted for you. That's really handy. I was wondering about actually about that. Those are all upcoming new ones or is that list often recorded once? Every month is, every month for that month. Okay, so it's just upcoming live ones coming up. Yeah, live ones. But those are archived as well. Some of them are archived, right? And you're gonna talk about our archives here. Okay. Back to the board certification for just a minute. There's an application form here. I'm not gonna show you all of these things because you can see them yourself but there's an application form if your board is not currently certified they can sign up for it. We have a library board handbook which I'll take that to you for just a minute which has been redone. It's now all online. That goes chapter by chapter. It's really nice. Laura Johnson did this before she ran out the door. We made that contingent upon. You may leave only if you do this before you leave. So she did this as well as some other things and it's really quite nice. We work very closely with the five regional library system directors in our four systems and they helped out with this as well. Really handy if you wanna look at any of these things here. This is another easy way for boards to get CE credit is to take a chapter at a time at a board meeting and look through it and discuss it and talk about it. It's really easy. So again, no excuse to not have your board certified. We have a status lookup if you wanna see for example if your current board is certified you can see that there. This is a link to your websites as well. This can be sorted by the library name if you're not quite sure what city it's in. It can be sorted by system and that changes over here and it can be sorted by expiration date which is kind of nice. You can check to see if your library is coming up for recertification soon. We recommend very strongly that you not wait till the last minute. I had a meeting with a library board last week and I noticed that all of their hours were in the last month. And I said, do you know what this indicates? And they looked sort of guiltily at me and said, yeah, we waited till the last minute. So don't do that. Please do this on time. And we also have a form to submit your CE credits. I believe Holly is gonna be working on this if she hasn't already because we're going to be looking at how to do that. We're gonna be making sure that you give us adequate information so that we don't have to guess what it is, the activity that you looked at. So she and Linda and our staff are gonna be working on that. By the way, Linda Babcock who is our support staff is not here today because she's taking care of some family matters. I told her she should come on board. She was worried about what she'd say and I told her we just needed a pretty face but she laughed and she has to do those family things. But Linda Babcock is often your first contact with library development. Let's have Holly talk about library and certification. I'll turn the mouse over to her. Okay. Like Richard said, we've been working on updating some of these websites. So if you haven't checked them in a while, it's a good review. So this one, there's a lot going on with the certification program. So we'll just start at the beginning, just real quick and go through it. If you want to or need to enroll in the program, you'll start with the application and just fill it out, submit it to us. And once we process it, you'll be enrolled. And part of this application will ask you what level of certification you're at. And one of the updates, we tried to make this reference a little easier. To go back to. So it really depends on your level of degrees or how much college credit you've earned so far, which level you're at. And then you'll see that depending on what level you're at, you might have to take some of these basic skill classes, which I'll mention in a second. So basically once you're in the program, you'll have three years to earn 45 continuing education credits through different activities. And the question might be, how do you earn those credits or what counts for credits? So you can either scroll to the bottom of this page or if you're just looking quickly for it, it's right here under this fly out menu, how to earn CE credits. And this is another one we've updated. So hopefully this is an easier reference to give you some guidelines of what counts for general CE activities if you take an academic course and how much those are usually worth. And you can kind of see how do you know if it counts? It's usually, if the event or the activity was created or planned with the intention of teaching or discussion of library topics in minimum 20 minutes long, but there are some exceptions. And if you go all the way to the bottom of this page, you can see what activities are not eligible. So some of the regular staff meetings, business meetings, the training of new employees or the training on regular work activities, we really want the continuing education credits to be awarded for activities or events that really add to your knowledge and really expand on your abilities or your knowledge of librarianship. So that's why some of those don't count. But the most important thing is if you ever have questions on whether or not something you're doing or wanna do will count for CE credit, just ask me, just contact me and I'm more than happy to talk about it with you. And there's your contact, isn't it? Yeah, my contact information right there. So that's just kind of general, what counts for CE credits. And like I said, 45 credits for each three year certification period. It really isn't bad if you spread it out. No, not at all. Like Richard said, don't wait until the last minute because it's really hard then. But let's see. So if we go back to our about the public librarian certification page and I mentioned the basic skills classes. So basically, if you don't have some sort of degree in library science, we want you to take these basic skill courses, which gives you kind of that foundational knowledge that we expect. So these basic skill courses, if you scroll down here, you can see the list of classes. So these are online classes that we offer periodically they are all online, but they're not self-paced. So you don't need to attend or log in at a certain time. But there are instructors and classmates and assignments that you need to be aware of and complete the work during the course. So how this? Usually two weeks. Two weeks, yes. Except for the organizational materials is four weeks. So it's not a hugely time consuming class, but you'll take six of the required courses and then you'll choose seven. So whatever is most relevant or interesting to you, you'll pick seven. And you'll need to do that in the first three years that you're a part of the program. So to register for those, you can either come down here or I guess I can talk about the calendar real quick. Anytime you're on the library commission website, if you go to the top, the calendar is right here. If you click on that, you'll be able to see all of the library commission events and the system sponsored events as well. And so to register for a basic skills course, you'll go to the date of when the course starts. Click on it, you'll see the description of the course. And this is true for all of the activities on the calendar. You'll see the description of the activity or the event, the dates, the contact information. And right here, it'll tell you how many CE hours this is worth. And then to register for the basic skills, you just click register, fill out the form, and then a few days or a week before the class starts, I'll send out the information about how to log in and how to access the course online. And again, if you have any questions at all, just contact. And then the last thing I'll mention is just submitting CE credits, just like the board certification. It's on this menu. Make sure you're under the library and certification for your individual CE credits. You'll fill out this form. And like Richard said, we're taking a look at this form to see if we can improve it. But for now, you'll fill it out, submit it, and then Linda Babcock will get your hours recorded for you. I think that's the basics of that. Good job. Okay. We do have an observation from someone. I had a question. Steve Fosselman out in Grand Island. I don't know if he's working on something in particular. Just gives us a little insight. Just an observation. He'll take any suggestions for classes on stress relief and retirement planning. I think we all could use some of that. I thought he was going to ask for one on stirring up trouble. How long have you got that? Yeah, he's got that down. Get that down, Pat. Well, we're going to go to library accreditation now. And for those of you who have gone through the library accreditation process, this is probably a favorite part of our website. Library accreditation. Just as with board certification and as with librarian certification, there's a three-year period during which your library is accredited. Now, the first six months here, I've said this to everybody. I couldn't keep straight whether to say the word certification or accreditation. This is the way you do it. Only people are certifiable. That's a little joke. So only boards and only librarians are certifiable. When you talk about the library, that's accreditation. So you can go to this about click here and we can talk about the accreditation information here. I'm going to go through it rather quickly. Basically, the accreditation guidelines are set up such that they hope and we hope to ensure some level of quality of public library services in our state. About 150 or so of our 200 and... 60 something. 260 public libraries. Somewhere around 264 public libraries are accredited and have gone through this. The process begins every year at July 1st. We contact the public libraries that are up for accreditation for the next three-year period and let them know that by October 1st they have to have done a few things. They have to have sent in the application form for accreditation and they have to have completed and have approved a strategic plan which we'll talk about that in just a minute as well. So we'll talk about the application form itself in just a bit. You can preview that application here if you wish to. This isn't a live application, but if you click on it you can see what the application form is going to look like here. Can I do this whole screen here? Can you do it? Let's do that. That's a little bit better. Is it easier to see that? Yeah, a little bit better. For a little bit about the application form itself, this is an interactive application form. Our computer team here in particular, Vern Bias did a wonderful job of taking the work of a task force that we had together about five years ago and redoing the whole application process. It's now online. Used to be kind of paper or you could opt for paper. There are 12 of the guidelines of this whole document that in which we pull statistics from your annual statistical survey that you send in to us that Sam Shaw works with. Those 12 guidelines compare your library with peer libraries which is libraries of similar service size. And if you have met one of those guidelines there's going to be an automatic green check mark if you have not that there's an automatic red X in it. There are about 275 total points on this application form. You have to earn 250 or more to be at the gold level and 200 for silver, 175 for bronze. There is a sheet attached to this. I'm not sure if it works on this one or not. It's an information sheet. No, not on this one, it's not live. Which if there is something where we want to offer additional information for you you can click on that question mark in the yellow ball. It takes you right to the exact section of that information sheet which will help explain that. Any time you see that I recommend strongly that you look at it because there are probably three questions on this application form that I spend the most time on trying to answer for libraries whereas if they read this I think they might understand it or at least they'd have a better chance at it. The application form itself is broken into five sections. We're not going to go through it here but the one section I do want to show you that is actually could add up the most points is this guideline 1.03. Your library policies have to be up to date. That is they have to be no older than three years old in order to be able to count them here. Now this is self-reported so we're not going out. We don't have policy police go out and check this but when you do this you have to be able to check off which of those have been reviewed or have been written within the last three years. Each one of those counts of points. So look at this one. You could earn up to 19 points on this thing. If you have all 16 that we have listed here plus others so that's a big deal. So right now if your library is up for re-accreditation in this year 2016 get cracking on your policies so you can earn those points. When you get to the end of this application form you will see that you won't see everything here but you will see that we ask you to list the library name, the director's name, the director's email. This allows us to update stuff. Now on the live form it will say you can save and do later or you can submit it so you have that option. The reason that's good is because you can start working on this I assume after July 1st as we make it live which should be right at July 1st. You can start working on this and save it and submit it later. You'll notice here there's a point total box here. On the live application as you go through here and check one of these things let's suppose something is worth 10 points. If you click that there'll be a floating box of points that will automatically go up to 10. I've had one library in the past who said you know what I'm getting to 175 and then I'm quitting. I'm not gonna answer the rest of these. That's up to you. It's fine, whatever you wanna do. But anyway, that's the example thing. That's not the live thing. If you actually go to the live accreditation application here what you're gonna notice is that it doesn't pop up that way. There are 12 minimum qualifications that you have to be able to answer truthfully that your library meets. And the reason these are in here is because the task force decided that there are basic minimum qualifications that a library has to be able to meet before it can ever even apply for accreditation. These are the 12. You have to be legally established in the state law. You have to comply with the various levels of laws. You have to have a governing or advisory library board that uses the Open Meetings Act for its meetings. The board has to be certified, notice. We just talked about that. Director has to be certified at the appropriate level. Just talked about that. You have to receive local funding from a Citadelage Township or County. You have to have submitted the most recent survey which was due back in February and you have to have submitted the supplemental survey. Sam Shaw sent out a message that apparently scared the willies out of a whole bunch of people because we got a whole bunch of supplemental surveys in over the last month or so because they're both required in order to be able to check that. You have to have paid staff that's there anytime the library is open. The director has to have an email address that's used regularly, use the email. You have to make your basic services available to all residents. And without charge, you have to provide access to the internet at no charge to anybody who walks into the library, whether you're a part of your taxing district or not. And I don't want to check this one until I explain what's gonna happen. You have to make your annual report to the governing body and to the public and that's due usually the second week in February, the second Monday in February of every year. You have to make that available and in fact the law states that it should be the library board that makes that report. Now watch what happens when I click this last one. Kaboom. It says, ah, based on the responses above, you meet the minimum qualifications and you may choose to apply for accreditation. Then and only then does the live one come up. So I'm gonna hit apply for accreditation. And now what do you think you put in here? Well, magic. You put in the same user ID and password that you use for annual statistics. That's right. I'm not gonna do that at this point but that's what you do and then you get into the login into the live application. And when you get to that. It does have that password help thing there too. If you don't know what yours is. That's right. You just click that and it will tell you. That's right, you get to that. You go to the form and figure it out. Now the reason it's set up that way is because remember I told you that 12 of the guidelines are specific to your library. That means that the statistics that are in there are only for your library. The application that comes up is only for your library. Your library pops up there. No other library has that. I wanna talk for just a minute about peer library. What it will do is when you log in with your survey ID it will automatically pull into your application anything it knows from your survey that you submitted. That is correct. So part of it gets automatically done for you. That's right, so that makes it a whole lot easier. On the live application, since we're not in the live application there actually is a link up here for your peer libraries. I'll just explain peer libraries to you rather quickly but not show it to you. On your live application, your library pops up and there are anywhere from five to 10 to more libraries above and below your service library population. I suppose your service population is 5,000. There are libraries above that are up to 15% higher and there are libraries below that are down to 15% lower than your service population. That means your library is right at the median. Now we have a lot of libraries in our state that do not have enough peer libraries to show those. So what we are doing there is we're pulling in statistics from Iowa because we think we have a lot of libraries with 270 or so public libraries. They have 545 public libraries in Iowa. So there's a whole lot of peer libraries we can pull from. So we use their statistics for the year just as we use your statistics for the year for your peer libraries. All right, let's go back to this because I'm talking too long. If you need to see your status you can figure out when your library is up for or what year your library's accreditation expires. You can arrange this list by library name, by system or by year expires. What would be handy, really handy if you don't wanna go through the whole list. If you wanna see if your library is up for accreditation this year is you just scroll down here and all those libraries listed under 2016 and there are 47 of them are gonna get an email from me on July 1 and it's gonna say get crackin'. Only nicer. Oh yes, nice, of course, we always try to be, yes, thank you Sally, nice. Sally keeps us nice here, Nebraska nice, yes. But start working on your strategic plan now and start working on some of these other things now. Well, let's go back here because I have to talk to you about strategic planning and I'm gonna do this rather quickly. I told you that a strategic plan is required for library accreditation. There's information here on the seven elements that are required in strategic plans. There's a video I'm gonna suggest you look at first and foremost before you do anything else. We have examples, strategic plans. We have sample community questions to use when you try to find out what the community needs are and we've got all kinds of worksheets and how-to guides down here. Your regional system administrator or administrators are key to this whole thing. Every year we do strategic planning workshops within your region, sometimes more than one. Often your system director will review your strategic plan before you send it to me. I'm the guy who has to say whether it's approved or not. I'll send recommendations to you if changes need to be made. So will your system, so will your system directors. I couldn't say that quite right, yes. But look at this video here first. It goes about an hour and 12 minutes or so. It'll give you strategic planning ideas in a nutshell. When we do the strategic planning workshops, they go three and a half hours or three hours depending on how short the system director wants to keep them. This is a shorthand reader's digest version of it. Take a look at it, that'll give you some idea of what's in mind for your strategic plan. All right, let's move on because we're taking too long. I'm taking too long. We're going to go to children's and young adults and Sally's going to take over. I feel bad because I don't have an about section here. Oh, wait, there I did. Here's an about for the summer reading program. One of the many things I do, because of course we all have many things we do, is the summer reading program. I go to the Collaborative Summer Library Program annual meeting every year. There's some information about that group because way back in, what it says right here, we joined in 1997. Instead of each state creating their own summer reading program, it made a whole bunch of sense for us to get together and share the scene, the slogan, the manual. And that's been so wonderful since we did that. And there's some information about the Collaborative and I did do an encompass live about how the Collaborative works and how we choose our theme. So you might, if you ever want to watch that, it's right there. Some other information that I think is really fun is if you go to the SRP current, et cetera, we just say, tell you what the slogans are for this year and how you can get your manuals, et cetera. And then you can either go down, scroll down a little bit. And here's again the current, but what's next year? I have people call me on the phone and that's fine. Please call me on the phone and ask me, what's next year's theme? If you want to, you can look here and see what the topic is. They call it topic or, because theme got confusing and the slogan for the first time next year, each level of the manual will have the same slogan, build a better world, which is really exciting. And then if you want to know what year did we do the bug theme, which is catch the reading bug, now you know, oh, that was 2008. Because sometimes things haunt you, you know? I remember we did bugs. When was that? Well, right here you can look down and find it. So that's kind of fun. So there's a pretty good amount of information about the summer reading program on this page. And I'm also going to go to some general topics about books and reading. The Golden Sower Award, I have to fix that link, something, everything's been changing and I slipped and didn't update that. So that's my... Well, some of the, I'm not sure. Golden Sower is related to NLA and Nebraska Library Association and they are, I believe, still in transition and getting the new website for NLA, working with a lot of the sub pages for different groups. And I know, last I looked, the Sower one was partially has information, but not all, like, current stuff is there, but anything old is not, so it'll be more. To clarify, the Golden Sower Award committee is a committee of these school children's and young people's section of NLA because we had a couple people talking the other day about it being separate all by itself. No, no, no, no. Just saying. Yes, they operate great on their own with very limited supervision, but they are a committee of the school children and young people's section, but this is my mistake for not updating that. This afternoon, we're going, Janet and I are going to update the one book for Nebraska kids and teens. We had a year off last year in 2015 and we do have books for this year and we're going to be getting some activities, the books and everything up there this afternoon and then we'll be working on activities. My youth advisory board is going to be working on that, so that will be up soon. And then Read Aloud Nebraska, I am one of the board members of Read Aloud Nebraska which is a non-profit group that's all about encouraging people to read aloud to their children. And I just recently read an article about how it's more important to use the print book. There's something about the interaction with the child and the parent or adult with the print book than using a digital device. I don't know why I have to find the study that talked about that, but I had to throw that in there. So right now, you can apply to be a Read Aloud school or community that started April 1st and we'll finish, I think in early, maybe November 1st. Hey, let's find out if it tells us that. And if you are, it's just a form to fill out, it doesn't cost you anything. We ask you to apply every year so that you're keeping active and then later on, you can have some benefits, again, free to you for having applied to be a Read Aloud school or community. And community can be anything. It can be a public library. It can be a particular group that's supporting reading aloud. So it's very vague on purpose. Okay, so we'll go back here. Some of the other things I'll talk about, I have a youth advisory board, like I said, and they helped me with the one book for Nebraska kids and teens. And also, when I come up with a question, somebody says, is this a good idea or a bad idea? I can run it by my youth advisory board and see what they think, because they are children librarians and teen librarians across the state. So they're not the youth themselves, but the librarians that serve the youth. Sometimes that's confusing. We, I do have some information on some other things over here. The Children's Internet Protection Act, which, you know, I'm gonna have to look at that again and see if that's changed now, because... You can consult with Krista on that one. Yes, I think I need to talk with Krista about that one. No, I don't. Oh, yeah. SIPA. SIPA, hopefully. And there are, I'm thinking there's some things I need to add to this too, but we'll get on that later. This is just a real general overview of things that are being done. Another thing that I do wanna point out that is not on the flyout menu, but all you have to do is type in the word, hand out, and click over here, handouts. The first thing that comes up is Nebraska Library Commission handouts. When I first proposed this page, I said, you know, anybody can use this. If you're doing handouts for a presentation, you wanna, now, it makes sense to put the handouts with the Encompass Live show. That makes perfect sense. For those particular events, yeah. To them. So far, I'm the only one using this. And, you know, I'll hog it if that's... And when you do do an Encompass Live, we do link to this page. That's true. That's true. So this is where you land up if you watch any of Sally's shows. So this is a list of handouts that I've created for different presentations, and we try to, we just go in chronological order when they come up. So we have the last false in LA and SLA conference. Here's the handouts. So you can get either the list of the books, just the straight list. So that's not as many pages. Or you can get, oops. You can get the list of books with my blurbs in there. So then if you really want, what does Sally have to say about this? There it all is. And of course, that takes more pages. So if you're printing it off, it might be problematic. There are also, we just added this one because I do have the summer reading list that I had at conference. But when I was working doing this with the system administrators and system directors and their workshops, it says November, 2015. That was the first workshop. The last workshop was just last month and I didn't update the date, so that's my bad. But then as you look at this, you'll see a check mark here at the side. That means that book was added after the conference list. And it says that at the bottom of the handout. But then you know, everything that was on the conference handout is still in here. I've just added more titles. So that can be helpful. And then some other different kinds of things like the really loud Nebraska fall workshop. I did some handouts for that. So this one has the blurbs right in there. And that might be handy if you have a particular need. So if someone, the future, if someone decides they want to put their handouts here too, we'll be fine with that. We'll just kind of say Sally Snyder or someone else. And then you'll click on Sally and there'll be my list. And I've had a couple people ask, should we take some of these off of here? When I've asked my youth advisory board or at a workshop, everybody says no. Don't take anything off. There's still useful lists of good books. Yeah, some is looking for something on a particular topic. This is from 2008. This is back when I had the whole list, picture books, routine lists all together. And you can't talk about that in an hour. But so in the future, maybe they won't be lost forever. They just won't be on this list. They'll be kind of... Archi. Archi. That's a good one. All right. So thank you. Very good. Let's go back to the fly up. I just want to see what we want to do next. Do we want to do anything in education and training? You want to talk about basic skills? I've done it before, right? Is that covered out of this repeatedly? The only thing I would mention is the webinar list. If you want to click on that, I'll click on the three webinars. Where is it? Oh, right there. Yeah, there. Thank you. Okay. So this is that first link, April 2016. That's the monthly webinar list that I send out in emails. Sure. Go ahead and take them out. Okay, sorry. Let you do it. This one, I meant. This is the monthly list that gets sent out on emails and it comes from the OCL web junction. And then we have our archive list of the last two years and this is the page that we're looking at redoing to see if maybe there's an easier way to divide it up by subject so that way the archives are a little easier to access. So once we do that, I'll send out updates but just be aware that this page might change a little bit. And then back to the education. We are also looking at these Skillsoft courses. They are online classes that Nebraska librarians have access to for free. They are self-paced online courses. A lot of them are technology, Word, Excel, and there are some communication and leadership ones also but we're looking at whether or not we wanna continue this. So if you've accessed or completed any of these courses and have feedback, I would love to hear from you as we try to determine where we wanna go with this. What we seem to have found with those courses is we have a lot of people who sign up but don't finish the courses so we really need people who have done that sort of thing. We're glad Holly's looking at that. Okay, all right, let's get down here to grants, funding, and e-rate and let's have Krista talk about e-rate. You want them out? Sure, yeah, I can do that first. Yes, one of the big things I do here, probably half my job at the moment is e-rate. I was doing that before I came to Library Development and I brought that with me, we brought back to Library Development actually because previously it was part of this department. Things move around a lot, we're very fluid here I guess. For anyone who is not aware, e-rate is a federal program and there's a link right here to the list of people but up here is all the information about it and this will just get you to the main page on our website about e-rate program that I maintain and put together. e-rate is a federal program that gives discounts to schools and public libraries on their telephone and internet services and anything related to them. Getting, doing construction on building a new computer lab, wiring cables, equipment that you might need to maintain those services. As I said, they do telephone and internet at the moment. Phone is being gradually phased out of the e-rate program however. So if you are involved in it and wanted to do it, it is something that won't be available in a few years. They're switching, FCC is the federal organization, that federal department that is in charge of e-rate and has determined that they want to focus on internet, increasing internet use at schools and libraries, better use, faster speed, fiber connections, higher broadband, better wifi, basically anything internet related. So all the funding is being gradually switched over to anything to strictly just internet service related funding and support. Yeah. So on this website though, I do training. I keep everything up to date here as much as I can to give you information about how to do it. It's a program that has multiple forms you submit throughout the year to keep up with the program. Just last Friday was the deadline for the first form in the e-rate process for the upcoming funding year. e-rate funding year runs from July through June of every year, so you get discount for that and you're always applying for it each year. So that first form, the deadline was Friday, people are now working on their second form in the process. We have information here, flow chart timelines for everything. I do do training in the fall when the process can start and I do in-person training around the state and I do an online training, which I then record and is posted onto the website as well. So you can go here and watch my two hour session. You don't have to watch the whole thing for sitting two hours if you want to, if you don't want to. On the YouTube, on the video that I post up to YouTube, I do break it up into different sections so you can jump ahead to a particular section. So if you're just working on the second form, you can say just jump to stuff about the second form. So you can watch it in little bits and pieces. I do have links to all the different forms here, help tools, guides, instructions on how to use them is all on here. Information about SIPA, Children's Internet Protection Act is in here, so if you wanna learn more about that, this is the place to go. In order to apply and receive e-rate funding, you do have to be in compliance with SIPA. That is when we talk about filtering in libraries, filtering your internet connection. If you have questions about that, you can go here or you can ask me and I can help you out a little bit with that. But only for internet, not for telephone. Right, only for internet, not for telephone. Telephone, you don't filter your telephone so that doesn't apply. Sometimes you might filter your telephone. Yeah, yeah. And then we also do have a list of all the recipients going back to the first year that e-rate was available which is in 98, it started in, it was officially, the act went into, was written for creating e-rate in 96. So the first year you could apply was in 97 and so we have our first year of recipients in 1998. So if you're interested in who's gotten it in Nebraska, this is specific to just Nebraska funding recipients. You can look here and see who's received it, how much they've gotten and what kind of service it was for. This is all public information so that's why we also just pull it out and post it on here for people so if you're curious about that. So if you are a public library now, as I said, it's for schools and libraries. I only do support and training and instruction for our public libraries in the state. Other states do it differently. They have different people in charge. Here in Nebraska, for our schools, so if you are at a school, the Department of Education handles it for them. So Sue Ann Witt and Jim Coopley are over there, mainly Sue Ann, that's who if you are at a school you would contact her for support and instruction. They're very similar to the way they apply, but there are some things specific to schools that aren't for libraries so I don't know as much about it. I wouldn't feel as comfortable giving advice to a school. So I handle public libraries and she handles the schools. So if you are a public library doing a rate, contact me, that's what I'm here for. I can help you get through anything, hold your hands, look at your forms, get you up to speed. If you've never done it before and you're interested, definitely contact me. As I said, the first form for the upcoming year is already the deadline has passed so you can't jump on it now for this next year, but for the year after that, it's an every year thing that you can apply for. So if you didn't get it this year, you just wait and do it next year. Talk about not Richard. Not Richard. Oh, for some people may have known Richard before. I was involved in E-Rate, which I started doing it in 2009 being the E-Rate coordinator here. Richard was doing his best to keep up with it, a previous staff people had left and didn't hire new people to officially do it. And when I came on, he was my backup, but as of now or within like last month, he's no longer my backup for E-Rate. It's epic. It's, it's, there's this whole, yeah, it's things have changed a lot and he's with strategic planning and accreditation, things just other things that needs to focus on. And also the program's changing. I don't really need a backup necessarily. So Richard is no longer backup. He doesn't keep up with the program, which is fine. So any E-Rate things, it just goes to me. So don't, if you ask him, he'll just say, thanks. Talk to Chris. I can't, sorry. But they do have their own customer support team as well. So if I'm not available, you can always go directly to them for help. My official public thanks to Chris. So there's this new, the newest thing that they're doing that E-Rate is E-Rate Productivity Center. All forms are now done online. There's no longer any paper forms that you have to print out and mail in and maintain or everything's all done in this new portal where everything is kept in one place for you, your profile, your information, your forms, notifications from their E-Rate people. So that's a whole new interface. It's very cool. It's very slick. It works very well. It does have some issues still. It's a work in progress, but people are using it now. And that's really it for E-Rate. Okay. Jumping through that, yeah. Do you want to go to next year? I just want to let people know we are getting close to 11 o'clock and officially if you look at our schedule it does say that any campus library runs from 10 to 11 a.m. But we will continue going with our show as we do every week if it runs long, that's no problem. We'll just keep going and recording until we're done getting through all of our stuff here. If you need to leave, that's fine. You can always come back and watch the recording later. But we will not be cut off right at 11 or anything. We're going to talk to you about several different grants, library improvement grants, youth grants for excellence and perhaps Holly wants to talk just briefly about continued education grants, but let's start with Sally with youth grants for excellence. If we go to the, I know, if we go to the about down at the bottom, I have to show off because I update your part. Well, mine comes first and I'm going to start getting questions pretty soon. So I want you to know. Oh, your deadline is coming up. No, I mean, mine's the first one. I mean, August 19 is when the application form will become available for people to start filling it out. And just an FYI with my, with the youth grants application form, write your narrative in another document, a word or word processing document until you get it right and then copy and paste it into the form because if you started and then you have to leave everything is gone just so you know that. Anyway, so it comes available August 19, due October 5th and recipients will be announced by November 16. Once in a while, we actually get it done early, but I have a committee that helps me look at the applications and determine who's going to be the recipients that year. And so it takes time to read the applications and do our worksheets and then get together. So let's see what happens if I click here. Woohoo. Okay. So this is my about page, so to speak, about the youth grants and the reason it's read at the top is so you don't go filling out the form when it's not available. I mean, it's available, but you shouldn't be filling it out yet. And this will change on August 19, it'll be great. So there's a whole bunch of information and I'm gonna try and follow in Holly's footsteps and be more concise about, I still want this information there, but I think I ramble on a whole too much. It's possible. I haven't asked Holly to look at it yet. But so there's some information here, one of which here I want to point out is that the all workstations or other stations like that of other companies were allowed last year for the last time. So as you're looking at things that you wanna do, those will no longer be eligible for a grant. And if you, I'm just gonna scroll through here real quick. If you get, when you get to the bottom of this, there's the application forms. We're all online with the application. You're welcome to print out a copy of your Word document and send it to me if you just want to be sure it gets to me. But it needs to be filled out and submitted online. If you only send me the print copy, I'll have to call you on the phone because we'll have to talk about it. So this is the basic information that you need. There are FAQs about it, which you can get, I don't have to look at these again too. These are just basic things. I thought that this would make my about file shorter, but I think I just repeat everything. So I'm just thorough, that's all. And of course, there are other grants from us. The youth grants, I've had $25,000 each year to give away lately and hopefully that will be the same amount for this late summer, early fall. And she usually overspends it a bit. Well, sometimes I get a special permission, but not always. A special permission from Ron, yes. I'm going to talk briefly about the library improvement grants. Now, Sally's grants, as she was talking about, the youth grants for excellence are from state general fund money. The library improvement grants are from, I didn't want that to happen, are from federal money. So let's see, I have to go elsewhere for that. No, that takes us to, it doesn't take me where I want to go. Over here, I want to go. Library. I don't understand why that one isn't going there. It did when I looked at it earlier. Do you see library improvement grants over here? No. Let's look here. Let's go back to what Sally was talking about. Here they are. I hope this doesn't take me where it was. The library improvement grants for this past year are already finished. As you can see, the grant recipients were announced by February of this year. To build on something Sally just said, we were not going to allow the all workstations to be eligible for these grants this year, but there was nothing in writing that said they couldn't do that. So since we had three or four libraries that asked for them, we switched gears. And now in our grant applications for library improvement grants for the upcoming year, it will say the same thing that you do about the all workstations. So we did make some grants. Let's see if this takes us where we want to go. Yes, it does. Again, the red at the top means don't apply right now. This talks about library improvement grants, about how those grants have to be responsive to LSTA purposes. LSTA stands for Library Services and Technology Act. Those are grants given by or monies given by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. That IMLS is the entity in the federal level that also gives us money for operations here at the commission, but that's the source of these funds. We usually figure we have about 100,000 or so that we usually do. We didn't go quite that high this year. I think there were grant applications for up to 87,000, but so we do have a little wiggle room if we want to. These are only for eligible public libraries in our state and for certain state run institutional libraries. And for the first time in a number of years, we had a request from one of our state run institutions this year, which we're very happy about. We'd like for these folks to apply as well because they count for eligible entities under the federal guidelines. Okay, so what this is for is for libraries to try new things, for libraries to join the Pioneer Consortium, which is one of the priorities within this, that we do have three libraries this time that are either joining the library consortium or are preparing to join the Pioneer Consortium next year. They're getting their collections in and cataloged and so forth and so on. We also have used LSTA money, not under the library improvement grants, but also using LSTA money to support some software development that is occurring in the Pioneer Consortium this year as well. So we've used LSTA money for those purposes. Please feel free if your project addresses some of these federal priorities and you're in an accredited public library to apply. One of the ideas of the federal money is that you should be able to try something that maybe you're not quite sure of, but let's get a little creative about the whole thing. These do require a 25% match of which that at least 10% must be a cash match. That's not a very high thing. And Sally, you wanna talk about your requirements for matches, the library improvement grants, or you don't wanna talk about that? I was just gonna mention the match is the same. It's the 25% match of the grant amount which we bantered about a lot and we now know the formula to figure that out. And every time I have to say it, I say Sally, you say it because I don't say it correctly. I wrote it down and put it in a file. The other thing I wanted to mention was that I told this to my youth grant recipients. I also want them to try something new if they knew for them. It might be something somebody else has done. And there's no penalty if it doesn't work because the whole idea of trying something new is to try something you've never done before. And we hope it works, but I had one library call me and say, this is just not working. I don't know what to do. I'm never gonna get a granting in from you guys. Yeah, you will. We don't penalize you if it doesn't work. If you tried it, I know you're trying hard and things just not happening, your project, whatever it is you wanted to do, try something else next time because we will not say, you don't get any money for five years because you blew it. No, we say try something else. That's right, you don't learn if you don't try. Do you want to say anything, Holly, about the CE and training grants at this point? Or do you want me to just give generalities? You can, yeah. All right, the CE and training grants, Holly, as she says, has been here for a month. She'll be looking at the CE and training grants to see if we're gonna make any changes in these at all. Over the last several years, what we have done with the CE and training grants is that we have looked at upcoming regional or national conferences and then decided to, let's say, this year we're going to emphasize or focus on, let's say the Public Library Association conference coming up or some other conference like that. We may or we may not do that in the future. Holly is gonna be looking at that, so we won't see anything more about that at this point. Sound good? All right, let's go down to library management for just a minute. I wanna mention just a couple things on that page. Under legal, we do have information here about the Nebraska Library laws and we do have the Open Meetings Act. If you have questions about either the Nebraska Library laws or the Open Meetings Act, you may contact me. I will not give you legal advice. However, I've been told to say this, however, I will give you opinions of someone who's worked with these for a long time, but I will tell you, talk to an attorney if you do need legal advice because you don't wanna count on me for legal advice. And if it sounds like I'm practicing a law without a license, just hit me with a club and I'll stop. All right. I don't think we'll do any more on that page. I do wanna go down to show you under library organizations that you'll notice over here that the systems are listed. About two months ago, we actually added a flyout menu for the regional library system, something they've been asking for for a long time. The regional library systems are so key to what we do here in everything that we do in library development and actually everything that we do at the commission. In fact, if you ever wanna look at a copy of the contract we have with these systems, it lays out about 13 different tasks and the last one of those is what I call the elastic clause which basically says, you'll help us do whatever we need to do in the state because we have to have these regional library systems as partners. This is the quote, new configuration unquote. As you know, we used to have six regional library systems. We have the set amount of money we have for the regional library systems every year is about $600,000. It's not gonna change. We're not getting any new federal money. We're probably not getting any new state money. We can always wish, but I think that's wish fulfillment is a waste of time. So the reason we had a task force work on this and they made a recommendation to our commission which is our governing body, our commissioners to either change from six systems to five or six systems to four. The task force itself was split right down the middle as to whether it should be five or four. They heard and looked at the arguments for both and they chose four. That was my own personal favorite because I think if we did five and about five years we'd be back where we are now. So each of the library systems has a system director or directors, central planes because one of the system directors is gonna be retiring within three years or so has two people, but will be down to one. The Western library system has a recent opening for the system director there and that job is posted now on our website under our now hiring website in case you're interested in living in that part of the state. And the other systems have one system director each. Here's the information on who those people are. There's Denise Harders and Sharon Osanka in Central Plains, Scott Childers in Southeast. Western library system is vacant currently and Anika Ramirez in Three Rivers Library System. So that's information on that. You can get a link to their archives, a link to their newsletters and so forth. And I think that we will stop with that unless we have questions or unless anybody here wants to go back on something we missed. Krista mentioned that she's gonna be working with the academic institutions in our state because we have not had anybody in the library development that has focused on them in the past. So she'll probably be talking to them perhaps setting up a group or something. And the other thing that Krista has been given a charge for in her newly redone job or position description is that she will be working on the brass card, something that is somewhat moribund which is a statewide library card for more direct and local kind of sharing of resources. So she'll be working on that as well. So anybody have any questions for us about anything we do here in library development? Don't you want everybody stuck around? So that's good. Anybody here want to say anything else or did we cover pretty much? I think just say please call us on the phone or send us an email if you have questions about anything or if we didn't cover something you're wondering about because we're happy to answer your questions. We love to talk, you can tell. And we're hoping that a lot everything we do is somewhere on this website where you can find it in those flyout menus and organize it as well as we can get it out there. Okay. All right. Thank you. So I don't see any urgent questions coming in right now. That's cool. So I'll just, I think maybe we'll just wrap it up for today. If you do have questions, call us. Like Sally said, call us, email us, tell us what you want us to be doing or what you might need help with. So that will wrap it up for this week's show and what I will do is the, as I said, E-Ray is probably half of my job, almost half of it and the two big things that is E-Ray and then this show, Encompass Live, which is, right here off of our education site but if you also just Google Encompass Live you find us luckily so far, so far nobody else seems to have come up with that as the name of something. So if you just do that anywhere in your search engines, you'll come to our website. So that wraps up for today's show. We did record, as I said, and all of our recordings are right here underneath our upcoming shows which coming up in the next couple of weeks. We have our archives where we post, as I said, all of our shows here going back to the very beginning. We started Encompass Live in January, 2009. So we have all of our shows going back all the way every week of the year. We do it except for the week of our state library annual conference or NLA and SLA online, our library conference, that's the one week we take off. Unless there's technical issues or something, sudden things that we can't do it for but generally we're here so 51 days of the year, 51 weeks of the year we are here. Our recordings we'll have, let's see this is last week's, yeah, a link to the recording, as I said, on our YouTube channel. If there is any slides or PowerPoints we'll put them on our slide share account or we'll link to wherever anybody else has them. And we use Delicious to collect websites for any of these. So all that information will be there for recordings. For this one we'll probably just have a link to recording because we didn't do slides for today, we didn't need to, we just used our website as our guide. So we'll probably just have the recording up there for today. So that should be available sometime later this afternoon if I get my things up to speed and get it all processed and YouTube does things nicely for me. Next week our topic will be innovation on a shoestring free and cheap tools and I'll be back, well I'm here every week but I'm actually presenting again next week along with Louise Alcorn who is a colleague of mine next to her to us in Iowa and with this presentation we do of some new and interesting tools that you can use in your library covers all sorts of different topics. So we'll just do some showing some really innovative things that you can do with free resources online for doing things that have to do with running your library or just your personal life, your own professional development. So join us next week for that show and any of our other upcoming shows we have during the schedule we've got all our April shows booked I'm working on getting more May shows booked so this gets updated as we go. So if you are a big Facebook user please do go over and like us on Facebook and Compass Live is a Facebook page and there it goes finally and we post, oh hey that's new, Facebook are prompting you to me to log in because I'm not actually logged in. I post reminders of when a show's starting and this actually did it incorrectly it did the description for today but it had the wrong title but I'll give reminders of when the shows are starting up people can log in on the fly when the recording is available I post the shares last week's I announced when the recording was available. So if you are big on Facebook do go ahead and go over there and like us and you'll be notified of when we are doing things on the show. Other than that anybody have any last minute urgent things they want to say? We just have some thank yous coming in from the crowd. So that will wrap it up for this week's edition of Compass Live, thank you very much and we'll see you next week, bye. Bye.