 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Christa Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event where we cover anything that may be of interest to librarians across the state. We do these sessions live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. And they are recorded though, so if you're unable to attend any of our live sessions, it's not a problem. You can watch all of our recordings that are out there on the website. We do include, if there are PowerPoint presentations or websites that people go to, we also include all of that information in our recordings as well. And we do all sorts of different things here, presentations, book reviews, web tours, whatever we can think of that might be of interest to librarians anywhere or up to us. And this week I have next to me, Laura Johnson, who is the Continuing Education Coordinator here at the Nebraska Library Commission, and she came to me. I moved on this before, after we just left here. We provide grants for people to go to conferences, and they're going to come and report back to us on what they saw and didn't saw there. So I'm going to turn it over to you, Laura, to introduce what's going on, and what your people will be up to. Well, hi, everybody. As Christa said, we do give grants to people every year. And this year we tried something a little bit new. We divided our continuing education and training grants into three different areas. And today we're talking about one area, which was reimbursement for expenses of attending a professional conference. And we had six people who went to the PLA conference in Philadelphia. And we really saw this as a win-win. When you come back from a conference, you always want to tell people what great stuff you've heard about. And we wanted to give them the opportunity to do that. And we also wanted to hear from them how it went for them. I think this grant has worked very well. We simplified the application. And I think we've generally been very pleased with how it's going to work here. We do have just a certain amount of grant moneys. Because of the way our fiscal year runs, this year the grant is going to have to be completed by April 30th. But we will continue to work on making these grants reasonable for people to apply for and get. So we have six people with us today. Each of them is going to spend a little time telling us about their experience at PLA. And one or two of the programs that they found especially striking that they really want to share with us. And the group is Robin Clark from the Papillion Library, Cecilia Lawrence from North Platte, Mary Jo Mack from the Stahl Library, West Point. Greg Michaels from here in Lincoln, Matt Williams from Carney, and Steve Fosselman from Grand Island. Each of them is going to speak for a few minutes. If you have questions for them, please kind of ask at the end of their speaking time. And we'll try to discuss those things. I don't know that they have necessarily had a lot of time to discuss with one another. So we're just going to go with each one what they want to do. A couple of them did ask me yesterday when I was doing tech tests with them. Is anybody talking about the same sessions? Did anybody? I didn't have time to even look and see. And so we'll see what happens. If that happens, that's cool. Different point of views. So we're going to start. We said we'd do it more or less alphabetically because that was, well, arbitrary and fair. So we think we're going to have a great program here. So without further ado, we're going to turn it over to Robin for a minute. I'll try to space-part instead. There we go. Robin, I've got you unmuted. Can you say hi? Hello. Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Great. Before I get started, I just want to say thank you very much for the funding to go to conference and to remind everyone that my conference attendance was supported in part by state aid funding appropriated by the Nebraska Legislature, granted and administered by the Nebraska Library Commission. And without further ado, now that that commercial announcement has been taken care of. If you could flip to the public library website with the conference on it, really, I saw you had that up earlier. We do. Yes, I do. You can do that. Right there? Because I wanted to show everyone, if you'll look at the top, it says session handouts available online. Almost all of the sessions have handouts available. So if you are not able to attend conference or attend the sessions, there's a plethora of information available on this website, lots and lots of handouts. But the ones that I want to talk to you about today is a pre-conference that I attended. So I just wanted to show you this site and you can see on the right all the handouts and it just goes on forever. Yeah, PDF files, lots of, you can see a lot of those slide presentations they loaded up. So I just wanted to show you this site. Okay. Make everybody aware that it's there for the picking. Yeah, we will link to that when we put up the recording to so people know where to go to get them. Good. And now if you'll flip to my second side, I'm going to talk a little bit about the pre-conference that I attended on the 12th called Dig Deep to understand what your community needs and wants. I really like this because it gave me a lot of hands-on information that I could take directly back to my library. Really it was talking about how to get to where you need to be by actually mining your community's data and looking at what your community wants and then matching your library services and programs up with that community. So some of the things I talked about were trans-spotting and I'll talk a little bit about that, GIS mapping and lifestyle analysis, benchmarking and then appropriate roles for trustees and staff in a community needs assessment. I want to start a little bit with trans-spotting. Some of the trends I talked about was that solo living is increasing and it's increasing enough that the line has actually dipped significantly since 2000. The statistics they had were from 2008. So one of the trends is that more and more people are either divorced, they're not marrying, but they are living by themselves, they're not living in a family relationship like it was back in the 60s or the 70s. Another trend that they talked about was do-it-yourselfing and I don't know about in your library but I know we see a lot of it. There's been an upsurge in people being interested in knitting, in doing crafts, in remodeling so do-it-yourselfing is partly driven by the economy with what's going on right now. It's also being driven by websites such as Etsy where people are making things and then selling them online. So do-it-yourselfing is a big trend as far as needs for collection development materials. Of course you can't say enough about diversity and immigration. I think we're seeing that certainly in our state and it would not be appropriate to leave that out. The minority population by 2042 will be 50% of the population in the United States will be of minorities. So the other thing that they talked about was niche aging. This is in large part the baby boomers continuing to age and move through the system. We are going to see a lot of bigger need for home delivery service to assisted living facilities as that group continues to age that there's going to be more and more expectations by that age group on libraries and library services. And along with that ageing group comes the caregivers that are taking care of those older adults and the ability that the library would have to provide either programs or services to caregivers to support them helping with their elderly parents or elderly aunts or whoever they're taking care of. You don't just have the preschool mothers taking care of children now you have older people taking care of their much elderly parents. There continues to be a huge digital differentiation in our population even though we try to do everything we can 36% of Americans lack internet access at home which is a huge amount. I know when we talk to people they say everybody has computer everybody has that now. Everybody does not. The library is still a player really important part in providing computers to those people who are not able to afford internet access at home. Information paralysis is another trend they talked about where we have so much information we just don't know what to do with it anymore. And we can see that with Twitter, blog, website, Facebook, page, there's more and more and more opportunities to put information out there which means there's more and more opportunities that we have to go and read more information. So there's more information that we can actually take in and actually paralyze people. Another trend that they talked about was called atmosphere which and it's spelled A-T-M-O-A-T-M-O-S and then the word fear F-E-A-R. And it talks about the continued fear that some of the younger generations and others also are I think the pipeline that's coming through Nebraska is a really good example that we can use right now. I know in other parts of the country it's fracking but it's a concern for the environment and that trend is continuing to grow and get stronger. The vigilante consumer, the consumer, the patron who wants it now and they want it right now, they don't want to wait, they want it, there's no gray area, they want it right now. And they talked about how more consumers are demanding services and they're demanding timely services and that is definitely a trend that libraries are seeing. Of course the privacy trend that there is no privacy now with the internet that will continue and then the biggest trend that they talked about was power to the patron that the patron does have a lot of power now. They are totally plugged in, they have an e-book reader, they've got an MP3 player, they've got a laptop, they've got an iPad, they are powered up and they are expecting more and more power when they come to the library. Those trends then feed into some of the changes for libraries, the trend changes that they talked about for libraries which are libraries less as a reference library and more as a community comments where people come together to have conversations about a wide variety of issues and also the library as a discovery zone where people come and they can discover new learning opportunities where they can come together and discover other relationships with other people through programs that you may have at your library. Then they went into the whole whether print books are going to endure or not in the whole e-book topic and that was a whole discussion in its own. But those are just some of the trends that they talked about that are happening in libraries right now. They do believe that there's going to be new e-book models that are going to be coming out in the next few years and the biggest trend of course is changes, definitely the new normal which I think we've heard for years and years and years. The thing I liked best about was they also presented the GIS mapping which is where you take your patron database and overlay it on a map and you can actually see where all your patrons live. Then they also talked about benchmarking which I do a lot with the state public library statistical page that we have within the state and then also they showed us how to go out on the IMLS site which I was not aware of and also pull benchmark libraries down on a national basis and showed us how to do that. So it was a really good conference. And I've also put a couple more slides up. If you just want to flip to those and I'll be finished here. These are the other sessions that I attended. If you want to talk with me or shoot me an email about that I'll be glad to discuss those with you. All of the sessions that I went to were really, really good. I probably would have to say the weakest one was the saying yes to the community but all of them were excellent and I got a lot out of all of them. And I just again want to thank the commission for the grant to be able to attend. Well, thank you Robin. We're really pleased that you attended and you could share with us. I think it's very exciting the idea that the trend spotting really is going to affect your services and your planning. So thank you very much for sharing that with us. And we will be sure that these things are up and available to people including the links to further information from the PLA website. And does anyone have any questions for Robin? I think you did a great job of telling us in the very few minutes you had available to you. So does anyone have any questions before we move on? Nothing's going in the way. Okay, well if we haven't gotten anything coming. If you think the other thing that's fine, put it in and we'll bring people back if we can be here the whole time. Robin's been very thorough, so thank you Robin. And we'll go on now to my guest Cecilia. Hi Cecilia, you here? Good morning, hello everybody. Hi. Okay. Also Ditto on all the wonderful grant. That was just, you guys really made it easy and so thank you very much. By able to write this grant for me, I was able to bring a second staff person with me. And when I look at 18 sessions or so when you include all the conversations, being able to have two of us to get a better chance to cover some of these, it was just wonderful. So thank you. The first program that I went into was first thing in the morning on Thursday, it was a conversation. It used to be called the talk tables and now they're called conversation. And the one I went to was called help, I am not a social worker. And I have to tell you this particular speaker, her background is she has a master's degree in social work, then she got her master's degree in library science because she was getting burn out doing social work and then she just got her private investigator's license. And she is currently working as the executive director at the North Texas Library Partners. So she is essentially a systems director. And one of the things that she was amazed with was how much overlap there is when you look at the National Association of Social Workers Code of Ethics and the ALA Library and Code of Ethics. And there's so much overlap. And she said when she started working, she was just amazed at how many people that are in the social services area could also come to the library. And we've certainly seen this in Nebraska when you're looking at helping our clients and the people that need to apply for the SNAP, the food stamps and helping them do taxes and getting them to the right place to do their taxes. It's just amazing but one of the things that we end up doing is it's almost like dealing with a disruptive child in the classroom because a lot of the people that we're dealing with sort of fall into certain categories where they're taking a lot of our time. Whether it's the angry person and she broke it down into these categories, the angry, the medicated or shall we say the non-medicated, the self-medicated, the confused, the child and the childlike and the truly dangerous. And I think the point of her, this particular session was to help us identify who is truly dangerous. And in a small library, you certainly know your regulars and the bulk of your patrons are fantastic. But then we get these people that we're dealing with that really require more time, they require more tact. And sometimes you certainly feel at risk and when you don't have a security guard and it's an all-female staff, it certainly makes us realize how aware we need to be of who we're dealing with. And basically what it boiled down to the nutshell of this was the people who are the truly dangerous are probably the people that are mentally ill, they're off their medication, and they're substance abusers. And when you put all those three together, you are certainly going to be dealing with people that are unstable and you're gonna have a possible dangerous outcome. And most of us think that it's the angry person, that's the person who is the truly dangerous person. And people, they get angry, you're the last straw of the day and they get this letter in the mail it says they have overdue material. Those people, they blow up and then they're fine and you deal with them and they go on their way and you go on your way. And it was really, it was a good eye-opener to what the staff on the front lines are dealing with in some of these cases. And when staff come to you and they're saying, I just feel really uncomfortable with this particular patron. When you start adding some of these characteristics together, not to stereotype anybody, but you can certainly see that there is some potential danger there and you can develop policies, you can develop action plans. I was so impressed with this speaker, I actually, I told Denise was there from RVLS and as Sharon was saying and I told them both, I said, this particular woman needs to come and do either a pre-conference for NLA or be a session because she was humorous, she was energetic, she was very focused and it's definitely something that's applicable to I think today's frontline workers and dealing, giving time to some of these people that are coming through our doors. So I'm gonna stop talking about that and see if there's any questions about this before I go on to the next session that I was really impressed with. So anybody have any questions for Cecilia? Go ahead and type them into your interface there, your question section. Well, nothing's coming yet. Feel free to type anything in as you're thinking of it and I'll watch them here and can ask them at any time. Go ahead, Cecilia. I will just share with you. I also was just so excited and every session I went to, I thought was fabulous and it was actually kind of hard to pick one or two that I really, really was inspired by but that was one of them. But the other sessions I went to, the one I went to and Robin also went to this was creating a vibrant organizational culture at your library, I saw that she went to that one. I thought that was actually a very excellent program as well, another one I really liked was program clues of 60 programs in 60 minutes. Absolutely wonderful and I'm hoping that they will get their slide presentation up on the website because it was absolutely inspiring and programs that they put up, it was California branch libraries. They did it with very minimal impact or zero impact to your budget. So it was very appealing from that standpoint because they're just calling upon volunteers and library staff that you already have to have passions for things and creating programs around them. The slide that I have up was on my Friday session which was transforming public libraries to institutions of the industrial age to change agents for the network society. Extremely long title. Ralph Hapl, I believe is how he pronounced his name is from Denmark and absolutely is an 81 page slide point presentation. Absolutely wonderful. Worth your time to go through it. He's got a lot of great pictures and it really boils it down to the nutshell of exactly what is going on in this area. When you're looking at libraries in sort of the traditional sense and of course this is from a global perspective in a very metropolitan area of Denmark. We always used to think that you've got the democracy, the access, the information, getting it into the people. You create an educated society and it moves forward. But what's happened is as Robin mentioned you've got people looking for the instant information, the instant gratification. Our demographics have changed and we're all getting older. There's 30% of the population is older than it was when we were children. I mean, and we see that certainly in Nebraska. We have a lot of aging populations and you've got more diversity that we're dealing with. And so definitely I see as we're working through this moving to the digital and network society we have to change. And what this particular gentleman was talking about was how this library, and I almost compare it to a mega church. It is a mega library. It is absolutely huge. And it certainly has a lot of the elements that I saw in some of the other programs. It's got the flexibility built into it. It has the ability to embrace a lot of the new technologies especially some of the social media and networked things that we're seeing globally. Wonderful things that you can add into your services. Can you go to the next slide? His whole presentation really focused on the future of digital library services, innovation in the services that we're offering and then thirdly using the library as space. Those were really the three things that he looked at he encapsulated it very well from a global perspective. And even from my very small library there were certainly aspects of what they were looking at in Denmark that I was sitting there translating it to North Platte Nebraska going, this is a successful model. The library that they're building that is they talked about those discovery zones. I heard Robin say that he mentioned that as well those discovered zones for children certainly embracing the family aspect of it as well as the elder and elder care into your services and your spaces. And so it really looked at that from all aspects. The library in Eirut, I think was the name of the Danish city will be open in 2014. They are in the beginning phases of their construction and the end of their fundraising. And so I would strongly recommend especially the Metro libraries but even the small libraries, fascinating program if you're looking at this really from a future perspective. One of the things that I was concerned about when I went to PLA was I was like, I wanted the, I was looking for future library trends. It was the trends piece that I just didn't see really reflected in a lot of the sessions and I did not go to the pre-conference although the one that Robin went to, I think I'm gonna have to go back and read through those slides and notes because that seems like that would be very helpful to me. But I didn't see like there was a lot of programs that were really in that area. And so this one was as close as it got and it really hit the mark. So take the time and go through the 81 page slide presentation. I think you'll see it's very well worth your time. And with that I'll ask if there's any questions. Hi Cecilia, that was great. That presentation was also one of the presentations that was presented in the virtual PLA which we were able to support Becky Baker in having it at her library in Seward. And I have to say I was as you were very struck by it and thought that he had some great ideas and a great attitude about what he was doing. And I thought his accent was really cute. Yeah, I could have looked at him all day. But and definitely, I'm trying to think what his background was. I had that on this, what's backup once like? Is it, is he like a trustee and then now works for the library? I mean, he's worked in four Danish cities, the library and he's worked as different aspects but he certainly from the citizen services standpoint, he really nailed it. And he also because he's worked on international advisory boards. And of course he's done a lot of presenting but yeah, absolutely wonderful from a lot of different and really encapsulated the tone of where we're going. Yeah, I was very struck by his continued emphasis on the individual and how you needed to keep the person you were serving in mind as you went on. But I think it's great that this really worked for you. So thank you. Do we have any more questions? Nope, not at the moment. Okay, well then we will go on and our next presenter is Mary Jo Mack from John Stahl Library in West Point. So Mary Jo, are you with us? I am with you and I wanna say good morning to everybody. I had a wonderful conference. The session I wish to talk about is called Being the Best Stories from the Best Small Libraries in America. The presenters were the 2008 to 2000 winners of the library journal Best Small Library in America Award. And they shared stories about their programs, partnerships and services that helped their libraries rise to the top. The Best Small Library Award is an annual award presented by the library journal and co-sponsored by Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation. Winners receive a $15,000 cash award and they're featured in a library journal article and two library staff members get to attend the public library conference. I found all the presenters to be very energetic and very excited about their libraries and I found them to be very motivational. Several libraries had applied more than once for the award. One common denominator in each of the presenters was that excellent customer service was the key to a great library. One stated that their model was delivering to yes. They tried to make every answer to any question yes. Great staff was also essential. Staff members need to have a passion for what they do. The right staff members need to be in place in the right niche. Staff people need to share the library director's vision and everyone needs to be on board. Directors should strive to make it a fun place to work. Patron service needs to be stellar and the library needs to be a welcoming place. The library should also be a place for all people. One presenter said that their vision was to have a vibrant and energetic library. They wanted their library to be a gathering place for the community and they wanted it to be a place. They gave the patrons what they wanted and what they needed. They offered lots and lots of programming. They suggested getting the library staff involved with programming by creating programs using library staff members' strong points. It was repeatedly suggested to offer lots of classes, computer classes, resume classes, e-reader classes. Some of these classes were group but some were on one-on-one. One library offered a computer mentoring that placed a high school volunteer with a senior citizen and then they did learn computer skills. Suggested programming included cookie decorating, pumpkin decorating, a Halloween costume swap, prom dress exchange, job counseling, online book clubs, iPhone app demonstrations and music or arts and craft kits that could be loaned to other libraries or daycare providers. One library offered homework help and also sponsored a food drive to benefit the local food pantries. The last speaker urged us to go to the library journals website and to take a look at the application for the best small library in America and then formulate an action plan for our own libraries based on the criteria listed on the application. After taking a look at that, we should assess the needs of our communities and determine what the library's role should be in helping to meet these needs. I wish I could convey to you how motivating I found these speakers. While I may never actually apply for the award, I found that I was energized by listening to them. I found that I was anxious to take their ideas and modify them to fit the needs of West Point's library patrons. Customer service was stressed again and again. From this, I decided to take a step back and take a hard look at our library's customer service and then make changes so that our service could be the best that it can be. This was only one of the excellent programs that I attended at PLA conference. I went to as many sessions as I could fit into the conference and also attended the opening and closing sessions. I want to thank the library commission for this grant and for the opportunity to attend this conference. I know that the experience of going to PLA conference 2012 will definitely benefit the patrons of the Johnstall Library in West Point. In closing, I'd like to also encourage all library personnel from all sizes of libraries to apply for the continuing education grants that are in the Rascal Library Commission. Thank you. Well, hi, thank you, Mary Jo. We're thrilled that everybody seemed to have such a good experience at PLA and that you're also enthusiastic about sharing this stuff. I'm just really pleased. I'm kind of overwhelmed. I'm so happy. So thanks. Do we have any questions there? No, not yet. Don't forget, type in your questions if you want to, in your question section there and any of our speakers can answer them for you. Yeah, we're gonna move on. We are, you know, our time work. We're kind of having to keep an eye on time here. So we're gonna move on next to Greg Michaels and thank you, Mary Jo. And hi, Greg, are you with us today? Greg? Yo, Greg. There. Okay, do you have me now? Yeah. Okay, good morning, Laura Christa. How's it going? I'd like to start out again by thanking the Library Commission for providing this continuing ad opportunity. It was really great. We got to meet each other on several occasions and visit and talk about sessions while we were there. Probably the one thing that I would talk about with, about PLA as each conference kind of picks up one or two major themes that seem to be the underlining buzz that's happening. And one of those themes that I noticed at this year's PLA was that of eContent. Just about every session you went to talked about eContent. And libraries are really struggling over the delivery of eContent. One, due to popularity and uncertainty of ownership. And traditional publishers have been reluctant really to develop an eContent library lending model that matches our print model. And as you can see from the slide here, what the impact at least in 2011 has been with eBooks. We've got like 35 million have been checked out, 17 million on holds. eBooks sales in 2011 exceeded physical paperbacks and hardcover. So this isn't just a trend. I think we're really at the point with 17% increase in eBooks sales where we've reached a tipping point. If you go to the next slide. Also, this is what's causing this huge increase in interest in eContent by our customers and patrons. As you can see from 2009, only 2% of adults had eRators. And right now, up until 2012, we're looking almost to 30%. And that translates into just millions of these devices being out there. In addition to eRators, it's the tablets that are being sold thanks to Apple and others coming out like the Kindle Fire. We've got almost 50 million or 45 million tablets of those out there as well. So what is this meant to libraries? We need to build collections based on that. We also talked about one of our sessions, would we even open a library with the size of collection that we have right now for eRators and that's what we're struggling with. Douglas County in Colorado was quoted during this session saying that their eContent circulation rose by 175% over the past year while their print circulation declined for its very first time. So I think a lot of libraries are beginning to realize this tipping point where it's going. And then on the next slide, one of the presenters that they had getting in content to your customers was Tom Peters. Tom Peters is the CEO of Tap Information Services, which is a library consulting firm. One of the things that he emphasized to all of us and is where this trend is headed is that mobile is the biggest part of the revolution. So if libraries are ignoring that aspect of our service model, we're really missing the boat here. He emphasized also probably one of the biggest mistakes by libraries right now is that we're still over purchasing print, which I found was interesting. And I've come back from the conference and had discussions with our collection management people in regard to this and do we start changing our ratios of how much funding we dedicate to our print collection as opposed to our eContent. And then Tom continued to talk about publishers and where they stand and what it means to libraries right now as far as access to eContent. There's a couple major publishers like McMillan, Simon and Chuster, they won't even sell or negotiate for eBooks to libraries at this time. You got Penguin who was selling but now they're backpedaling. You've got Random House or the Hatchet Book Group. They're both selling Random House just announced though tripling their price for eContent. And then you've got something like Harper Collins which he described as 26 bottles of beer on the wall. They've got their limitations of 26 checkouts and then you have to repurchase it. So the emphasis switched to will publishers become obsolete. And he really felt as well as a couple of the other presenters that probably new providers to libraries will become like Amazon, Apple or even Google. So it's kind of an interesting dynamic happening now of whether publishers will even either be involved in the transactions or not. And then let's see. And then just finally, if this is of interest to you, one of the websites that you can go to, I thought I had put up a slide, but unfortunately I didn't, was to track eContent activity as libraryrenewal.org. And that site just kind of tracks trying to keep what the library's perspective is on this phenomena that we're experiencing. But every session, somebody was talking practically about eContent. And one of the sessions I attended, it wasn't until the last presenter and he apologized that eContent wasn't mentioned so he had to mention that at the one. But fascinating conference, support what everybody said previously as far as the quality of the sessions that are always excellent at PLA. And again, I appreciate the opportunity that the Library Commission provided to me and for Lincoln City Libraries that we'd be able to attend this conference. So thank you very much. Thank you, Greg. I think we did have one question. Yeah, one of our previous speakers, Cecilia has a question. Go ahead, Cecilia. I've unmuted you. Hi, Greg. You said you after the conference after these sessions and you went back to your collection development team and we're discussing about changing the ratio of funds spent on print and eBooks. And I guess my question is, were they, how did they react to that? Because we've started a little bit of those discussions here. You did. The catalogers and my acquisition, I mean, they want to hang on to the book. And they see the usage coming in the eBooks and the overdrive and everything. But I just wondered how your team reacted to that if it was the same or were they open to changing things? Great question. The staff actually here was very receptive to the idea and looking at it. We've always set up certain ratios of holds per copies and we were trying to do the same thing with our eContent as well. And what we're being overrun with is just the demand for eBooks right now. And with restrictions and funding, without huge increases in our funding, something's gotta get. And so we're looking more for the balance because our customer base for eBooks continues to grow. And it's really difficult for us to be putting out titles that might have 200 or more holds on them without getting additional copies. So yes, the staff has been. They see that this shift is happening and they're very receptive to addressing the issue. Okay, I'm sitting here going ahead. Another question is you were talking about the ratio. Oh, here's my question. Are you solely using overdrive and if you're not, if you are purchasing things and getting them directly into your catalog, how are you getting them into your catalog and how are patrons getting them out of your catalog without using a third-party service like overdrive? Right now we're just using overdrive. Okay. Now one of the presenters at this particular session was Dance Books, D-R-A-N-Z Books. And they're a small publisher that is hoping to develop a library model where libraries would actually own the content. So that's a direction they're taking. There's a large consortium out in California of over 200 libraries that are trying to develop this. Douglas Kilnian, yeah, again in Colorado is looking to develop where libraries could actually own the content. But it's very small inroads are being made in that area and the publisher is willing to come on board and actually allowing libraries to own their e-content is very minimal. Okay, that's kind of what I'd run into and I've also had an author want to donate an e-book copy to us. We had no way to take it. So thank you. Unmuted, there we go. Well, Greg, do we have any more questions? No. Well, thank you, Greg. That was great. Obviously, this is something that is striking a chord across all the libraries and it's gonna continue to be an issue for a while, I think. If we don't have any more questions, we'll move on to our next presenter, who is Matt Williams from Cardi Public Library. So hi, Matt, are you with us? Yes, hi, I'm here. Thanks again for giving me the opportunity to go to this conference. I really appreciated that. Are you hearing me? Yes, we've got you. All right. I had a... Unmuted. Goal in mind when I went to the conference. As you know, we just built the building and we built it thinking of the relevance, the continued relevance of the library in mind. We put a lot of thought into the amount of space we would give to technology and to programming space as opposed to more book space. And we put a lot more of our space into technology and programming. Now the library's built, it's complete, and we've got the programming space. And my goal was to learn more so that we could put that programming space into use. Think about our policies. We've done a lot of work on our meeting room policies. And just to become renewed and inspired more about community service and programming. And so I didn't look a lot at the technology aspect, but a lot of what I learned dovetails with what Robin was saying, what Craig was saying. One of the programs I went to was reaching for the future. You gotta take the risk to get the reward. It's put on by R Squared. They are actually having their own conference in Telluride in September, which I would love to go to, probably won't be able to. And not just because I grew up around there, but I think it's a great place. The presenters, they were from any think libraries in Colorado and also from the Public Library in Telluride. And part of their goal with R Squared is, they have four main goals. That is culture, customer curiosity, abundant community, and creative spaces. They want to bring the customer in through culture and just peak their curiosity in the library through programming and technology, make use of creative spaces. And we did an exercise, that was kind of a discussion, and we did an exercise where the goal was to come up with an idea, just get our creative juices flowing, come up with an idea, and then what would it take to implement that idea as far as space, materials, time, money, and we came up with zones. You could have, for instance, a yoga zone, and in that yoga zone, you might have a speaker from the community, someone who teaches yoga, come in, teach, you'd have a mat in that set of side space for people to do yoga. When an actual instructor wasn't there, you could have a video playing. And then along with that, you'd have a display of DVDs, books, that have to do with yoga. And the zones can change monthly. You might have a cooking zone one month, a knitting zone one month. And this kind of goes along with the next program, who also had a presenter from Tell Your Ide. And that was maximizing the impact of programming and getting the most from your efforts. That one talked a lot about using people from your community and getting them into programming in your library. And I know some other people told me, I didn't go to this session, but there was a session on actually using the new reference being actual hands-on training of people. Do you get a book or do you go in and actually learn from somebody you're watching and working with? And obviously, Karni is not Tell Your Ide, we don't have movie stars abundantly and authors and that type of thing to draw from. But we do have a lot of interesting people in our community, we do have a university, we do have people that have shops, cooking and knitting and all those type of things. And those people can be drawn from to come in and teach classes, hands-on classes to people. And I think you then form bonds with the business community in that way as well. We have community partnerships with these businesses. And I think that's a extremely important way of drawing people into your community. They also talked, they had somebody there from the Tribeca Film Institute and they talked a lot about getting national humanities grants for films and that type of thing to show at your library. They talked about how controversial some of the speakers they got in from the community were. You never know what's a hot button issue in your community. For them, it was night landings at the Tell Your Ide airport which almost got the director fired. So, that I thought was really interesting. I went to young adult programs that wasn't one of the stronger ones but I did get some good ideas from that program. They actually had a runway type thing where they would dress, kids would dress each other's up as zombies and then the zombies would do a runway walk and be voted on for the best dressed zombie or the worst dressed zombie, I'm not sure. And also there were just a lot of libraries that did work with manga and anime. Losing my religion, no, we didn't have a concert there by R.E.M. but losing my religion, crafting meeting room policies that keep you in charge and out of court. Again, with our meeting rooms, we've found that a lot of churches want to use them. Actually, people ask us when we built these meeting rooms, these program spaces, will the community use them? We've been open since February 22nd and we've had 80 requests from the public so far to use our meeting rooms. Three of them were churches. This class really solidified in my mind what I already knew, that you can't stop them from using your meeting rooms. It has been taken to court a few times. The Alliance Defense Fund has taken libraries to court over it, the court said yes, they have to be able to use them. Another court said well no, not if they're specifically religious but religious does not include praying, singing, or anything else. So, there's no way to actually, this side of it's religious unless they actually mock you and say, we're gonna have a religious meeting and then I guess you can say no. The thing to keep in mind when you're doing this, when you're crafting policies that have to do with your meeting rooms is that everybody is under the same rules. So, if you have rules about noise and you have rules about how many times you can book a room in a month or in a year, how far ahead you can book it, what the shape of the room has to be, eating beverages, that type of thing, that if you have churches that wanna use your room, they have to abide by these rules. And we're not gonna open early, we had several ask us to open early. We're not gonna let them in early, our rules say only when the library's open and we don't have the rooms in the summer because we're not open on Sunday in the summer. So, a lot of that can be just taking care of with obeying the normal policies. Also, they must be open to everyone. So, I think it really is what I knew already that you had to allow them to use it, but it was good to solidify that in my mind and be able to think about that. Last of all, and this one doesn't really have to do with programming, but it looked very interesting to me. And I can't, well, don't, couldn't, shouldn't, wouldn't, combating negative Nellies in the workplace or negativity Nellies rather. And, you know, what I wanna share of this is that it wasn't all about how do you deal with negative people but how to become, how to keep from becoming negative yourself, and they had a top 10 of how to control your negativity, which I thought was interesting. And number 10 was set a time limit and you're only gonna feel negative or gripe for a certain amount of time. You're gonna give yourself a certain amount of time to feel that way about something and then you're done. See the bigger picture. And this can work when you're, you know, try to get your staff to see the bigger picture, but also yourself, see the bigger picture in mind. Don't hone in on those small details that are bothering you. Three, two, one, one, two, three is basically list in order your negative thoughts, the things that are bugging you, your complaints, and then do it, turn around and do the things that you really like the best. And you may find that when you number your complaints, some of them really aren't that important. Laughter is the best medicine. Of course, humor is always important. Where a rubber band, I'm not sure that I got the significance of this, but maybe when you get feeling bad, you can just snap yourself with it and wake yourself up. I'm not sure. Stay in the present. Try not to dwell on all the things that you could have done right in the past that went wrong in the past. Stay in the present and say, well, that's in the past, we're gonna make it work now in the present. Stop the thought. Just actually say to yourself when you're thinking something negative, just say, stop, stop, I'm not gonna think that. It works sometimes, I've tried that, and it does work to a certain extent. And they say it takes a certain amount of time, I'm not sure the number of days is 21 days or something like that to break a habit. So if you keep doing that, stop the thought. For 21 days, maybe you'll break the habit of thinking that way. Have a favorite saying that you say to yourself, I'm not so sure that I'm, that that wouldn't make me even more grumpy because I'm not really a hallmark type person. Be your own best friend. Make yourself feel good about yourself, even if you feel like others don't. Number one, do something to help others. Go out of your way to go and help others. If you see that they need help with work, makes them feel better and it'll make you feel better as well. That's really what I have to say today and I'm open for questions. I'm muted. Hi, Matt. Thank you very much. That was good list. We'll have to keep some of those things in mind, although I don't know about the rubber band. But thanks. Do we have any questions from Matt? Not at the moment. Okay. Then we're glad that you could join us today, Matt, and we're gonna move on to Steve Fosselman. Steve, are you with us? Yes, I am. Well, hi. Good morning, everybody. Let's move on to Steve's slide here. Take it away, Steve. Okay. There are 20 out of 30 slides done so far. So onto your hats, there's a few more slides here. I wanted to talk, first of all, though, about some sessions. I too, as all of you did, really appreciated the Nebraska Library Commission's help in getting me to the Public Library Association. Also, my city administrator and I had a nice talk about this meeting. We have a limitation on out-of-state travel, and she actually encouraged me to not only attend PLA, but to attend this pre-conference, guessing isn't good enough using data to make effective decisions. It was by June Garcia and Sandra Nelson. You might be familiar with them. They've been around the country consulting and doing workshops on result planning and all sorts of strategic planning. So went and Matt also attended this, and we talked the other day, and he wanted to talk about some other things, so I'm talking about this. But I did attend a lot of other sessions. I wanted to zone in on data and efficiencies, and so there were two other programs I attended, industrial engineering approach to library efficiency. That kept me awake. It really did. Successful engagement of high-impact volunteers. You're getting a trend here. The impetus in a lot of public libraries is the new normal, is program prioritization. And so public libraries across the country are making difficult decisions and are doing them in a little bit more effective way. But I also wanted to zone in on some of our new long-range planning initiatives that we've just started, and so just a few of the programs we had that I went to, and it started, to me, it all starts with staff. So I went to a program called Creating a Vibrant Organizational Culture at Your Library. There were others that were program-oriented. Trends and Tips to Help English and Hispanic Elders Online, Commons Ground. There've been a lot of academic libraries that have information commons, but public libraries are starting to have information commons as well. Transforming Life After 50, Public Libraries and Baby Boomers. Library to Go, putting your library virtually anywhere. And another one I attended was Tell Me Something I Don't Know, Meaningful Community Engagement. So here we are. I'm gonna tell you something you already know, and that is making use of data helps you make effective decisions. So the slides I have actually came from, we're lifted from a site that you have access to free of charge. You just log in as guest, and that's our libraryplace.com slash elearn. So on to the next slide here. I am as guilty as anybody else of using this rumor, belief, opinion, and fact-based decision-making, helping me make decisions based on opinion and fact is something that libraries have to deal with, and they have to deal with their own prejudices and their lack of comfort in using data. As the next slide shows, though, there's a model that the consultants use, and that's based on data, information, knowledge, and decision-making. And so the more I mix those three elements into the decision-making process, the better my decisions will be, and the more we'll be able to proceed into the future and make some decisions that are really tough. So on to the next slide. Oh boy, did we have fun with this one because whether we consciously or unconsciously do it, and I think I'm more unconscious, or just am not conscious most of the day, but I have a sense of how issues are to be resolved, but when you work with consultants, they really like to line it up for you, and so we got more than we bargained for it. It was a pre-conference after all, it was like a workshop, it was like a real class. So defining the problem, gathering internal data, scanning the external environment, identifying options, evaluating options, and then making the decision sounds like it's gonna take a long time. I solved a problem the other day that had to do with a patron complaint over the ratio of e-books now to audio books on overdrive, was able to satisfy her with just a few minutes worth of data analysis. And going on to the next slide, because I'm gonna go back to the information on the bottom of that continuum. But very briefly here, obviously we've all known all of our careers that there's some common sense guidelines for collecting meaningful data. In a nutshell, why are you collecting the data in the first place? You have to have a purpose. You don't keep it in your head, you keep it in some kind of a list, and it's reviewed by staff. It's collated in ways that are uniform from year to year, and I know I have to look at some of the stats that are in the Public Library, the Nebraska Library Commission report, because I know in the future there has to be a different way that I look at some of those statistics. I'm placing too much emphasis on collecting certain statistics and it's not helping me make certain decisions, and I need to pay a little bit more attention to those. And written instructions as you go on to the next slide, written instructions making sure that you have people that are responsible for collecting the data and they actually know why they're collecting it and monitoring that data. Onto the next slide. Defining the problem. Now, this was probably to me one of the best parts of the pre-conference because in order to do the data collection, a lot of librarians, they have trouble in one sentence or two describing what the real problem is. Maybe they're describing the symptoms of the problem, but really, what is the problem? And so here they line up for you, do you think you have a problem? Do other people think you have a problem? How long have the symptoms existed? You know, do they happen here? Do they happen in other libraries? Do they affect staff? Do they affect the public? Are they affecting your workflow or your efficiency? Is there just a matter of becoming more effective and more efficient or is it a public service problem? Is it resource allocation? What kind of impacts do you have? Do they affect the staff? Do they affect the public? And what conditions allow the symptoms to occur? And those are internal and external. And so then at the end of this, and we did this in an exercise, we all learned how to write a problem statement in one or two sentences. So onto the next slide, we also learned how to record all the data that's either internal or is external data. And internal is what's happening inside your library and external data is what's happening in the world out there. And obviously, what's happening in the world of eBooks is affecting all of us and it's amazing. We had the very same conversation with our librarians when I came back, not having gone to the workshop that was on eBooks. But I just had the sense that we were over buying in print now and we have to start taking a look at the rest of the world and how that affects our decision-making process. In the lessons or examples, exercises that we had, we were all writing out all the different data elements and the purposes for that. And so some of our groups were coming up with 10 to 15 kinds of data that we would collect on one problem. And the consultants knew what we were doing. They just laughed at us saying, you're creating way too many data elements. So the other day when I solved the problem over the eBooks and the audiobooks, I just simply looked at what's the overall turnover rate for both of those collections in the last 14 months from January of 2011 to today. And what I would call the efficiency of those collections and that is assuming that those materials go out twice a month. Maybe I'm wrong about that assumption and that's one thing I have to check. But assuming they go out twice a month that the efficiency and the turnover rate for both of those collections at this point, of both of those additions to the collections at this point is almost exactly the same. And isn't that great? If you had a library collection and you had 30 different collection types and all 30 of those collection types were creating that much efficiency for you and that much turnover for you, wouldn't it just be absolutely terrific? And so I think that what the consortium has done, the overdrive consortium has done, at least at this point, is right on target. They're making the, they're allocating resources as effectively as they can possibly do it. So on to the next slide. There are some tips for making effective decisions and I won't belabor these either. But the decision that I make too often is not to make a decision. And then that leads to the future happening before the decision could have been made. I still haven't made any decisions about whether to do blu-ray versus standard. I think I'm still in that opinion and rumor and that kind of stage. And so maybe I need to take a look at that. Whenever possible, involve those who will be affected by a decision and the decision-making process. There's just not enough time in the day to do some of these things. And consultants, they know that these processes aren't perfect. And so going on to the next slide. The bottom line is that don't confuse the ideal in reality. We all strive for ideal, but by definition we can't achieve it. You're never gonna make the perfect decision, but I feel pretty comfortable that I knew most of the stuff before I went in that I can go back and I can apply it a little bit more evenly, use my data, my information, and my knowledge. That's what we're all here for to make the most effective decisions. So that's all I have. Unmuted. Well, thank you, Steve. That was great. Oh, I did have one more. Sorry. Okay. Sorry, I did have one more. Well, you know. Okay, sorry. It's the bottom of it. And we didn't talk an awful lot about that, communicating the decision, implementing it, monitoring implementation, including the possibility that you found some unintended results and actually used that the other day in working with the city's IT department. We anticipated some unanticipated results and that helped us a lot. But oftentimes what you've done is you've created the right results and you have a new status quo and that is going to be the best for your community at this time. So that is all I have. No. Excellent. Does anyone have any questions for Steve? I think we could probably discuss this for a long time. Robin, one of our previous speakers does have a comment. You're unmuted, Robin. Hey, Steve, I really appreciate what you presented. My comment is on some of the other presenters. I would really like to see out of the Tennis to PLA come some type of continuing education program or something from the commission on meeting room policy. So that there is some type of consistency throughout the state and possibly even for the smaller libraries. I also attended that meeting room policy session that Matt was talking about. I saw Kathy took her there. I saw Brenda Ealy. I'd really like to see something come out of that session that can be used as a template kind of like across the state. I know everybody has their own flavor, but if we could at least get some of the terminology down that would be very helpful, I think. Okay, well, we will take that as a suggestion and see what we can do with it. I know that we have in fact been talking about having policy templates for various kinds of policies. So we'll have to see what we can come up with on that because I think that's a good idea. So thank you. I just wanna thank everybody, all our speakers today. I think this was terrific. I hope it's not crass to say, I think we really got our money's worth. And so we're thrilled to death that you could go to the conference and share with everyone. This program will be recorded and the resources that you've mentioned will be listed so people can go to this talk later if they weren't able to see it today. And we really wanna thank all of our speakers today for their enthusiasm. And I know that we were a little last minute in getting this all planned, but it worked out great. It came together great, yes. It came out beautifully. You were all terrific. So thank you very much. And I guess that's goodbye. Yeah. So thank you everyone for attending and all of our speakers, of course. We did wanna over, but I think that's fine too. Whatever it takes to get all the information out there that you guys need. And I just wanna say I hope you join us next week when our session will be about the Summer Reading Program for this year. Sally Snyder doing our coordinator of Children and Young Adult Services here at the Library Commission with doing her regular usual book talks about books for both the teen and the youth themes, the children's and the teen themes. So sign up and join us next Wednesday for Sally's session. So thank you very much. And goodbye and we'll see you next time. Thanks a lot.