 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 a commission's weekly online event. Yes, we are a webinar. You can call us that. We won't be offended, not be too offended by it. And we do this show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. And they are all recorded. So if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. You can always go back to our website on our webpage and see the recordings of all of our previous sessions that we have done. The show and the recordings are free and open to anyone who wants to to watch them. They're all up there for everyone. They're free to password or anything like that to get in. And we do all sorts of things in the show, presentations, book reviews, mini-training sessions, anything related to libraries. We will have on the show. We have commission, Nebraska Library Commission staff sometimes to presentations and we have guest speakers as we have this morning. On the line with us is Louise Alcorn, who is the Reference Technology Librarian for the West Des Moines Iowa Public Library. Hi, Louise. Hello. Hello. And she's, I don't know, you do lots of things there. Reference Technology Librarian. That sounds kind of a nice broad. Yeah, it's pretty much Jill of all trades sort of job. They keep adding to it. Yes. I'm the web mistress and then some. So she was, of course, then involved in doing a mobile app for her library using Boopsy. So she's going to talk to us today about what they did, why they did it, how it all turned out. The process they went through at their library. So if you want to go ahead and start, Louise, you are good to go. Okay, great. Thank you, Christa. Again, my name is Louise Alcorn and feel free to ask questions and Christa will pass them along to me as we go along. I will try to remember to pause for questions. It's okay. I'll interrupt whenever I feel like it. Okay. Christa and I are old pals so she knows she can interrupt me at any time. So, okay. Well, first of all, I don't know how many of you actually have a mobile app already or are thinking of one. We have been thinking of one for a while for, I guess, what are the obvious reasons and a few that weren't quite so obvious. We have a very sort of wired community, what we used to call a wired community. I guess now they're really unwired because it's mostly via mobile and increasingly people are using mobile devices here. We're a fairly affluent suburban community, medium-sized library growing like a weed. And frankly, the only way we can continue to provide services to everybody is to go as virtual as we can as often as we can. So people had been asking for it. I guess when you say why you're doing something, I think a perfectly reasonable answer in libraries as well. Patients are asking for it. They want it. Other area libraries had been sort of testing it out. They had had some versions here and there. We kind of were running in parallel to a few other libraries who were working on the same thing at the same time. My biggest concern, and I'm going to pop up here, our current website, which is actually in process of being changed, which I'll talk about in a little bit, is definitely not mobile-friendly. It's on a about six or seven-year-old content management system platform, and it just is not mobile-friendly because it was not designed to be. In addition, we did not have a mobile app. We had Horizon at the time as our ILS, and that web interface was not. I actually had a screenshot of it, but it's so awful. I'm just not going to bother. It just really didn't work very well on any kind of mobile device, even a larger tablet. So we were looking around, but we realized at the time we were looking around, we didn't really have the funds. We had basically just contracted just last year. So in 2012, we had contracted to get a new ILS. We decided to go with Innovative's new Sierra product with their Encore. The web interface, basically, is how I think of it. That was all well and good, but that was basically going to take up all of our time and energy moving to that. So all of a sudden, in late 2012, we got notification that a woman in the area had passed away and had left the library a chunk of money directly to the library rather than to the friends or whatever. And it was, as it turned out, exactly enough money to pay for mobile app development and website development that we needed because I had been looking around and sort of holding that in my pocket for a while. So it was serendipitous. It was sort of a sign from the library gods that this is what we were supposed to do. And the fact that we were getting a new ILS was also a big pushing factor. We wanted to make sure that if we were kind of leapfrogging to this new ILS with a lot of new features, and many of them could be what you might call mobilized. They could be done via mobile devices. And we didn't want to not have that option. And people get frustrated, you know, that, well, OK, you've got this great new thing and it looks pretty, but why can't I get to it on my phone because that seems reasonable to people these days. They do all sorts of things on their phones. Heck, they order coffee on their phones, you know. Really? Well, I didn't know I could do that. We have a couple places where you can order your coffee ahead via your mobile app. So pretty much you can be as lazy as you want if you want to have a smartphone. So just a little word of warning to anyone out there who does project management like I do. Things not to do all in one year. Get a new ILS, implement a new ILS, develop a brand new mobile app, and build an entirely new website, which is launching in about a month. I was lucky and I didn't really have that much to do with the ILS launch except for doing some public end things like writing instructions and getting it integrated with the new website. But yeah, we're pretty much, we're a pretty stressed bunch of puppies over here. Yeah, you need a vacation. Yeah, pretty much a couple, preferably. But in fact, it's been very exciting. So let me talk about why we went with Boopsy because there are a number of options when you're talking about a mobile app. And let me be clear about a mobile app. I'm talking about, obviously you guys know what apps are for smartphones and so forth, but it's basically a piece of software for people to access via mobile devices. Many of our library services, primarily obviously our catalog, our ILS system. But in addition, we were also looking for something that could integrate pushing people over to Overdrive. We're part of a consortium here in Iowa called Wilbore. That's 100 plus Iowa libraries doing Overdrive. And so that's a big chunk of our, quote, circulation. We have a group, an Overdrive group here in Nebraska as well, yeah. Yeah, we actually have two here in Iowa because it was just kind of a weird thing that got set up separately. And it's just growing and growing and people are really using it a lot. And we wanted to just, it's the kind of thing where they were having to do it on a separate app on their phone. It would be nice if it was more tied into our brand, as it were, so that they're really getting to it from the West Des Moines Library, not via an Overdrive app, necessarily. We also have One Click Digital from Record of Books, which we hope to integrate in, and some other products that we just, we knew could be made more special, made more useful via mobile devices, and we wanted a platform to do that in. So we also wanted people to be able to check their account and so forth. In part because even when they come in the library, we're very, very busy. We're crazy busy and we're trying to, one of our strategic plan items is to add more self-service options for everything that we do. And so the mobile part of that is really within our strategic plan in the sense that people can, you know, check their account, do things. Eventually we hope they're going to be able to actually check out books that way. There is a function that you can add with Boopsy where that is possible. We're still trying to get used to our ILS first to make sure that that's all working. And also we have some infrastructure things in terms of the right standards and so forth to do that. But that is in our longer term plan. So pros and cons of doing it ourselves versus Boopsy. I do want to point out to you that you can create a mobile app on your own. And I'm going to point you to, I'm going to go over to here. This was actually a really nice little presentation done by Amy Clark from the Milford Public Library up in, in Milford, Iowa. They, and I'm, this is, this will all be on the recording. But she did a nice little Weebly site to go along with it. So I figured I'd give her a little bit of credit here. And she did a nice thing about all sorts of different mobile things, but specifically how to build your own app was one of the options that was on here. And she talked about three different possibilities for doing that. Infinite Monkeys, AppsKaiser, and Conduit Mobile. They went with Infinite Monkeys, which is kind of a nice drag and drop, build your own mobile app thing. We wanted something a little bit more sophisticated than what you could make with that. And also the reality is we're at about 50% understaffed for the, for the public that we serve. And the reality was it was going to be me. And they couldn't, they just honestly couldn't free up enough time for me to be able to do this and the website and all of the other work that I do. So it was a time and money consideration to, to pay a third party developer to do a lot of the work. And I'm going to talk about their process, which was very good. But the reality is I, I could have done it, you know, for us on, on our own. And I would recommend you at least look at that option. I had certainly done some research on it. I had started playing around with it. One of the things was I wasn't, because of the ILS was so new, we would have had to really work with them to figure out how to get that to work back and forth, whereas Boopsie had already worked with Innovative on their new Sierra ILS. Again, these were just considerations we, we put into play. But they, it just came down on our side with the pros and cons to go with a third party. But I can, I actually know several libraries, especially smaller libraries who've just done their own and they've been quite successful and they work beautifully. So I do like to point that out that that is an option. So anyways, I'm just going to kind of show you the Boopsie site here. One nice thing is they work with libraries. That is their primary business, or at least the folks who we're dealing with. That's their primary business. What's nice about that is when I say things like ILS, they don't, their eyes don't cross or they go, huh, what are you talking about? They really understand that we have issues with our ILS. There's ways we like to use, you know, our catalog systems. There's ways that we need to make sure that patrons can use them. And the options that they provide are really very much designed for that. So that was a, that was a definite pro on their side. Other things were that they, they do it as a project management. I never actually met anyone from Boopsie. I did the entire thing via phone, email and, and project management software. Now that may sound a little odd to put that in the pro column, but I don't have time. I don't have time to go to meetings. I don't have time to do, you know, I was also at the same time trying to work with our web developers who are local and who I did actually have to meet with in person. And so being able to do Boopsie largely virtually was a huge bonus. And it sounds like that's a good way for you, you can do it on your own timeframe and on your own schedule that you're not locked into. Well, we must meet at this time to tell you this thing or we have the sales pitch you got to watch on this day that you can, yeah. Yeah. And when an interesting thing about the process is they give you a series of steps which I'm going to show you. They have this really nice implementation document that they give you at the beginning. In fact, here let me pull, let me pull it up. So this is literally they send you a Google Doc and it literally goes through and this is just, this kind of made me laugh when I saw it. But it absolutely works. It's just, okay, phase one, you're going to do this. Phase two, you're going to do this. Phase three. And here's a remarkable thing. They actually followed this process. Now I do a lot of project management. I do a lot of project management working with vendors and staff and multiple departments and everything. And I'll tell you what this was hands down one of the easiest, smoothest, most clearly laid out implementation processes. I have ever gone through. And I know I sound like I'm shilling for boopsy, I am and I'm not. I am trying to give you guys an idea of sort of the pros and cons here. And a definite pro is that they know what they're doing. They also know that we don't always know what we're doing. And so they lay out very clearly what we need to send them. So to give you an idea, because I know this is a question that often comes up when we talk about this. What did we have to do versus what did they do? What we had to do was things like provide logos, provide images that we wanted them to use. And I'm going to actually show you the app here in just a moment. We also provided some sort of general design ideas. Part of it was because we were working on the website at the same time, we were far enough along with the website development. We were a month or so into that that I could, and I did this on purpose. The color scheme, as it were, that our website developers had come up with, I was then able to show a screenshot of to the Boopsy people so that their designers could work from that. So that our mobile app and our soon to be launched new website looked roughly the same in terms of the color palette being used. So that was very important to me because I'm hoping these last for a very long time, both of these new items. So I wanted them to not jar against each other. So other things we had to do, and this is a biggie, our head of tech services, who's our head cataloger, did have to do a catalog poll where we basically, they needed a data poll to work with so that they could test the app. And then he has to actually do that periodically in order to make sure that Boopsy is getting all of the data. And I'm not a cataloger, but I'm sure any of you who are will know that that is something that has to be put into the workflow. So he's now had to add that into his roughly monthly workflow. And they let you decide how often you want to do that. Because of course, if you're adding a lot of new items, they may or may not be showing up on there if it's not going, because it's not really pulling live per se. So that is something that we had to put into a workflow. And so we had to talk about that really before we started to make sure that that would work. Especially since we were trying to implement a new ILS at the same time, I certainly didn't want to add burdens onto our tech services department, because I didn't want them to explode. So I'm going to stop for just a second to see if there are questions coming through that I can answer. Nothing has come through yet, but yes. Anybody, if you have any questions, comments, thoughts for Louise, type them into the questions section of your GoToWebinar interface. If you have a microphone, just say, I have a mic. Unmute me. And I can do that. And you can use your microphone to ask your question, just like we are doing here. I'll let you know if anything comes in. I'm far more interesting when I'm answering a question than when I'm answering a question. Other things we had to do was, like you'll see here, provide two test of patron accounts. And we actually were just, the head of circulation just had emailed me the other day saying, do we need to keep these open for Boopsy? And yes, you do. As long as you're with Boopsy, you need to keep those accounts open because they use them for testing and to make sure that things are working periodically. So it was no big deal. I mean, you just create a couple of dummy accounts. And what we did was we put a couple of items on them per their request. And these were basically items we'd withdrawn anyway. So we just leave them in a back room and don't worry about it. Let's see. I'm trying to think what else I should let you know about in terms of their implementation. It was just remarkable. Now, one big thing you have to do is you have to create an Apple developer account. Oops, I just closed the window I needed. Well, no big deal. They basically want you to create an Apple developer account. You have to do this. The library must do this. And it takes a while. And this is interesting because when you're talking about the timing, when I asked them when I was first contracting with them, well, how long can this take? And they said, well, we can get it depending on how fast you are getting things to us. It can be done in as little as like four to six weeks. But that can really depend on Apple. So if the Apple developer account, sometimes it can take a week or two for that to come back through, there may be questions they have. They walked us through it so carefully, step by step by step, so that there was no chance that Apple would go, whoa, wait a minute. What's going on here? And so that really helped it. They walked us through it very, very carefully. And again, it's another Google Doc document that they just sent to you. I'm just very impressed. I write instructions for a living. I write lots of stuff for overdrive and so forth. And I was very impressed with the way that they set it out. I asked very few questions, except as they related to our data. So I do have a question. So this Apple developer account thing, this is for the entire app to be built, created to work with all devices? Or is that just something for it to work on Apple? Just for iOS. So basically, you don't need to do it for Droid and whatever. You just have to submit your information to the various stores from them. With Apple, you need to create a developer account saying that you are going to, basically, permitting Boopsy to do the development for you. And even if you're building your own mobile app, if you want it in the Apple stores, you may have to do this as well. And I believe most of the third-party software, like the Infinite Monkeys, does explain this to you that this is, again, a thing that you're going to need to do to get it in the stores. You kind of have to create an account with them to say, yes, we're real people. Yes, we really want to do this. And we're going to take responsibility for whatever is put onto the store. So this special account, the extra thing you have to do is just for Apple. There's not that same kind of thing for Android or the other places. For that, I'll show you here, you basically will just create the promotional text, which is then, this is basically what goes on. And again, they give you really clear instructions of words not to use, words to use, things that are going to show up and make problems. They let you know about that. But the Apple one, Apple's just very finicky. I don't think that's going to surprise anyone. And it costs you $99 a year to have that developer account. So you do need to put that into your, it's not a lot of money, but for a small library, that's a lot of money. So you do need to keep aware of that. And obviously, the cost for Boopsie, it's hard for me to say because part of it is based on the things we wanted. They also have a couple different levels. They have the standard package, and then they have the optimum package. We went for the optimum package, but not the full optimum package, which is a little confusing. But I do want to show you a couple of features that we did get that I thought were rather cool. And helped us, here's the other part. It helped us sell it to our board because even though the money had come to the library, technically, we could spend it, the board did need to approve us spending it for this particular project. One of the things that we added, again, we have the overdrive, and so they have the one-click access through to the overdrive titles. They are working with one click, and we hope to add those perhaps by the end of the year as another function. But the other one is the book-look mobile. This is such a, in a way it's kind of a silly thing, but I kind of love it. So patrons are at a bookstore or out somewhere or at home, and they can scan the ISBN on a book. And some of you have probably seen this. I'm going to actually go over here and show you an image. They basically, on their phone, using the little scanner feature on their phone, which you may not even realize you have, but it's basically built in there. They can scan the barcode of the ISBN barcode, and then it immediately goes over to your catalog via the mobile app and searches to see if you have that book. In this case, this search said, no, the library has no matching copies. I think it was just that addition that we didn't have, because I'm pretty sure we have that book. This is, by the way, these screenshots are thanks to my boss, my director, basically took all these off his iPad. That's why they're so wide-form. But it also, they see them, which is fantastic. But again, that was kind of a neat little feature. That, I think, is genius. That is awesome. You're in a bookstore. Look, you can get it for free over here. Yeah, and it's funny. Librarians always ask me about what kind of statistics that you get from the company. And one, I guess, con, I would say, is that the stats, they pull the stats for me. So I can't actually pull them necessarily the way I want them. But what they do send me is that they basically build a Google Doc, and then they just dump it in there each month. So I have May and June here. And one of the things they do show you is, if I can find it here, is uses of the book look. So that's actually kind of fun. And I'm really going to be interested to see, here in the Des Moines area, in October and then in April, I think, we have this giant book sale that people come literally from all over the country for. It's actually to support Planned Parenthood of the Heartland. But it literally fills a giant building in the state backgrounds. It's full of books. It's basically like a library in heaven, right? And so I'm going to be really interested to see how many more book looks we get from people running through the book sale, scanning ISBNs to see if they have it, so they don't have to buy it, but instead borrow it from us. I'm actually going to track our stats rather carefully in October when that comes up again. So just kind of funny things. Again, this is not a big deal. But yet at the same time, if you can see that people really are using that function, it means that they really are thinking of the library when they're looking at the bookstore, whatever they are thinking of us. And that actually makes me feel good that it occurs to them to check if they can borrow it rather than buy it. Now, not to possibly ask a question that'll be difficult or something, but it just popped in my head. That's cool. What about other media that the library has? Can you scan a barcode on a DVD that's at the bookstore? And see if you have that. I don't know if they have ISBNs, but they have ASINs. And I think those might scan. Other things work with it, yeah. And if not, that'd be something to suggest. Here they say just books. And I have this feeling it wouldn't work so well on a DVD unless it had a proper ISBN. So I will have to test that and let you know. And it could be a feature to suggest adding that the libraries carry more than just the books. And bookstores carry more than just books now, too. Back of our Barnes and Noble is full of movies. Well, if anybody in the course of the next half hour wants to download our app, just search in the App Store for West Wing Library. It's free. Give it a whirl. Why not? I'd love to know if that actually works. So I am tasking one of you with that. So pull out your smartphone and figure it out. Now, one of the things that we've not added yet, but I talked about, was the book check, which is this is something you can add on where they can actually do self-check on their phones. And our idea is to eventually get RFID so that we don't have to do the tattle tape things. And they can just self-check out and not have to scan it out. This is a long-term process because we don't yet have the RFID in place. But it is something that we're planning on, which is, again, part of the reason we went with the Boopsies is that we knew that the minute we were ready to do that, they could effectively turn this on for us. And we wouldn't have to start all over again. And again, we're so low staffed. We have so few people. That this actually really is a good equation for us in terms of time and staff time versus money. So I'm trying to think what else I wanted to let you guys know about. Oh, one other small con. And this is entirely nitpicky. But I like to be nitpicky because I'm a librarian. They give you a unique Boopsy code. And so basically our, and I'm going to show you the actual app. That's what we're going to do next. But it's Des Moines. Well, this is a problem because we're technically West Des Moines. And Des Moines has its own library system. But they gave this to us. And by the time they'd done it, they'd created so many accounts for us to get this thing started, I couldn't really get them to change it. So I'm a little worried when people are doing Google searches that they're going to get us correctly. But at this point, we're not going to worry about it. If it comes to a thing later, we may have to book a Boopsy to sort that out. So the pros are really that we get professional development, including by the way, professional graphic design, which again, I'm going to head over to the actual app now. This is the website we send people to, DesMoines.Boopsy.com. Again, I wish it said West Des Moines. I'm just not going to worry about it. There's a QR code there where they can just scan the QR code and just that'll take them straight to the app store to grab it. Or they can actually just go in and download it. There's various things they can do. I'm going to actually pull up. Are you guys seeing the little pop-up window with the actual app in it? Yes, yep, I'm seeing it. Excellent. OK, so this is our app. And one of the nice things they did was you'll see the logo here. The reason I'm pointing that out, that actually is a slightly altered logo than what we've used in past years. It however matches the new design on our new website. So again, once our new website launches, people will get, oh, I see. That's what they were doing. I'm hoping that's what they're going to say. But again, you can go in and you can check your account. Glee, I type fast. And it gives you the full, I wanted to show it to you live. I have all these screenshots, but I really kind of wanted to show you live. And so I can see what I've got checked out. And again, this would be on my phone, but I'm kind of showing it to you in this format. But I actually love the fact that I can pull it up here and test it out before I go grab it on my phone. I actually kind of like that. That is very cool that you can actually show it to someone who's not sure. What do you mean what's going to look like on my phone? Let's just look it on the computer here so you can see. Right, because they're like, what do you mean by mobile app? What will I be able to do? I don't know if I want to have another app on my phone. All that kind of stuff. So and then it also shows me my holds. So it's kind of nice. And they also tell me whether I have fines due and all that marvelous stuff. In addition, there's that book look function, which we talked about. And it'll shove me over to our overdrive. And again, it shoves me over to our Wilbur Consortium right away, which is also nice. So I can actually get in. I'm going to say we all are going to just forget what my library card number was. And again, this is now my digital account. This is my overdrive account. I don't really have anything checked out right now. It's not really letting me in there properly, sorry. Part of it is because I don't have it fully in. What it would do is send me over to the overdrive app. But it will at least tell me what I have out. And I can go and check what dates things are in. The library look hitter is basically just our hours. Now our hours change. We're technically on summer hours right now. So I have to twice a year have them change it back and forth. But they just do that for me with no charge. That's just part of our agreement with them. So that's nice, too. We do pay an annual fee to them. I always love that this doesn't quite work when you do it on here. It does work beautifully on your phone. It takes you right over to the Google Maps. But again, the basic things that you'd expect to have on there, they ask us. They can actually call. It's a direct call thing. They can email us. So it'll link to their email if they're on their phone. And then, of course, the information. And then our Facebook account. I haven't actually added the Twitter or anything on there. I don't really want to. But it's a nice interface. And again, it's a very, very simple end of our catalog interface. So I'm actually going to do the one they suggest. But you'll see how, as you're searching, it's actually pulling stuff up for you, which is nice, too. So it's very, very fast, very useful. And then you can actually get information. So that is our app. And it's very pretty. It's very nice. People have responded very well to it. I hope in the future that we're going to be able to add more functions to it. For instance, I want to look at possibly having our various EBSCO products pull through to the mobile app more directly. So people can search that more directly. Technically, they can search it through our catalog. But I'd love them to be able to just search that separately directly through there. And I haven't really decided what we want to do yet, which is why we haven't yet added it. So are there other questions right now? I do want to pause and see if there's questions. Yes, comment and question. Someone here said on the text chat about the book look thing that it says it does an ISBN search in the catalog, so it wouldn't really work on a scan that isn't of an ISBN the way it's set up now. But I still think that would be a good feature to suggest to them. Well, and the thing is that I don't know whether they're also including ASINs in there or not. I suspect it is just ISBNs. And yes, I will suggest to them the DVDs. And I have this feeling knowing them, they're probably looking at that. Like you said, they know libraries, so this isn't something new to them. They know the kinds of stuff that we get asked about. It's a nice little feature. I suspect they might have sort of borrowed it from somewhere else and paid the licensing or something. I honestly don't know. It might be their own build. I honestly am not sure. But yeah, it is something that I think it would be nice if they started spreading that out to other media. It would also be nice if part of our problem is we do not have our ebooks, for instance, that are in overdrive. We do not have all of those pulled into our catalog yet because we had trouble with our previous ILS with all of those, so we took them all out. And we need to add them back in, but we're still trying to get our ILS fully working before we start adding in 10,000 additional items. We do have a question from Michael here at the commission. I'm going to unmute. You guys are unmuted. You should be able to talk. Am I coming through? Yes, you are. Hello, Michael. Hey, Louise. So I kind of have this larger issue sort of question. And I'm going to preface this with just sticking with the standard package, because I see once you get into the optimal package, you start actually using the hardware on the phone, like the scanner and things like that. What would be the pros or cons to creating a separate app versus making sure that your ILS and your website is just very mobile-friendly? I think it's interesting, because we kind of asked this too. It's like, OK, do we just want to make sure? For instance, let me show you really quick, because we're using Encore. And this is fairly mobile-friendly. This page, if you went to it, is fairly mobile-friendly. It's not terrible. It's a simple search box. So it's certainly perfectly easy to put things in. The display, I'll just do this, is not bad in terms of displaying on your phone. And certainly on your tablet, it looks lovely. There's no problem with it. However, the reality is that we've become an app-based world. And what we've found is that there has been a tipping point, where people don't want to go to a website and have to type in the address, even if they have it bookmarked. They want to open the app and do just that thing. And we're finding this from our patrons, as we've talked to them when they started asking. We're like, well, because we've tried to explain to them, well, with our new ILS, you'll be able to go in just to the website. No, no, no, I want an app. I want an app, because I want the app to be able to log into my account and display things. For instance, if you were logging in here, first of all, you'll notice that this makes me crazy, you have to then click my account again to actually get to my account. It doesn't automatically take you there. This is sort of mobile-friendly. But the reality is there's a lot more clicking. You saw when I went in through the app that, boom, I had my information. I had the books that I had checked out. I had the books that I had hauled. They were just there. And I think that ease of use, that friendliness, that user friendliness is reasonable to look at. And again, you could DIY the app so that you're not necessarily spending money for something like this. But the reality is I think people are looking for the app. It also, here's the thing, we're in an affluent suburb. They have certain expectations of our technological expertise, our technological level. And we were not meeting it for some years with our old ILS. Part of the reason we're doing this is to really leap frog forward and really be present in people's technological lives as the library, as a community entity because for our survival, we need to. Because the reality is that our neighborhood, if you're not out there on an app, you're probably not being used. So does that help answer your question, Michael? Oh, yeah, thank you very much. That all made sense, thanks. Yeah, so just like anything that your library is doing, it will depend on your local situation, if this is the best choice, or like Michael is describing, just making your website more mobile friendly. Does that work for your community? And I think for plenty of communities, that would be more than sufficient, especially if you have an ILS who's like the Encore Functions here. There are perfectly mobile friendly. You could certainly really do a great PR push to have people bookmark that page and make sure that they had it and use your library, use the online. Here's the way to get to your stuff. And I think you'd be perfectly fine. We know our community is wanting that extra little fancy something. We just know that about our community, because we've surveyed them enough times to know this. Does that help? Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that I did forget to mention, one nice thing they do is they do provide some marketing materials that you can use, so you can pop stuff in. These are fine. These are the basic things that every library vendor gives you. EBSCO gives you the same stuff, where you can make bookmarks, you can make whatever. I'm about to do a big push on this, so that basically we're pushing this right prior to pushing our new website. So again, I want them to be linked in people's minds. And so we're going to be doing a bigger push on this. So I will probably use some of their functions, but I'm also probably going to put together some of my own. Again, with that new branding that we've created, I want more and more of our materials to have that new color branding. Actually, let me show you guys. By the way, you are the first people to see this outside of my library. This is actually going to be our new website. Yes, I know. Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert. So OK, just to give you an idea, I think I should do the old website, right? Here's our new. So you can see that we're re- Yeah, isn't that nice? They did a beautiful. And this is, again, a local company that did this. Again, because yes, I could have built this myself. It's on WordPress. But I'm not a graphic designer. We don't have a graphic designer on staff. We have somebody who does a little bit of that, but it's just not at the level that we needed. Again, we have a very sophisticated user base. Anything that doesn't look fairly pretty, we're going to hear about. Being able to have an actual professional graphic designer of some sort make, you can tell, the difference from pages that do and don't. And being able to support a local business, that's very awesome. I know we have local companies here in Lincoln, too, that libraries can go to. And you don't have to go to some big, crazy expensive place, just look for someone local that can help and do the things you like. And they did a nice job. We paid them, again, the money that we were donated basically was enough to pay for this website development and the BoopSea. We went a couple of thousand over because we were adding some functionality that we knew we're going to need in the future. This is a WordPress-based website, which means that I now have about 90% more control than I had in our previous content management system. Which was, again, that is a cost-benefit analysis that we made in that if we pay the money now to have them build us something with all of the add-ons and all of the stuff we need, that saves me hours and hours and hours of time as the sole web mistress for our site. I then have a platform upon which I can do the value-added work of actually putting content in. Which we're madly doing. A lot of this is just temporary stuff right now. But we're madly trying to add in the content so that we can launch. And a lot of this is just being pulled from feeds and stuff we already had. But it's just being done in a much more sophisticated fashion. The company that we use is called Flying Hippo. So basically, I got to say things like Flying Hippo and BoopSea a lot in the last six months. It's just been a lot of fun for my job. It makes the stress a little less. I'll give you a little betty to finish out our time here. Because every time I say BoopSea, I think of it. That's basically what I have to tell you. Again, this was a cost-benefit analysis that we made. It doesn't necessarily make sense for everybody. But I did want to give full props to a company that I have dealt with vendors for 20 years now in various ways. And I have never had an experience that was so smooth. OK, to give you an idea, the only other staff member that really had to spend much time on this was our head of tech services to do the poll. And then basically, the only other staff time, besides mine, that was used on this entire project, was when I would send out the test versions of this and have everyone on staff who had different devices try it out on their devices. So we did try it out on about eight different droid devices. Actually, I had a Windows phone to see if it would work. That was really interesting, because at the time it wasn't. And now they do now have Windows 8 and Windows 8 phone capability. Oh, nice. Yeah. At least that's what I saw on their website. And of course, the various iOS things, so iPad and iPhone. It works beautifully on the droid and the iOS devices with little or no problem. I was very pleased with that. We did come up with a couple things for the, like the book look wasn't working quite right. And again, part of that was our new ILS, so we did tons of testing to make sure that the communication was going back and forth properly. So that was really helpful. So that really took a couple of weeks just because you know how long it is when you've got people working part time here and there, and you want to hear back from at least a dozen people. It could take a while for all of that feedback to come in. So I factored that into our time. The whole thing actually took about three months, mostly because of us, not them, and a little bit Apple. Yeah. So from start of picking. The primarily was just, you know, I would say, yeah. Picking them is how the way you were going to go. They say, hey, it can take eight weeks. Right. And it's just a matter of saying, yeah, you know, our people are so busy that I've just got to assume that this particular step, this phase, because they have it all in phases, is going to take an extra couple of weeks because it takes so long for everybody to get the stuff here. So I just factored that in, and that was fine. That's still us, not bad. Launched in May, and it's been well used since, and our usage goes up every month, so. Nice. We do have a question. Let's see. I'm not sure if you showed this earlier or not. Do patrons have full usage of the library's website using Boopsy? Specifically, could they request items from the catalog, not just view their account or renew? It's like placing an actual hold, I guess. Let's go back to the actual app, but I think I closed up. OK. Yes, I believe so. Let's go and try. I don't really want this book, but what the heck? Oh, you can always cancel it later. Exactly. All right, yeah, so you can request it. And of course, it is actually, I believe it is actually in, yeah, it's available. So I would be requesting it, and they would then pull it for me downstairs. So I'm not actually going to do that, because I don't want to put them to that work. So actually, it went ahead and just did the request for me, so now I'm going to have to go ahead and take off later. That's how good it is. That's how good it is. It's that fast. So the answer is, yeah. Now, is there anything that it doesn't do that they can do? I mean, is there anything that the app, going the other direction, can't do that you could do by going and sitting down at the catalog at a regular PC? At the moment, no. However, that's actually an interesting question, because we're dealing with the fact that we eventually want people to be able to request us, request books for purchase, and also request ILLs through the catalog. We have not yet set that up through the catalog. And because we're having some issues with tying those things together, and again, we're still, we only launched our new ILS like in March, so you can just imagine we're still in cleanup mode. But one of the things that we want to do is to have those. Right now, I'm creating those forms on our website, because that's where we've always had them before, and it's just a web form that sends to an email. We eventually do want to do those through the ILS side. At that time, I have talked to the Boopsie people, and they think they should be able to reproduce it, but there's going to be a little work there. So that's going to be one thing where we may leave the ones on the website for those who are primarily using the mobile. We don't know. We're going to have to figure out how to do that. And then what we would do is put on the mobile a link to those forms, so at least they could get to them if need be. But I'm really hoping we can integrate it with the full ILS functions on the mobile device. So someone here, I'm assuming Michael, is typed in to clarify, the app is an interface to the catalog. The website is separate and not accessible via the app. It's not working now. No, this is just an interface. Well, it's an interface to the catalog plus to our overdrive account. Right, it's got even extra separate. Basically, a separate app. Yeah, it really isn't a full website. They can, once we launch our new website, go to our website via their mobile device because it will be mobile capable. Which would be a totally separate thing from using the app. It's a totally separate thing. Go to the browser on your phone and go to the website just, yeah. Yeah, but the reality is that most people, when they think of the library, they're really thinking of the catalog. They're thinking of the things we have, or at least the things that they can access. We are slowly trying to change that. Now, one of the things we do have on here, though, is actually an RSS feed of all of our events is on the home page. So our various events, this is actually an RSS feed from events, because we use events for all of our calendaring. So that's actually really nice. It's a very nice clean. And they did have to clean up that RSS feed for us a little bit. But they did a nice job. And so all of that is in there, and they can go and they basically just get the events to page, and then they can go and click on it and go register. Nice. Which then takes them to their browser, which it won't work in this one here. But it basically just takes them to their browser, and then they can go and sign up. That part really does get them to our website in the sense of our advanced calendar website. So we are linking to other things. It's just not necessarily the full website. But I think that's OK, because I think an app needs to be simple. I think if you add too many bells and whistles in an app, people just get overwhelmed. So you want your primary functions. Overwhelmed and lost, trying to figure out where is the thing I want. Yeah, I actually saw somebody who had built their own mobile app, and they really tried to put absolutely everything in it. And they kind of asked me to look at it. And I said, you know, I want to do these four things. Can you just make sure it just does these four things and maybe add one other kind of cool thing? And then just give me a link to your website. And I'll go look at your website separately. But I would prefer just to do these four things and then go separately. And maybe I'm alone in that. I don't think so, though, because I think as people use apps, they do get used to being able to do these things well. For me, as soon as I go in and open it, I want it to be able to clearly show me what I can do, why I'm there, so I don't have to go searching and looking. When I'm sitting at a computer and going to a website, I am more, for me, in the mood to explore and click and discover, oh, where is this part of the website? Where is the team section? And where is the whatever section? But not when I'm on my phone, because it's a small screen and I just I open it up because I wanted to do something, not because I wanted to sit around and browse. And I also think your app should send people the things that mobile devices do well. Now, the list of things that mobile devices do well is expanding exponentially every day. For instance, if we have talked about the possibility of having a YouTube series of maybe book reviews or something, I would love if we do that and if we have the content to support that and not a minute before. I would love to, for instance, add that on here and have that be an extra link on here. And they can do that for you, I mean, especially if it's just a URL they're going to, that's really easy for them to build on there. And probably there'd be a small cost, I don't know, I need it. You do get a certain amount of sort of yearly development with your annual fee. And there is an annual fee, it's not a one-time cost because they are then sort of hosting your mobile app and so forth. So again, there are costs going forward. For me, again, that time-benefit analysis was absolutely on spot to go with them for now. Mm-hmm, yeah. So, anybody have any questions, comments? Type them into the questions section. Let me know you want your microphone unmuted. One thing did come in, someone from here wants to know the actual numbers. What did it end up costing in the end? I was afraid somebody was going to ask me that. Now, you do need to keep in mind we are a population over 60,000. So is the pricing based on then your library size? Is it a little bit of a variant? Partly, and then partly just on their base packages and so forth. So the base package, this was for, I'm sorry, for the optimum package was just under $1,500. And then we pay, we're paying actually for the optimum package, plus some extra stuff, like $3,500 a year, which, yeah, that's a chunk of change. Yeah. I gather it would be significantly less if you went with the standard and also different sizes. And you did get some, you had that donation that helped that as well. Right, and then moving forward for the annual, because basically that initial, it was actually $2,600 because they prorated it for us for that, so it was basically like we paid the base $1,500 fee plus the portion of the first year. So we go on a fiscal year starting July 1. And so the first part of that was basically paid for out of those funds. So that meant we could do the development effectively for free. It didn't have to come out of budget. Then we have state and other funds and some private funds also that are put in what we call our gift trust account that are then gonna pay going forward. And it'll just basically have to go into our budget each year, along with, for instance, our web hosting for our website. At this point, I think of these as ongoing costs that just are part of the cost of doing business in a virtual environment now. So this is the kind of thing, because you guys got that nice donation, that libraries here, we have in Nebraska, I'm sure across the country, you could apply for a grant from your state library association or your state library or somewhere to get started with us to get those startup costs taken care of for you. And that's a fantastic use of a grant because it's a one-time thing so that the people who give out the grants can really get their brains around. Oh, I get it. It's just the $15 or whatever they need to get it started. And then they love to see then the library will take on whatever the annual is as a commitment to this thing that they've paid to have developed. Take on the ownership and the ongoing maintenance of it. Grandwriters love to see that, yeah. Our grant givers. So yeah, there are ways to get it to pull it off, definitely. Yes, and again, there are plenty of other options. There are even some other companies that do this. You can also talk to your ILS vendor because they may also have options where they, they actually, I think, Innovative did have something we could have used, but it just didn't have all the other stuff we wanted, like the overdrive and whatever. I mean, this just made sense. We were gonna be, we also wanted it branded for ourselves. That was a big deal. When you go into the app store, either Droid or iOS, you search for West Des Moines Library. You don't search for Boopsie. So that was branded for us. And I know that seems really weird to have that in our big thing column. But again, when we're talking about our local community, we need to get our brand out there more. And so this was, again, this is in our strategic plan. I don't, well, I don't think that sounds weird. Branding and people recognizing you're the library is something that they can click with immediately. Holy makes sense, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. So any other questions? It doesn't look anything else has come in. We're almost to the top of the hour again to 11 a.m. central time. Anybody have any, excuse me, last minute questions, comments, thoughts for Louise. I'm sure afterwards, if you didn't want to, you could contact her via the, excuse me, it's a West Des Moines public library. If you do have a name. I just Google my name. I'm pretty easy to find. Yeah, she's out there. It doesn't look like anything urgent is being typed in or coming through. Okay. Hopefully that means I was thorough enough. No, I think you were. Yeah, I covered everything we had wanted to talk about. Sounds like it was a good process. And definitely, I agree that, I mean, you said ILS can sometimes do this and that's fine if they've got it as a good module part of what they do. But it's also nice to have this company, like you said, they're geared to doing apps and doing apps for libraries. Exactly. And that makes a huge difference when you're trying to do something like this that they enjoy. And I'm gonna make one final comment. If our ILS implementation had been one tenth as easy as the Boopsie was, we would have been much happier. I, yeah, to be honest, every ILS company I've ever dealt with can learn a lot from the way Boopsie does implementation. I was just gonna say maybe Boopsie should expand, but no, no. No, they should stay focused on what they do because they do it so well. Stay focused on what they do. And I think that's why they're good is they are pretty focused. And everyone I've dealt with there was friendly, helpful, very immediate answers to questions despite the fact that they're two time zones away. Where are they based in? They're based in California although they actually have people kind of all over. Yeah. Do have one comment. It says, thanks, I gained so much information. Good, yay. Hey, I'd love to hear that. All right, since no urgent questions are coming in, I think we will wrap it up for today. Let me get rid of this here. So thank you so much, Louise. This was awesome. You're very welcome. I think it was a, I'm just trying to get myself situated here. Yeah, I've heard of libraries doing this and as we had seen when you and I were printing this before, there is a large list somewhere of all the libraries that are using it. Oh, yeah. You're actually, give me a second. I can, I swear it's been here for a while. I think if you go to our library apps on the, yeah. So that, and it's not actually alphabetical, which is very funny. But if you're looking for something, you can actually just do a quick find. So there's us. To see who's, yeah. So I don't know quite how they're adding these in. And this I notice here too, there's academic libraries on here as well. It's not just something specific to publics. That's one of the things I looked at that they had dealt with small libraries, large libraries, large library systems, public, but also like community colleges as well as large universities. So they clearly have done the whole gamut. A little of everything. And all over the world. So there's a couple of Australian ones in here too. Oh, cool. And Canadian. All right. All right, great. Okay. All right, thank you, Louise. Thank you everyone for attending. I am going to pull back control here. There we go. Okay, so thank you everyone for attending. I hope it was useful. We are recording the session. So sometime later today, the recording will go up. And I have been bookmarking all of the links and websites and things that Louise has been showing. Boopsy page and the library page and everything. So you'll have all the access to all those links as well when the recording goes up. So thank you very much for attending this morning. And I hope you join us next week when our topic is everyone on at your library. Everyone on is a new campaign going on, trying to raise awareness of digital literacy and places that consumers can go to get training. And they're pushing libraries as one of those locations as well to get free training on how to do anything online, anything on a computer. So we're gonna have some staff here from the library commission talking about what's available from there and how you can get your library promoted for doing training if that is something that you do at your library. So sign up and join us for that next week. If you are a Facebook user and Compass Live is on Facebook, we have a Facebook page. So whenever we have a new session coming up, we post it on here, I send reminders of when, like here's the one I just did through this morning that you can log in right now on the fly to see our show. When the recordings are ready, I post up here as well. So if you are a big Facebook user and you wanna follow what we're doing on Facebook, you can go ahead and follow us there. Other than that, thank you very much for attending and we will see you next week. Bye bye. Bye.