 All right, there we go. Go ahead, Holly, if you want to start. OK, we'll get started. Welcome to all of you to join us. Sorry for the hiccup in the beginning. This is the second of two presentations that the Library Commission is offering, and they are both recorded for special construction and the modifications recently with the Nebraska Public Service Commission as far as funding, which is going to enable Nebraska Public Libraries to be able to request and receive funding if they're all as followed correctly, and that's what today is all about, what you need to do to bring fiber to your library. I am Holly Wolt, and I'm soon to be retired. December 1 will be out for a week or so. So I will be around for a few days, but later on in the presentation I've asked Sam Shaw to work through the pieces of the process that I'm responsible for this year, well, because I will be retiring. So we'll move on and let Krista and Andrew and hopefully Becca introduce themselves also. Hi, I'm Krista Porter. I am the Library Development Director here at the Nebraska Library Commission. I have also been, since 2009, the state e-rate coordinator for Nebraska Public Libraries. So I handle all of the training, consulting, hand-holding, whatever you all need to make sure you successfully apply for and receive your e-rate funding. Hi, everybody. I'm Andrew Sherman. My nickname is Sherm. I'm a library technology support specialist here at the Commission. The two projects I've been hitting up is our DNS filter offering, which gives you e-rates of the compliance. We provide that at no cost to libraries. And I assist them with getting it enabled at the libraries. As part of that, a lot of times I'm working at the network technology that's in place at the library. So one of the things I'm also doing is what we call technical reviews, the library, where I can work with you to kind of get a snapshot of the current network set up at the library and let you know if it needs to be upgraded and such. What I've run into a lot helping libraries to DNS filter is we've run in some very, very, very old technology that's still in place. Not only does it hinder us from being able to get DNS filter running at the library, but part of this discussion is getting libraries onto high-speed internet. And some of these libraries have networking gear that's sold that even if they got a high-speed connection, the networking equipment they have in the library would be a limiting factor on that speed and performance. So one of the things I'm happy to do if you just want to get a snapshot and some suggestion of what the current state of technology at your library, or if you want to get fiber ready where we just go ahead and go through the work beginning the network upgrade so you're ready for that high-speed connection when it gets dropped at the library. I can assist with that. Do we have? I don't see Becca. Yeah, no. OK. We can keep. I think we'll continue to move on through. Yeah, so we'll be joining us. We have Becca Kingery. She's from the CEO's office at Nebraska and she handles their network Nebraska. And she'll, she's later on in the presentation, so that's OK. She'll join us as soon as she is ready. And yeah, I'm sorry. There we go. Sure. So just this is a little bit dated, but I took advantage of the fact that I'm just about out of here so nobody can remove me for putting this cute little picture in. But this is a little bit of an overview. And it's supposed to relax you and make you want to enjoy and just absorb the information and not have your pinout writing lots of things down. Just listen to our presenters and get an overview of special construction. So Eloise, my almost two-year-old granddaughter, has a lot of responsibility for this presentation. As I was putting it together, I'm always looking forward as, and we know that fiber is very important, but we know that fiber is just basically an infrastructure that will just open up the doors for libraries and your community with the fiber into your community will be opening all kinds of opportunities for you. So my little granddaughter has a, I think it's about half as tall as her, a Buzz Lightyear doll. And she's always loved it since you could hardly even hold it. So she of course wanted to be for Halloween Buzz Lightyear. So I took a spin off of that as far as his famous quote. And today we're just talking about to fiber and beyond. And really we're talking about the fundamental infrastructure, but I just want to kind of highlight a few things. So we know that E-Rate, as I said, is the foundation for free fiber to your library. Right now we have this opportunity for us that was just opened up in the fall of October of 2023. So Kristen will go over this quite a bit more of the information about this, but it's the E-Rate program, which isn't ministered by USAC under the direction of the FCC. And I did not look to see, and Kristen, did you happen to know and recognize how many people participating maybe are already using E-Rate? If you didn't, that's fine. Oh, who's registered today? No, I didn't check, yeah. Yeah, I did for the last session. But so some of this for you may be a bit of a repeat if you're already working with E-Rate, but there are some differences related to special construction. So we want to pay attention to those as they are part of the presentation. So we all hear about here at the library commission, oh, I did E-Rate when it was paper. Well, we know now that most things are online. So the E-Rate Productivity Center counter-epic is what is used by libraries and schools who are interested in working with the E-Rate program. That's how they access E-Rate. And Kristen, again, will be talking about that. And so the big focus will be the E-Rate category one special construction for today for you because it will detail out the information of how again, you were going to be able to apply for Fiber to your library for free. Two things that are included with special construction that are unique to that portion of applying for funding through E-Rate, the FCC are the request for proposal which goes, you apply for and include in your Epic submission for the special construction. And then for our state, the Nebraska Public Service Commission has a grant application of matching funds which the last three years has been administered with them matching 10% of whatever your cost is for your funding. So that would be your discount funding for E-Rate. Chris will go over this plus 10% that they would match. And then with their match, the federal government matched another 10%, probably confusing right now. But what the big deal is here is the Nebraska Public Service Commission has made a decision. They will cover whatever cost your E-Rate funding doesn't cover for you to have Fiber free to your library. And we'll also be visiting with Becca King-Grey who is for the OCIO with the state and Network Nebraska has for many years been offering a backbone of support for libraries, E-Rate interested in E-Rate special construction also. You can apply, it's like another option for you besides what we call the library lead special construction which means that you are doing most of the work. Network Nebraska has some unique features that it offers and we want to be sure that we put that opportunity to all libraries as well. You end up with the same thing, Fiber to your library. And I will mention, Becca is here with us now. She's joined in. Great, well, maybe she's not on a video yet. So... Yeah, Becca, anytime you want to, if you want to share your camera and unmute yourself to say hi, whichever, whenever you like. Yeah. Hi guys, let's see. Here you are. Yeah, here I am. There it is. Good morning. Good morning. We threw her into the fire today and I apologize if... But we're glad to have you on board and be the direct link and the library directors can put a face with the individual who's responsible for their questions related to network Nebraska. So what we want to do for, you know, free for the library with special construction and it's all about preparing your libraries for network infrastructure to be for a secure, reliable, that's secure and reliable and addresses privacy protection for patrons. It becomes, and this is the part about the fiber and beyond, basically it becomes a resource having fiber for digital equity ensuring that all the residents in your community have technology resources to fully participate in society. And that's the big thing. That's where we're at. Thank you. Okay. All right, so special, so what is special construction? Which is what we're talking about here today. Special construction, this is all of the actual physical construction that needs to be done to run new fiber to a school or library. And this is as related as it relates to E-Rate and this special construction fiber funding that you can get. So this is only for libraries in schools that do not have fiber already. Most of our schools already have it, I believe. So they would not be as interested in this, but for our libraries, many, many of them we know from your public library surveys and other reaching out we have done to you, do not have the fiber. So special construction is any of the one-time costs for running new fiber from wherever it is in your community, nearby your community to your library building for the first time. So this is actual construction, digging trenches, running the fiber, like in this photo we have here, any planning and project management, engineering design, anything that needs to be done, whatever other costs are involved in this, getting this fiber to the library building. And in the E-Rate world, for those of you that do do it, you know the E-Rate funding year runs from July 1st of every year to June 30th of the next year, meaning anything that's done in that time period is what you get funding for. Right now is when you start applying for next summer, next year's funding year. However, for special construction purposes, E-Rate does know, understand that you can't always schedule your construction during just that time, so they do allow you to do it at least six months before the funding year starts. So you'd receive the new fiber connection would start on July 1st. That would be when you actually have the faster speed, but you can do the construction to get that all set up, hooked up, and done anywhere up to the January 1st of that year. So even though the funding year for receiving the actual internet connection starts on July 1st, all of this construction can be done ahead of time and you get the discount for the construction as well. As Holly mentioned, you use the E-Rate Productivity Center Epic is what it's called to log in to your E-Rate account and apply for all of these services. Now, today we are going to do a kind of quickie version of telling you about the E-Rate and how to do it. This is not gonna be detailed step by step of all the different forms. I have E-Rate workshops I'm doing next week and the week after and the dates and everything at the end of this presentation, but will be my full three hour long workshops with a much more in-depth into the whole E-Rate process. Today is we're gonna do an overview of that just to get you the idea. And then also I should mention this when Holly was talking about the slides and things that are on here, these slides will be available to you afterwards with a recording of today's webinar as well. So don't worry about, as she said, trying to scribble down and write everything you see on the screen, you will have these slides in your hands yourself to look over afterwards. So Epic, this is one stop shopping for everything E-Rate. You can submit your forms, send the RFPs that you need to do, check on the status. You'll get notifications from USAC asking you questions from their program integrity assurance department, that's PIA. Anything you need to do is all done within the Epic system. They do recommend that you use Chrome or Firefox, other browsers, they do not guarantee that they will work successfully, correctly. And that's URL there to go to the main page, USAC.org slash E-Rate. To log into the account for the first time, if you have never used E-Rate before, you will contact, you will call USAC and say, I am a new library, I want to do E-Rate, and they will set up an account for the library, a profile for the library, and then one individual will be designated as the account administrator. Generally here in our Nebraska libraries who have small staff, it's the library director, but you can designate whoever you want to be that, but they will be responsible for making sure everything is up to date and correct in the account and for submitting all of the forms and responding to any questions and doing everything that needs to be done. There are, you can have additional users in your account if you want to, if you have other people that you want to help you do your E-Rate, they can have different levels of access. Full access can have ability to do everything, submit the forms, certify the forms, complete them, update info, do everything. Partial, you can update things and complete forms, but you can't do that final submitting, that would be only the person who's authorized to do that. And then you can give some people just the access to view things and see what's in there. Most of our libraries just have a single person and they have full access to everything and they're in charge of all of it. So this is just a screenshot of the main page for E-Rate that you'd go to when you go to usap.org slash E-Rate and there are, you can see, I've got two buttons here marked with an arrow to sign in, they both go the same place, this is the main E-Rate page and then that menu at the top always floats around whenever you're anywhere on the USAC website. So you can click on either one of those to log into the system and then whenever you log in, this is the first screen that will come up that tells you that the very first time you use E-Rate, use Epic, you do have to do something, you have to create your password. USAC will set you up with the account and you log in using your email address that you've provided them, but you have to then create your own password. And this is only the very first time that you do this, you have to go through this forgot password process. This is something I'm sure, I know I've done it, many of you have done in the past, if you've forgotten what your password is for something, you have to go in and do it, they have a feature for that here as well. Every 90 days or so you also have to reset your passwords so it will prompt you to do that when it's necessary. This is a page that can be confusing for libraries because you always get this screen whenever you log in, but you only have to do the forgot password the very first time that you've used the system. So if you've ever used the system before, if you've been in there at all, you just ignore all of these instructions and just click continue and log in with your email address and the password that you know you've created. But we're gonna go through this as if it was your very first time using it because we're gonna hopefully have some new libraries joining in. So the first time you would just hit continue and then since you don't have a password yet, if you're brand new, you hit click forgot password, you would then, you put in your email address, your email address is your username and that will then send you the email to use to click on to reset your password. You've done this before with other websites, I'm sure. I know I am. And this is the email you get, you get a link that's good for one hour. You click on that and it brings you to the e-rate page where you can then create whatever your password is that you wanted to do. Then when you go back to log in, you ignore that forgot password thing because you already did it, click continue and then enter your username and password. You have to click the little box to accept the terms and conditions to use this system and then click sign in. So that whole forgot password thing is only one time. You don't have to do it every single time. Once you've done this once, every time you come to this screen, that's why I put that big red X there, you just ignore that. I feel they need to make this more clear. It's only for the first time because I have too many libraries and this is a tip that tell me, oh, every time I go to log in, I do a new forgot password thing. No, no, no, that's only for the first time but it's not very, I think it needs to be bold. So after you do put in your username and password and go to sign in, then they do have what they call multi-factor authentication. So this is a second step that you have to do every time you log into the system where you put your email address, you send it, they send you a code, a six-digit code. You've probably done this with other programs as well. They either send it to your email, sometimes to your phone. And so this is the email that will be sent that says one time verification code, only good for 10 minutes, six-digit number, copy that and put it into the inter-pass code. This email here that you get, it's only, like I said, every time I get one of these, and this is a tip too that I recommend after you've used that code, go back and immediately delete this email from your email inbox. You'll never be able to use this code again. There's gonna be a new one every time you log into Epic. I've had some people who have used an old code thinking, well, I'll just try a different one and see if that one works. No, no, no, they expire. So what I do is as soon as I've used this, pop right back over, delete, and then it's not even floating around in my email. Let you enter your passcode, you verify yourself, and then you are into the system. There are two sections here that you'll see. There's the e-rate productivity center and then the emergency connectivity fund. The emergency connectivity fund is the special funds that were in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. That fund is no longer available to apply for, but libraries are still wrapping up in voicing and funding and whatnot. So don't worry about that. You're gonna click on the e-rate productivity center. Epic. And this is your landing page. Now, I know this is hard to see. I just wanna show you the whole thing and we're gonna zoom into a few parts of here and just to show you quickly important things on this page. Right in the middle here, you have when you zoom in your entity information, this is your library is the entity, that's what it's called. And this entity number here is something that you'd want to note. This is your entity number, also called your build entity number, or Ben, B-E-N for an abbreviation. And that is kind of like a social security number, but for the library, for e-rate purposes, it's assigned to the library and it always sticks with that library throughout its life of doing e-rate. It is something that USAC will ask you about. They'll reference it on forms and things that something to be aware of is what is your library's Ben or entity number. That's always right there, right on the main screen of your landing page. Right below that is a search for FCC forms and post-commitment requests. This is where you can look up any e-rate forms that you have submitted. I always had people asking, well, I don't know what we did last year. Can you tell us what we did or what should I put on this year? So I'm just doing the same thing. All of your previous forms are here, going back just to 2016. That's when we first started using Epic. But you can look it up by the form number and the year and then you'll get some results down there of what's in the system. If you have a, the status over here is what to look at to see where the form is in the process. Certified means it's done and submitted and USACs received it. And complete is a form that you started but haven't finished. You're in the middle of working on it potentially. So that's how you'll know if you've actually submitted a form, which is the final one. That's also a question I get is, how do we know if we did a form this year? Well, if you're not, can't remember, don't know. This is where you can look as well. All right, so right now we are in what is called also the Epic Administrative Window. This is where you can update any profile information in the E-Rate Productivity Center if you need to make changes to people who's in, users in the system, library address, square footage of your library, all this basic information in the system. There's a certain amount of time where they allow you to go in and make these changes. It does then get locked down right before the 471. That's a second form in the E-Rate Process before that form is available. And we're gonna get into the different forms in just a minute here. That usually happens sometime in January of the next year. So right now, I'm gonna just opened last month on October 24th. So right now anyone who has an Epic account, I will want you to go in and double check your info. Log in and make sure the library info, the profile info, the user information is all correct for your library so that when you do actually start submitting forms and applying for things, everything is correct. Like I said, this filing window or this administrative window will close sometime in January, most likely right before that second E-Rate form becomes available. The reason they do this every year is because they do need to, schools do update their student counts in here for discount information. And they wanna make sure that you have a chance to have everything up to date in the system. And what you can change and fix is the library's name, the address, mailing address, your contact information, any users that you need to add or remove, whatever you're doing, all of that information. Something very important that you should make sure you update is the square footage of your library building, how much square feet does your building entail? This is what is used to calculate your category two E-Rate funding, which is for getting discounts on equipment that you might need to update in your library for your internet network, routers, servers, switches, those kind of things. You wanna make sure that is correct. I know we have lots of libraries doing construction or additions and that will vary. And you wanna make sure that that is correct before you start submitting any of your E-Rate forms. To make these changes, when you're on your applicant landing page in the upper right there, there is a Manage Organizations link. Click on that. You select your library. Check the box in front of it and then click Manage Organization. And then here you can see if you needed to change the library's address. Latitude and Logitude is not something you need, it's just something that's in this system. Whether you're urban or rural, most of our libraries in Nebraska are rural, but you can check that. Just scroll down below that. Other contact information you wanna put in, you can add that. Library information. You wanna look at this and make sure that you are a public library if that's what you are. And even if you are just a single location, mark that you are the main branch. Even though you don't have branches potentially, you still need to be marked as that for to make the system work correctly with your library. So make sure you're marked as the type of library you are, most likely public and then main branch. If you have a bookmobile or kiosk, you can mark those two. And then below that is where the square footage is for the category two budget calculation. This is all of the square feet that inside the library wall. So all the floors, you might have somewhere this in your data and your statistics, I might need to look up blueprints, whatever, but however many square feet the library building has. Also here you'll see it shows what is the school district associated with your library. That is because the school district, student count numbers is what is used to calculate the discount you receive from e-rate. It is based on the number of children, students that are eligible for the school lunch program, the free and reduced lunch program. And that comes from your school district that your library is physically located in. And so that needs to be in here as well. So check that too and make sure it's the right school district for where your library physically sits. So the e-rate forms. And if anybody has any questions, confusion, comments, don't forget, type in the question section. I'll answer as you type them in there. So there are four e-rate forms in the whole e-rate process. Three of the four everyone does. The fourth one will depend. And we're gonna go through each of these forms one at a time. Like I said, it's an overview of how the process works. And so if you want to do e-rate special construction this year or any future year, you have to go through these steps in the e-rate program just as if you're just gonna do your regular e-rate application. You need to do this to receive the special construction, do the special construction and receive the matching funds from the public service commission. There we go. So the first form in the e-rate process is called the form 470. This is where you describe and request your services. This is where you're going to put it in and say, I'm looking for some company, someone to run fiber to our library and then to provide us with that monthly fiber connection. I might also need to buy a new router and a switch because ours are old. All of that you put into your 470. This officially opens a competitive bidding process. So you do need to be aware of competitive bidding rules and treating everyone fairly as your potential vendors are sending you their quotes, their bids for whatever you're gonna do, whatever you want to have done. To start your 470, right up here in the upper right of your landing pages, all of the different links to the forms. So your 470 is right there. And like I said, we're not gonna go through every step of it, but I'm just showing you when you click on that, it just brings up where you can start working on the form and filling in everything you want to need to include. Across the top of the form, there is a blue bar here that shows as you're going through each step in the form so you can see where you are in the process. Putting in the request for what service you want, if you have a technical contact, your procurement info, reviewing and signing it. As I said, I have E-rate workshops coming up next week and the week after that you can attend to see the full step-by-step how to do a 470. But for our purposes today, I'm gonna jump just to show you this is also where you will upload and include that RFP. It's a request for proposal. It's something that Holly will help you with and she's gonna show you that in a little bit here. This explains everything you're wanting to have done for Fiber Special Construction. You're gonna need to attach this document to your 470 when you first submit it. And there's a step here where you would do that and you would say, yes, I do have an RFP and then you can click this button to upload and go and find it on your computer or click and drag the file here. So Holly has a template that you would fill out working with her and then you would add that after you've updated it to have your library's specific info then this is where you would include it in your 470. After you submit your 470, you get a receipt notification summarizing what was in it. You can double check it and make corrections if you need to. If there's some really glaring errors, we can always do a new 470. It's okay to do a new one and then just ignore the first one. The 470 or the sheet notification also gives you what is called your allowable contract date. After you submit a form 470, you are required by FCC rules to wait 28 days before you make your decision about which service provider you're gonna go with, what service you're going to get and then go on to the second step in the E-rate process. On this notification, it will be in your newsfeed and it will be emailed to you. There gives you the allowable contract date. So you have that right there. What's also nice about this is when you have reached that date, the system will send you an email nudging you and saying, hey, you've reached your contract date now you can go on to the second step in the process. But, oh, this is one thing to be very, very careful of. Do not jump the gun on waiting those 28 days. If you do that, you have broken the E-rate rules and you will not get your E-rate, the E-rate will not be approved. So after you have reached those 28 days and you've received quotes from vendors, possibly multiple ones, then you do your form 471, the second form of the process. This is where you tell USAC who you've chosen, what the service is gonna be, how much it's gonna cost. And this is a point where you can work with your service provider to determine what's gonna go into this form, what you ended up deciding on. Be sure that your 470 and 471 must match. Whatever you've asked, whatever you say on your 471 that you're receiving, the service, the construction, whatever has to have been asked for in the 470. You can't show up with the 471 and say, oh, now we wanna do construction, so I'm gonna ask for it here. You have to have requested it in the first form. So make sure your 470 can have more than what you end up with. I think of it as a wish list. Here's all the things I'd like to have, but then this is what we ended up with. I want fiber, I want broadband, I want need this equipment, I need the construction done, but in the end you don't need the construction or you don't need the equipment, it's okay. But make sure everything that's on the 471 is definitely on your 470. And they said you will work with your service provider on the 471. You should not be working with a service provider on the 470, the first form. That would be giving one particular service provider and preference over the other ones. They can't be involved in figuring that out. That's why you have us at the commission or Becca, Holly, Sherm, to help you figure out what goes into your 470. We help you work out that. Then on the 471, then you can work with the provider and say, okay, now we've picked you. What do we need to actually ask where to make sure we get the right discount? And as I said, you gotta wait those 28 days through the 471. You have to either sign a contract or agreement of some sort with your service provider. And you have to wait for the application filing window. This is another window, just like the administrative window updating your info. There's only a certain period of time, usually three months-ish in the beginning of a year when you are allowed to submit a 471. It's not even able to be used until that time. Usually it opens in January and goes through March. The specific dates are not announced yet. They usually, USAC usually announced them sometime in December. So look for that those dates so you know when you can actually do the 471. When these dates are announced, this also gives you, is another question I get a lot is, what is the deadline to submit a 470? What is the deadline to start the process? Officially for e-rate purposes in general, it's 28 days before the close of the filing window. So you've gotta have at least 28 days available out there. For special construction purposes, we want you to do things earlier than that. So not waiting till March or something. You need to start doing that now. But officially you do have until that time. And like I said, all those dates once they're announced, then we'll know specific dates and deadlines for things. Here's that email I said that you will receive that when your allowable contract date has been reached. So you don't even have to, it's good to remember, but you don't have to USAC will let you know, hey, now you can go ahead and do your 471. And you also get a notice in your news section within your Epic account as well. Your 471 is also button up at the top of the page there. Click on that just like the 470. And like I said, we're not gonna go through step-by-step all these forms. This is just an overview, but that's where you would find it and go in and fill in all that information. So 470 or 471 have a lot of the same things. You also get our seat acknowledgement. You can make some changes or corrections if you need to. If it's been, you did really made major errors, that's okay. You can just start a whole new 471, it's okay. After you've submitted your 471, the second form, that's when you sit back and wait. This is when a USAC program integrity assurance department starts reviewing your application. They'll look to make sure everything's correct on it, that you're following all the rules. They may reach out to you with questions. If you do receive any e-mail from them, you need to answer them. If you are unassure about what the question is or what they're asking for, you can reach out to me and I will help you answer. I do this all the time. I translate for USAC and let you know exactly what they're asking for. You definitely wanna make sure you answer any questions that you may receive from them. And this process can go on for months. You may submit your 471 in January and you may not hear back from USAC until June, July, August, September, October, even into the funding year. There's just so many applications that have to go through it, but that's okay. No matter when they get back to you with their funding commitment decision letter, you do get your discount going back to the beginning of the funding year, July 1st. So don't panic if you don't hear by July 1st. That's okay, you still get your full discount. They just have to get to everyone's applications. When they have made a decision, you will get an e-mail that your funding commitment decision has been made and you will have to look at it, see if it's been approved or not. You can file an appeal if you disagree. Pay attention to if you've done a category one and a category two application, category one for internet, category two for equipment, you may receive more than one e-mail and decision letter, depending on how they're doing the review. And so this is just the e-mail you will get. So look for an e-mail that says subject, USAC funding commitment decision letter is available. The e-mail just says, here it is, and there's attachments. If you look up here, there's a spreadsheet and a PDF that is the actual letter itself. So you've got to look at the letter, the PDF to see if you have been approved. And here this one says total committed, how much, and then you know that you have been approved. Yay, you got your e-rate funding. However, yes, sort of. This is where some libraries lose it in the process. They think, yay, we got approved, I'm good, I did it all, I can sit back and relax. Nope, there's still one more form at least that you have to do. What this really means is they have set aside funding for you. They're saying it's been approved, you can have it, but you have to let us know that you still want it. Things may change from when you submit an application in January and get approved in August or September. So they do say you've got to let us know that you actually want this money and that is what you do your third form in the process, the 486. So this is a notify them that services have started and that you do want to be receiving at your discount. What's great about the 46 is that it is the easiest form in the whole process because everything you need to complete is already in the system and auto fills. All you've got to do is go in and create the form. Say yes, yes, yes, add all this info is already in there and poof, it's in there from your 470 and your 471 and you just have to then submit it. It is also available from the menu at the top of the page there form 46 and you just go through and do that one. It takes five minutes. For all of these forms, if you do need help with submitting them, that's what I'm here for to help you with. I can help you over the phone. I do go to webinar sessions like this with libraries where we will screen share and so I can see what's on your screen and guide you through submitting the form. So if you want help with that, just reach out to me. There's a deadline for submitting the 486. It is 120 days after your service start July 1st or after when you receive your funding letter if that's after July 1st. So service start date 20 days, 120 days or if your letters is later 120 days. If you got your funding commit letter before July 1st, the deadline's the end of October, October 29th. This letter is sent to both you and your service provider. And this is then what initiates the service provider knowing that you've been approved and then starting to give your discounts, starting working with you on how you wanna receive your discounts. And the service provider can't start doing the discounting until they get that form is submitted by you. So the last form in the E-Rate process is the invoicing forms. And there's two different ones depending on how you're gonna receive your discount. If your service provider is just gonna automatically give you discounts on your bills, then they submit what's called the 474, the spy form for a service provider invoice. They submit that to USAC, telling USAC, we are gonna be discounting this library this much. Please reimburse us for that amount. Your service provider is always paid in full. It's just part from you, part from USAC. Or you can do what is called the bear form, the bill entity applicant reimbursement form, that's of course 72, where you pay all the bills in full and then at the end of the year, after the funding year's over, then you request reimbursement from USAC for all of that money. So in this case, you'd have to be able to pay everything in full, get reimbursed. If you do the spy, you don't have to worry about anything. You're just bills are automatically discounted when they come to you from your service provider. Recommend if you can do this one, the service provider discounting, it's much easier for you onto the library because you don't have to do anything worrying about any other forms. It also has a deadline to do your bear form 120 days after the last end of the service funding year, June 30th, or same thing, your form 46 notification list. And this is a direct reimbursement from USAC. It is electronic deposit, direct deposit into whatever bank account you tell, you rate that you want it to go into. It's your checks or send you anything like that. It's just a direct deposit. Recently, there was an E-rate system consolidation that was done, which is great. All your forms, some of your forms were kind of in you in Epic, but you still had to pop out to a different system called the legacy system. That is no longer the case. Now everything is in Epic. Yay, finally, years since they've been waiting for this. There was a cut over at the beginning of this month, but now that one bear form used to have to kind of go somewhere else. Now everything is just right there in Epic for you. If you want to learn more about that, there is a link there for the system consolidation info, if you really want to read into it. Basically, it just means everything is so much easier. It really is one stop shopping for E-rate. And this is just to summarize up what the E-rate process, the basic E-rate process, you do 470 to open up the bidding process, the 471 to choose your service provider after waiting 20 days, the 486 to start your, tell you SAC, you want the funding, and then depending on how you want to get your discount, the 474, if your service provider is going to give you discounts on your bills, they submit that. The 472, if you're paying in full and you're getting a reimbursement ask for, you submit that. All right, so that is my quick overview of the E-rate process. As I said, that was a very high level, quicky version. I know there's a lot of information. If you have any questions, anything you want to know about it right now, type into the questions section of your go to webinar interface. If you anything I wasn't clear about or anything you want to know about, excuse me, more, let me know and I can answer whatever questions you have right now. As I said, look for, sign up for the longer workshops if you really want the detailed step-by-step to do all of these forms. I can't see if you're typing, so I should wait a minute here and see if anyone does type in any questions. Someone does want to know, how do I know if I have an Epic account or not? That's a good question. If you're not sure, reach out to me and I can check on that. We have found out that some libraries who thought they didn't have one and they're like, oh, I need to do this for the first time. Sometime like 15 years ago, somebody set one up and there is actually a library account out there, but nobody ever used it in E-Rate. So if you're not sure, reach out to me and we can look up and find out if you've got an account or not. We have all that information for you. All right, I don't know if Holly, Becker, are you sure you want to add anything or according to our slides, we have a break time if we want to go to that or not. Or if you want to go to the template, whatever. Oh no, I think probably we can take a 10 minute break. I don't have anything to add but I just want to thank you for doing that because it might seem pretty confusing to you but I think what I hear from library directors who have never done E-Rate before and then they do it for the first time, there might be a little overwhelm but that's why Christ is here and that's why we really want you to understand for all E-Rate, but especially for special construction, we are here to help you. And even if you might have done- Yeah, yeah, applied for E-Rate in the past and you say, well, I think I can do it. If you find yourself kind of in a bind, you're not quite sure about this, what to do with the special construction, contact Christa. Christa, do you have a preference for email or a phone call or just get a hold of it? An email or if you call, we have voicemail here and I get it and also sent to my voicemails, get sent to my email account. So either way, I get the contact from them. Okay, great. If you get my voicemail, I just call or email you back, no problem. One question I get a lot from the libraries when we're talking about E-Rate is how they know what their match is going to be. Yes, the discount. That is something we can look up as well. Your discount is, as I said, it's based on the school lunch numbers for your school district combined with whether you're urban or rural. Most libraries in Nebraska fall between 60 and 80% discount rate. So at a minimum, you're probably gonna get at least 50% off. But that is, well, that is something you can calculate yourself if you want to. We do, I do have links on the Art Library Commission E-Rate website to the Department of Education school lunch numbers that you can look up there. And then you can look at this and also have a link to what is called the discount matrix from the E-Rate website where you can then find out because we have this percentage of students. This is our discount rate. I've linked all of that if you want to figure out that yourself or if you don't just ask me and I will look it up and do the math and let you know right away what, how much your discount is. I think we should just go ahead and take a 10 minute break. Maybe until 10.35, come on back. Is that kind of more or less give a little bit of a break we're slightly ahead of schedule but that gives us more time at the end if for questions, which is great too. Right. Yeah, so yeah, so if you have questions type in whenever you're thinking of them or if there's something you were wondering about before this workshop started you can type in the questions too and we'll make sure we cover whatever it is you were wondering about or worried about or are thinking about. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, we'll pause here, get up stretch get you know, hit your restroom get a drink, whatever you need to do and we'll be back at 10.35 central time. I don't know where everybody is today. Hello, we are back. My clock says 10.35. Sounds good. All right. I think you're up Holly. Sure. So right now what I'd like to just cover are the details or requirements for filing special construction which I talked about in the overview which are the requests for proposal or the RFP and the Nebraska Public Service Commission's offering of the matching grant program. And that is a piece of if you are making a decision to use e-rate to file for category one what we call special construction. And so let's start by going to look at the RFP. I think both of these sections I look at it more of that I'm addressing are more a lot of the conversations that I've had with library directors related to these responsibilities that have to be taken care of before you can file. So the example of the RFP document I have this here. This is just the basically the first page cover page for it. I want you to know that this is not a 50 page legally. Well, it's legally, well, it's not legally binding but at least it's information that you're gonna provide but it definitely is should be considered user friendly something that you can work with. It's a template which means there's not a lot of information you need to fill in with it. So I think at the most it might take you 20 minutes to read the first time through. I think it's 26 or 27 pages long. It's a lot of information. I would read it. This is how I would approach it. I would look through it, read it. Maybe not thoroughly word for word but get an understanding of what the content is and then come back and start to just work your way through it. So basically the RFP here is it's providing a standardized response from providers who are interested in bringing fiber to your library. So we have to in order to do a comparison which is of course required after the 28 days for the bidding process to be open. You need to be able to compare the bids that come in. And so the RFP gives you a platform where you have standardized responses and it's an opportunity for you as a library to put in your identifying specific information and requirements. Now for this RFP, much of that might come from what use access you have to do. And there are parts of that that are in there but it can also be information specifically like, where do you want the fiber to come into your building? And that's not a USAC requirement but that would be something you would want to do. Let's say, an example would be, hey, I want to, I actually have another area where I'd rather be having my connectivity to Fiverr DSL whatever and you can specify that in there. So the other piece of it, the main pieces is the scope of services that you're asking for from those who are interested in bidding. And so you really, you have a identification for that too. The front page here, this is just a picture of a library on the front who applied previous years successfully to get fiber. And then a calendar of activities. And this is again, just the front page, I'm just showing you some examples of the RFP. We will include an attachment of the RFP with the recording and the slides when they are sent to you. And so you'll be able to see it then. I've highlighted what needs to be changed in red. And then you can, as you go through, you can in a Word document format is what it comes to you in. You could do a find and replace, very simple. Will you just move forward a little bit? So again, here is another example and this is identifying what the scope of service is for the project. And this is very important. This is pretty much laid out. This follows what the USAC is asking us to do. It says the library in Nebraska is requesting proposals for itemized special construction to achieve high-speed internet access for the library listed in this RFP. So remember that Krista mentioned that early on with special construction. You need to identify the provider, the bidder must provide you with the construction of the network facilities, examples, what they're going to do, their design and engineering and project management have to be included in here. And so this is important. If it's not, then the bid is not to be used. It has to be discounted. So these are important. This first paragraph is very important. And it's also talking about one of the other, not benchmark, but one of the other requirements are that you have to have a speed of 100 megabits per second. Well, that's pretty interesting because some of the new libraries are at 10. So you're talking for 10 fold increase. I don't want you to be alarmed by that because one thing is we have found that libraries who've gotten fiber sometimes they're at that speed, they were at 10 before and they're paying less for their fiber. That's not always the case, but don't let that be a barrier for you thinking that, well, I can't afford the month of recurring cost even with e-rate. So this is where I talk about we're going fishing. This is the RFP is going out and going fishing. We're going to find out what's out there. Sometimes we visit with our tech support person from the local ISP that's giving us DSL or whatever it is and you ask them, of course you would because they're your contact. And you say, hey, I want them to know, what do you think it would cost to bring fiber to the library? Well, they can probably give you a response and they may be accurate, but really what we need to do is have this go to the company, the head honchos, because sometimes they have plans that they may be willing to be encouraged to provide a better discount. And at this point you're at 100% covered so it doesn't matter. But anyway, that they may be looking at your monthly recurring costs and thinking, well, maybe we'll give them a break there and we'll look more appealing. But as I think, I don't know, we didn't mention this yet, but basically for a special construction, what USAC is looking for is they want you to select the bid with cost as your number one focus. And so they'll still want to do that even if you don't have to pay anything. So anyway, so here's the page, it talks a little bit about the coverage. So July 1, 2024 is when the fiber is to be lit. There are circumstances and Krista would help you with that that can happen and it's okay, but yeah, she would work through it. You have something to say Krista? I didn't know. Oh, no, I was just gonna say this is, you mentioned this is like a phishing expedition, which is true, yes, and absolutely. But something we hadn't mentioned yet, which I think, I think doing these forms and doing this RFP can very be intimidating. And you said you're reaching out, you need to talk to people in your municipality about this, but there's no commitment either. Putting this out does not commit you to having to do it. We've had some libraries that said, yes, we can do the fiber, but then we don't know about the monthly or current costs afterwards, but that's okay. You're finding out what it's going to cost with this. So putting this out there does not commit you to anything. All right. So do it, just do it, just to find out at least what it's going to cost, and then you can plan. And then another scenario with this, and this is kind of loading the front end of the conversation about RFPs, but I know, and we that are working with you for special construction have had the conversations with libraries who say, oh, well, we're getting fiber. My city tells me we're getting fiber, and that's great. But we've found on a number of occasions, for whatever reason, provider city, we don't know that because we're not engaged with that conversation, that they didn't get it. And so because E-Rate is an annual event, we don't know when if they're going to get it, but right now is the window for you to go fishing. Throw it all aside, go fishing, find out what it is, because then you will be able to continue to the process until there is a point where you can say, I'm not interested, and there's no penalty. So make sure that you think about this. I wouldn't do it without consulting your local government, but you need to be able to explain to them, you're just going fishing, and you're really benefiting the community, especially communities, if we're looking at this, working towards special construction where there is no fiber in the community, because you would be bringing fiber in for free to your community, to the library, but from there, there's a lot of other programs happening right now across the country related to rural fiber coming into rural communities that you would benefit, your community would benefit from that as well. So again, and I again, I'm retiring, but Sam Shaw has agreed to take over the responsibility for this. So I will be giving him my mind drain to him about RFPs, and he will be the person you contact. And I was gonna mention this amongst us anyway, I think we are looking forward to having lots of applications for special construction. And I would say that any of us could, oh no, any of the three, Sherm and Krista and Sam might be able to answer questions, definitely Krista for the more technical, but as an overview, but I think we would appreciate that you would ask the specific person, Sherm for infrastructure, Sam for the RFP, and Krista for the E-Rate, and the application for the grant for Nebraska Public Service Commission is very easy. I think any of the three of them could help you out with that with a pinch, but just as an overview working through things, I just thought I'd mention that now too, because if we have 20 or so people, 30 libraries we hope, you know, then we wouldn't have one person being responsible for something that somebody else could be doing for them. So just a comment. So if you see down here at the bottom, you see this bidder has read and agreed to the comply. Throughout this RFP there is in red, there is a place for them to put a signature. And I think that's also very important for you to note, I would send it back to the bidder if they're the acceptable one or if they're the only one and just ask them to put a signature there, because that's your security as you go through and you state things, if they don't comply with it and they didn't sign it, well, then they may not be able to be the winning bid. I think we just can move forward with this. So some of the things that you need to be thinking about are you need to come up with a team that you're going to have review your bids when they come in. And that team, I've suggested that you have three people on that team, one would be you, one could be your library board president or and then the other could be either an educator and technology perhaps in your community or somebody on your local government in the community. But you'd have three people that need to evaluate the bids that come in. You will not be the, you know, you can have influence, I'm sure, and you can give your reasons, but you're required to have a review team. So here is just a sample of a rubric scoring that you could have to utilize to compare bids. And you can come up with your own also and remember that pricing is probably the highest weight that you need to put on all of these, you know, as far as the cost that they're asking for will be the whatever the highest percentage. Sometimes I will also say that there is some possibility of maybe you like your local provider and they're able to give you fiber and the others might be at the national level and you're not really sure about them and maybe, you know, maybe they can offer it a little bit cheaper. There are some things that you can include in your rubric which I think are also very important is let's say you say the ISP that's interested needs to make a local visit, needs to come to the library and see the library. That wouldn't necessarily, you can put that as the highest percentage for your evaluation, but you certainly could include that and that might be the deciding point and I have seen it be that in the past with some of the other bids that I've worked with helping libraries make the decision with their special construction, at least helping them to go through the process of doing that. So most of the times it's like one and maybe two or three bids that you will receive. I've never seen this process and worked with libraries in the last three years where there hasn't been at least one bid. So that's good news. It is possible you may not have a bid and then I think what you can do is if your local provider has Fiber, you can present to them and remind them that you have a bid out there and that may make them take some action too. Isn't that correct, Krista? If it's a local, I think- Yes, if after the 28 days have passed, you haven't heard from someone you wanted to like you knew your provider is available or something that you have a local one, you can then contact them and say, hey, we put this thing out there, we put out this form in this RFP, we really want you to respond. So yes, you've got to wait the 28 days and let them do it. But once you after that 28 days has passed, then you, yeah, if you haven't received something then you can contact them and yeah. So included in the RFP also is the activities that you're going to go through and more detail, it talks about the fact that, well, again, you have your deadline, when can you open up your bids, et cetera, similar to what Krista has just covered in her E-rate portion. There are some of those details built into the RFP which you will see. So anyway, this is just an example of how you might be scoring different bids that come in and then making a decision based on the highest score. And someone does have a question that relates to this, which is actually a good question. What if you have a bid from a provider that has a bad reputation for service in your community? That would fall under that, I may be prior experience section, as part of in this matrix you're talking about, that is definitely taking consideration. Yeah, price has to be the primary factor, as you can see in here, not like, so if you look at the weight you do in these of 40%, the different percentages, price has the biggest highest percentage, correct, but everything else has less. But when you do the math on this afterwards, if you apply points and they get like zero points in prior experience because you know that they're bad, that will put, and you forgot multiple bids, that could put them having less total ranking. And that's definitely something you should take into consideration, you'll make that one of these, these are just examples, you can add other things here. Oh yeah, it's just an example. But that would I think fall under the prior experience or knowledge or something like that. But yeah, take that in consideration and even if they are the cheapest, but you know they have a better reputation, make that one of your important things. Yeah, you can use your knowledge of your situation where you're at. Also within the RFP, there are some rules that are included because they also have to have whoever might respond because this has also happened. There have been responses from ISPs that are not licensed to be in performing fiber installs in Nebraska or may not be in good standing with the Nebraska Public Service Commission. Yeah. I should read through this. One of the things that I put here sometimes is that I feel like local, like they are a local company. If you want them to be local, that would be something like under these others. And you would have to yes, definitely check if you're doing, yeah, you wanna do this fiber special construction and get the state, the matching funds to the Public Service Commission, they have to be working correctly with the Public Service Commission and there are some that are not. Right. And so with this type of information that you may not have it right away. When you open up the bid for a period of time, you look through the bid, all the bids first for compliance. And again, the RFP, which you'll see in its entirety does have an area which talks about compliance with the RFP and you have to let it go if it does not comply. And in many cases, that's fine because it may not be one you're at all interested in. So we'll move forward. And then this is just basically the final sheet and believe it or not, I've had this not be signed too, but this is at the very end that you need to have the whoever's responsible for your contact with the provider who's submitting the bid sign this. But in general, very easy language is what I wanted you to understand. Again, Sam is here to help you. Probably the biggest challenge is working with the activity calendar and putting that together. And as Krista said, you have to meet the date specifications in order to be able to move forward. And so that would be the biggest thing is that. So if we'll just go on forward from here. So the RFP that we're talking about will be the first thing you probably work on besides talking with your community leaders, letting people know that you're interested in this, talking to your library board, because it is submitted with the 470. So that's showing your interest in doing this. And so by doing that, the day you submit it is day one of your 28 days. And all of the information that Krista offered you about how you get a response helping you. There is a piece of that that relates to the scope of work. Sometimes you would get a provider who would respond back with a question what they called the scope of work. It might be something you go, hey, yeah, that's right. I'm not sure if, you know, I may need to include that. Depending on how much of a significant change that is to your RFP you submitted with the 470, it could cause you to have to start all over again. But you have another option there. You have an option where you could extend that 28 days out. And I like to think of going to like 35 or something because it gives you a little flexibility. The RFP goes out and you give anybody who finds, you know, that is interested in taking, bidding on it, they then have five days to ask questions. So let's say one of them asks this question as they call it the bottom and the last bullet down there, the cardinal change, well, then you can say, well, you know, you could resubmit that 470 right away with your RFP updated and be fine. Or let's say it's not quite at that level that you have to change the scope of work. But there is a question that they've asked you because you give them this opportunity, then you need to be able to post that question. And we have a place on our website where you can post that and you can also send that information with Krista's help through as an addendum to the 470 for explanation if they want to find out more information. Okay, so that's just kind of an extra information on how to manage that. Okay, the E-Rate Special Construction, I just want to say on behalf of the Library Commission, we are so thrilled that you all, all of you that responded and offered information related to the NUSF 117 review that was just recently done and modifications were made to the NUSF 117, very much by the fact that libraries offered their own take on what would make it better for them. And in particular, of course, free installation of fiber to the library was the biggest hit of all. They're still looking potentially to do some evaluation, but that was one of the changes as I mentioned earlier, it was 10% that they were offering before. Now it's, they're filling in whatever minus another 10%, which comes from the FCC, it's a little complicated, but basically for your knowledge, you have free fiber coming to your library with their assistance and with E-Rate. These pages here, I included them. It's a lot of information. I thought that it would be nice for you to have, when you have to talk to your local government about this, this is kind of what you wanna be explained and when they say, what do you mean fiber for free to my library? This is the historical perspective of what the matching funds where they came from. And of course it was in the FCC offered it in what they called the second E-Rate modernization order. And that was in 2014. So since 2014, 25 states have adopted this matching fund. We're one of the latter ones. I think we were number 24. So it's being used across the US by states to facilitate bringing fiber to schools and libraries. So this is for you to read through. And then this also, this kind of gives you the perspective of the local or at our state level, the NUSF 117. It was implemented in August of 14th of 2020, which is the second paragraph below and above it's just the most recent information that relates to what happened and why the Public Service Commission made a decision to make this change. So these are links that you can go out to, copy information, send them on to those people, your board, et cetera. So it helps them to understand because it's hard to talk about this and just to be able to be comprehensive without having some aid of resource if you're not intimately engaged in what the process has been. Yeah, and to clarify about this too, so that you're telling them the current info, you wanna talk about the top one here. That's what you're talking about. When it was first initiated, first started up the Nebraska state matching funds, it was a four year program and it was only they would do 10% of what it was. So some libraries had to pay a little to have that fiber run, whatever was above. The state's 10% extra and the E-rate's 10% extra. But as of just last month, it is now the program has no end date. It's gonna go on until they use up all the money or that everybody has fiber, whichever comes first, I guess. They do a new revision evaluation and they decide to do something with it. Yeah, I think that 10% cap. So now if your E-rate discount, for example, if your E-rate discount was anything, 80% or 90%, it was 100% covered. But if your E-rate discount was 70 or below, you still had to pay a little bit. Now the Public Service Commission in Nebraska will cover the full amount above your regular E-rate discount and then E-rate's extra 10%, they will cover whatever is above that to run that new fiber to your library. So starting with this year, the 2024 funding year, running special fiber construction, running new fiber to your library would be completely covered at zero cost to the library. You would now have to still pay for the monthly cost afterwards, but the actual construction now, 100% covered through this particular program. And the link at the bottom is to the grant application itself. So you can look and see what the application is. It probably will take you maybe 15 or 20 minutes. Now, what you will do is you'll complete this once you've made a decision and you've signed a contract with an ISP that you're working with because you'll have to include that information in the grant who you are going to be working with. And that can be submitted also to, with your Form 471 because Form 470, you're submitting your RFP, Form 471, you've made a decision, you've gone fishing and you've caught something you like and you're going to go ahead and submit that as with your 471, which then will go into a, as Chris was saying, a PIA review so they can decide if everything is correct as they want it, as far as e-rate is concerned before they would issue a funding decision letter that they would fund you. So that's the process. Yeah, and something also to mention at this point, still you've signed a contract, but there is still an out because getting approved for e-rate funding is still a risk. It's not a guarantee. So there is a clause that we make your service providers include in that contract that says, this contract is only enacted if the library does receive the e-rate discount, does have their e-rate application approved. So if for some reason, e-rate doesn't approve your application, you don't have to follow through with that contract. You do not have to say, e-rate says no, for whatever reason, we're not approving your discount. So you don't get all this money from e-rate. You do not have to go through with the construction and then come up with the money yourself. We make sure that that clause is in there before you sign it. And before we send that even off to e-rate with the 471 so that if for some reason something goes wrong, you still have a chance to say, all right, we didn't get the e-rate, no construction then through this program because we do not have the money, definitely to pay for it at all. So you still have a chance to back out if needed. And the one thing is, if you happen to look at the promotional video that the library commission put together that was related to, it was a call to action by the library directors. One of them mentioned that what had happened with them was the provider put the fiber into the library before they had received their decision letter and they were panicking because they're like, well, what if we don't get it? Well, understand that they were protected, they had fiber and they were protected too. So it's kind of interesting how that happened. And I would say I'd plug if you've had an opportunity to look at either one of those videos or share them that you should. I think they're at the end of this slideshow. Yeah, okay, so I think I'm done at this point. Oh, nope, I still have. So here's about how you do the application process. So again, for the 470, yeah, for the 470, you have the, 470, that's wrong, is that correct? I'm sorry, library Swiss. Yeah, the copy of the FCC form 470. No, it's a 470 one. So I have an error in there. I have an error in there, sorry about that. That should be a one. So basically this is just going through kind of the process of how the timetable. Now this year, because everything was later because the public service commission did not make their decision until the end of October. Nah, maybe there'll be some fudge factor on this. So if you see any materials that say that the grant funding is, you need to file for the grant funding by end of December or whatever, it doesn't, it will not be a problem. They will work with you as long as, and Krista has done this right up until the very end. No, that's correct that they're the copy of the 470, yeah. So this is the application, when you submit, so first you do your 470, then you receive your bids and pick you're gonna go with. Then you apply for the public service commission grant. Their monies and you go include the copy of your 470 to them. And so there's the 470 you do, then you apply to the public service commission. Then once you get your notification of funding from the public service commission, then you would do the 470 long. Yeah, I see, yeah, that's right. You're getting your contract and you include that copy of, there's a letter that the public service commission sends to you that gets submitted with your 471, letting USAC know we've got this matching funds that they know to do their matching funds. So I can write it, but I can't say it. Okay. All right, so anyway, this is a good guideline for you if you need to see the process for the matching funds. So Becca, come on board. Welcome back for me, I guess, not for you guys. Okay, so Network Nebraska, I think you guys heard it discussed earlier in the webinar, but when we think about what Nebraska is, or Network Nebraska, that's most basic explanation. It is a collaborative statewide networking effort under the guidance of the Nebraska Information Technology Commission, and that's technically who I work for, to share telecommunication resources, network services, and applications among eligible participants of which libraries are eligible participants. It is the term used to describe the statewide multi-purpose telecommunications backbone and all of its associated service offerings and support. So we really are primarily a research and education network, so we have connections to almost every single public school in the state, we just have one, we are not, and then a handful of libraries as well as some of the non-public schools in the state, and higher education as well. So we do, like I said, we have a handful of libraries right now that are members of Network Nebraska. You can see them on this list, Fairmount, Gibbon, Grand Island, Lincoln, North Loop, and Omaha, as well as my contact information there. If you have any questions specific to or if you would like more information about what Network Nebraska entails and what some of those services and products that you might benefit from are. And then this is just, we're gonna talk about, I think it's Holly and myself, we're gonna talk about the different options when bidding for fiber. So there's Network Nebraska, but then there's also internet, just ISP internet. Do you wanna go first, Holly, or would you like me to? I can go first. So this is what we call the, I've kind of coined it as the library lead, which means that the library director or an appointed person will be taking responsibility for requesting the special construction or filing it with e-rate. So the form 470 filed by you, the director, if you're the director or you're appointed person. And as Kristen mentioned, I mentioned, you need to include these three things, the construction of the network facilities, the design and engineering and the project management in the bid response that must come back with that. And you've identified that in the RFP template that that's required. And the local libraries we were talking about does the evaluates the bids and may award a contract. You don't have to, as Kristen has mentioned also, to an ISP. So there you are. All right, and then what we offer here at Network Nebraska is essentially Ethernet access. So we would be bidding out for Ethernet transport services, which would, all of the information you've just heard about the 470 and RFP, we take that on for you. So we will file the form 470 on your behalf as a part of our RFP that we're typically submitting for multiple, several different end users. And that is filed in this office where I am with the office of the chief information officer. And for all, on behalf of all public libraries considering the NUSF. So just you would have to reach out to me, let me know that you would like to be included on our special construction RFP. And just like Holly was talking about you, we must include the construction of networks facilities designed in engineering and project management. We have to include those, those would typically be what you would consider your non-recurring charges when you would submit a standard E-rate RFP. And then we would evaluate those bid responses here at the OCIO's office and my team. And we would award contracts to fiber of Ethernet providers. So we handle this as final and best offer. So we do look our only evaluation tool is final price. And you can file for both of these, just understand that too. Because it's possible, again, we have the state making the decision based, and we wanna follow the rules too when we evaluate and award a contract as a library lead. But the state, I think is a little more strong. And it would potentially, you may end up with no state bid even though that they've managed everything and you still could have something come up locally or it could swap the other way. So I would encourage you to let Becca know and just state that you would be interested in having them have the NITC, her office, submit a network Nebraska bid or submit a request. And like when we were talking about some of the contracts earlier, I know we're gonna talk about it on another slide, but there is no obligation to network Nebraska or again, to the contract. We will generate a contract out of this, but you are not obligated to buy off of that contract. So that's why we recommend you do both and then see what you get from both and decide which one's best for you. You wanna go first this time? Sure, why not? So again, we're talking about ethernet access to network Nebraska. So when we consider that non-recurring fiber buildout costs, which were the three categories that we discussed on the last slide, that would be something that would be originally on that as an RFP response. Now, previously up until this year, you would have been required for whatever remainder after that additional 20% would be, but obviously with the changes to the two NUSF 117, the buildout costs are 100% covered, which is amazing and we are so happy about that. There would be a monthly recurring cost for membership, which is you see that these are broken out between the network Nebraska participation fee, typically especially for our smallest libraries, that is at a reduced fee, it's a quarter, like it's 25% of our typical full membership fee. You still get all of the same benefits and services, but it is, we do try to reduce that because we understand that a lot of libraries are typically you are on a tight budget. And then there's also the network Nebraska in a regional transport fees. And that basically just helps to support the backbone that you would be utilizing as a member. And then there would also be the recurring costs for at least 100 megabits per second of service, and that would be that circuit portion of your invoice. So it would be post D rate once we get those responses back. And then there is a separate charge for internet, because we've been talking about Ethernet access, which is basically just the wires that get the internet to your building, you would have to pay for that additional internet access charge. So that's where you would actually pay for the internet to come in. So kind of like when you think about electricity, there's wiring that gets you there, but then you also have to pay for the electricity after the fact. So that's something else that we offer, although I have to be honest, most rural libraries have a very, very, very small actual internet usage. So we have that monitored by the University of Nebraska who we partner with. And it comes back to be a very small amount. It's very rarely is that ever above even five megabits per second. So, and you can see that that's a very small charge for that. Right, very good. And so there are some additional responsibilities that network Nebraska takes over that for you, just this is my comment that you would be potentially I guess the next slide we'll talk about, but basically they're taking care of things that when you come in and turn on the light and you go, oh, the internet isn't working today, that you may not find happening with network Nebraska because they're proactive at monitoring these types of things. But anyway, same here. We've got the 100% of the cost, wonderful, fantastic. You would be paying your monthly recurring cost, which would be through E-rate. And all you have is additional taxes, fees and surcharges and that is very minimal. So, I'll start with the ISP internet access. The overall monthly cost may be lower than network Nebraska. We see the reason why from the previous slide. You can call this a pro or a con, but you deal directly with the service provider and you hear, I think things are improving, but there are still places where you may be a day without internet. You do the E-rate filing. We have a great person on staff who can help you with that, but it may just be something that you just don't feel comfortable with and network Nebraska obviously would be doing that. So everything as far as disruptions, like I mentioned before, is mitigated locally and the SIPA content filtering is required also. Sorry. Then for network Nebraska, like Holly had mentioned, we take on several components of that E-rate responsibility. So we would be filing more than likely that 4.471 on your behalf, as well as, as she mentioned, with the some, when you walk in and the internet's not working, we do have monitoring tools on our network, as well as we do work very closely with the Nebraska University Systems Engineering team. So your connection externally would be monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So like she had mentioned, some of these issues might already be mitigated before you even get into the building. That is part of why there is that added expense to be a member of network Nebraska. SIPA content filtering is encouraged. It will reduce your Ethernet transport costs or at least your, I'm sorry, your internet costs. But when it comes to the Ethernet transport, specifically for the inter-regional transport fees, things like that, because we break those two charges out between actual internet and Ethernet transport, sometimes even if you don't have the SIPA content filtering, we are still able to get part of that discount for you. We also do have an agreement with Zoom, so we can typically get you those, or not typically, we can get you those Zoom pro licensing discounts. So if that's something you wanna bring into your library, it is at an extreme discount right now. But as we've been talking about, because of these added features, the monthly costs may be higher than what your typical internet service provider access might be. Okay. I'll let you go. Sure, thanks. So how do we get there? How do you get on the network Nebraska State RFP? Reach out to me sooner rather than later. We've already submitted our massive traditional e-rate RFP that if you were already a member and you were a library, you were automatically included on that. We separated out. We kind of broke away from what we've done in the past and anything that already had established connection and was just, and like the contracts were expiring, that's already out the door, so we can focus on these special construction locations. But reach out to me as soon as you can. I know some of you already have. I don't know if you're on the call or not, but I know I have heard from some of the libraries. Our contracts that do come out of our special construction RFP are for 48 months. Again, you don't have to purchase off of them and you don't even necessarily have to purchase off of them for 48 months. That's just the way that we negotiate our contracts. We will have that drafted. I mean, I don't have an exact date yet for the RFP. We do anticipate it will actually be in 2023 or it should be because we are the state and we use the State Purchasing Bureau. We have some work on the other ends that has to happen on both before the RFP is out to the public and then after once we get those bid responses back. As we stated before, there is no obligation to purchase off of any of our contracts, nor are you required to be a member or to become a member to be included in our RFP. And we will contract with those providers on your behalf. You also get the terms within our master service agreement. So there are specific rules that we do make the providers follow. And if they violate those rules, then we can have those conversations with the providers on your behalf. So for the ISP with a library lead, you need to decide what bandwidth increments are in your contract terms to be bid or in your RFP to be bid. And that's already included in the appendix or as part of the appendix for the RFP. These are just recommendations. I think when you decide you're going to complete the RFP, I would visit with Sam about that. He may have some additional information for you about what to choose for that. So then you also have your RFP that you put in with your key narrative, which would be your scope and your expectations of the provider as far as to be part of your bid opportunities for the ISP. And for the 470 form, I say it has 2024 in here. That would be better if you were making your 470 application before sometime in 2024. I would say in visiting today on, I would think about maybe if you could do it in a month, that would be wonderful. If you could do it before then, that would be wonderful. But I would give yourself about a month to try to get the RFP completed and be contacting Krista and submitting a form 470. And earlier is better. And then award and sign the contract. That will be somewhat dependent upon when you do that. But again, if you could get it done yet this year, that would be great. But I think that we've had libraries that have moved into the year of January, February. But it's just can be very challenging to try to get everything done. All right. Does anybody have any questions right now about the process, your e-rate forms, Network Nebraska doing it through us directly yourself? Any questions for Becca or Holly about this process we're at here? Well, I don't see anything coming in right this second. I just wanted to remind everyone to do that, yeah. But if you do think of something, we still have, we're not done here yet. So type in your questions whenever you do think of anything. We can always jump back to anything in the presentation. All right. I think we are moving on to Sherm. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about the e-rates that the complaint filtering we offer. We're using a vendor called DNS filter. The NLC is covering all that cost on behalf of our libraries for that service. It's a cloud-based service, it's very easy to deploy. A lot of the libraries I've worked with, if the router is new enough and capable of supporting it, we've been able to do it all remotely. We've been able to log into the router and configure it and set it up and get them up and running on it. One thing I would really encourage you is even if your library is not thinking about participating in e-rate, the cybersecurity benefits of having this in place are significant, very significant. So even if you're not claiming to be an e-rate library, this is something I would still encourage you to take advantage of just so you're providing a really strong first level protection to the library and your customers. In the service, we block adult content, which is sexually explicit material. That's what gives us a surface of compliance. I talked about the cybersecurity benefit already. We also block the sites and the applications used to illegally download movies and music. I've been at two libraries where we received a letter from the Motion Picture Academy or the recording industry saying, hey, we're finding you $10,000 because somebody used your library network to illegally download stuff. That was kind of the old days. They now push that responsibility off to the ISPs. If you have somebody that's regular using the library's network to get pirate movies and music, you will likely get a letter at some point from an ISP that says, if this doesn't stop, we're going to shut you off. We are blocking that as part of this service. So if they're trying to connect to any of the sites, like Pirate Bay, the app that's used generally to do it is called BitTorrent. We block that. So it's just a level of protection there that keeps you from, my experience has been that people are going to do bad things on the internet. They don't want to do it on their network. So it can be traced back to them. So, you know, why not go use the libraries? For specific compliance, all library-owned devices must be filtered. It's just not the public computers. Staff computers have to be filtered also. Again, what's nice about this service is we set it up on the router and any device connecting to the library's network is subject to those terms and will be filtered. If you're a library that's living on devices outside of the library, SIPA compliance is a little gray on that. We do have a client as part of the service that can be downloaded on those devices. So even if the device is being used outside of the library on a different network, it can still be filtered. How we set that up in the routers is there a few different ways. The preferred method is if your library has a static IP address. Libraries that have usually a business class of service, that's something they have or they can get. Libraries that are using a consumer grade of service, they're having what their provider calls a dynamic IP address. So what happens is we give you an IP address, but let's say your router gets reset or they do maintenance at the ISP, that IP address can change without notice. So there's a new technology called dynamic DNS that allows us to enable that on the router. And this is where we run into the need to do router upgrades to libraries. Really out of date routers do not support the DNS. So to get the service in place, we may need to do a router upgrade. And I can tell you right now, if your router's not supporting the DNS, it's due for an upgrade anyway. Probably it's probably end of life. It's not receiving security updates. If it's providing the Wi-Fi, it's very old standards. So that's kind of a nice thing too, is not only are we going to make the DDNS work for DNS filter, but we're gonna give you a much stronger Wi-Fi service and a much more secure router. If you're in our E-Ray library, I've had some libraries that have contacted me that were E-Ray and were supposed to do filtering. They were told they were. When we tested it, they were not, which made them non-compliant. If you haven't tested your filtering or you're not sure if you have filtering in place, if you go on the library's computers, you can go out to an explicit site. If it comes up, you're not filtering. So if you're at xvideos.com, pornhub.com, if that site comes up, it'll be icky, I'm sorry, but then your filtering's not in place. Some libraries may have some filtering products like a Met Nanny or something. Those are only loaded on the public computers. If they're an E-Ray library, they're not compliant. So we have to be filtering on all the computers in the library. So if you think you're filtering, you're not sure, it's very easy to check and test. Again, I apologize. It's gonna be some makey stuff that pops up on the screen, but it's good to know whether you are or not. So this is an example of what the product looks like. This is the block screen that comes up. So if that domain like xvideos.com is on DNS filters, categorized as something we're blocking, this is what's going to come up. I have a little red rectangle drawn around the bypass block. What that allows you to do is we have a password that we provide our libraries using this. If you click on that, put in the password, it will stop the filtering on that computer. So if you have somebody trying to get to a legit site and it's being blocked inadvertently, this will basically let you open it up so they get what they want to. You can shoot me an email. I will open a ticket with DNS filter to let them know we have the main that's misclassified or do we need you some further investigation? If it's something that we need to get open up right away, for example, for some reason, somebody's trying to maybe get in, why run into one where we had a community college that for some reason was blocked and we had a student then. I can pop right into the white list, add that domain and fix it immediately until I can circle around with the DNS filter and get it corrected. I just will warn you if you use the bypass block, you basically shut all filtering off. So while that browser is open and running, it will no longer be doing any filtering of the internet. Filtering in the block screen, we can customize that for every library. So far, everybody that's come on board likes to use just the standard one because then they can basically save the breath, the library commissioner, the bad guys are the ones blocking your site. If you want a specific screen set up for your library with your contact info, we can do that. I can also customize our filtering. So for example, for SIPA compliance, we are only blocking explicit websites. If there's additional filtering you would want to put in place, we can do that. So technical reviews, this is part of what I've been doing is part of the raw for DNS filter is basically the library and what's really worked really good if the library sends me pictures of their network, I'm gonna go ahead and go to the next screen just now. So first thing I like to do is have a library run a speed test and see what their internet speed is and then compare it to the bill they're getting. Some libraries, it may be the town clerk or that's receiving that bill. If you could request a copy of it from them, they'll tell you what kind of service you have and how fast a speed you're paying for. If your speed test isn't matching that pretty close then you're not getting what you pay for. The one thing I will warn you is a Wi-Fi connection is going to be much slower than a wired connection depending on your internet speed. So if you're do the speed test on a Wi-Fi connection you're generally gonna get a much lower result than if you're doing the speed test on a wired connection. So I just wanna put that out there. The modern web these days is all about video whether it's TikTok, Shorts, things like that. Video conferencing. So this is where network speed of your ISP connection really comes into play. If you have people coming in to use the library network to do video conferencing telehealth is huge especially for our rural locations. When you have your internet service if it's a DSL or wireless or cable what we can't refer to that is asynchronous communications. So your download is much slower than your upload. And if you're doing video conferencing this is a big deal because if you've got a really, really slow upload rate that can cause the video that you're trying to put up into the session to buffer and be very slow and drop, audio to drop. Why we really promote the fiber connection is that's what we call an asynchronous connection where your upload and download speed is the same. So if you're getting one gig internet service that means anything going coming down from the net is a gig and anything going up to the net is a gig. Looks gives you fantastic video conferencing video capability. If you have ISP currently you can talk to after your little provider see if faster internet's available, what it costs. We're seeing fiber starting to get out in communities too. So you're still on an old DSL or cable connection it's very possible that your ISP may have fiber and it would just be a matter of contacting them and finding out what it's going to cost to get into the library. The purchase and installation of this new network equipment and if there's tabling or wiring we need to do is category two, Erate Eligible. This is where the match can come into play. So let's say we're gonna spend $500 on new networking equipment and you're a 70% Erate library then you would be responsible for 30% of the cost of that networking equipment. So what's nice is to do the technical view figure that out. So yeah, we need to do an upgrade of the router and the switch and all that. We can figure out what your cost is going to be before you go into the Erate process. So what you may run into is there may be a conflict between your budgeting window for the library and the Erate windows if there is, if you come up with some extra money. Again, we're not talking about a lot of money here. A lot of our smaller libraries we had one that was fiber connected that wasn't getting their speed. We upgraded their network for a cost of about 150 bucks and they jumped from 100 megabit to 400 megabit per second speed. So that's for that. The internal network, your internet's only as good as the internal network that it plugs into. So we can use the Erate category to pay for that. This is just a little diagram that kind of shows you with what you're trying to do with the different zones of basic connectivity. Right now the FCC standard is that if your internet is slower than 24 megabits per second you're underserved. I would say even 24 megabits per second in this day and age is super, super slow. Most of your cable or DSL is gonna offer 60 to 80 fiber. A lot of times your provider will provide different speeds from the fiber. Fiber will run up to one gig. To save so many you may only pay for 250 megabit per second connection or 500 megabit per second connection and that can reduce that month-to-month cost if that's important to you. But with video becoming so prevalent, for content, use on the internet, the faster the better. So when we do the technical review we'll basically do an inventory and assessment of the year at the library. So we have the modem, which is usually what the ISP uses to hand that internet connection off to the network at the library. Firewall, cybersecurity, Network Nebraska does have a requirement that if you're gonna plug another network that a firewall has to be present. Your router is what connects. The router and the modem may be one and the same. It depends on your ISP. Mostly usually there are two separate boxes of the modem and then the modem connects the router and then the router connects to the rest of the network at the library. Switches, those are the ethernet switches for your wired connections. So if your printer and your PCs use a ethernet cable to connect in, they will connect all into the switch which the router has a connection to that provides that internet service through the network. If you're not doing wifi on your router you may be utilizing what we call a WAP or a wifi access point. What's nice about those is they could be matched. So if you have a large building or you have zones in your building that have maybe dead zones where the wifi doesn't work we can use category two funding to pay for cable runs to be put in the library where we can then hang and run access points and we can provide a unified wifi network with good service throughout the LARC, the whole building if we need to. Network cabling, I have run the libraries that their cabling was in place for years and years and years. There's an older standard called cat free and the fastest that cabling can support is 100 megabit. So we may run instances where a library may need to look at having their cabling redone to get the full benefit of a fiber optic connection. If you're okay with your whole library running wifi if you have a fiber optic connection and good wifi service you'll still probably be delivering 200, 300 megabit per second service for your devices, which is fine. If you don't wanna look at having to recable through the building also. The other thing that I see overlooked a lot is having the UPS in place. That's an interacle power supply. If you have all your networking you're plugged into one of those if you get power outages or brownouts or something this will keep your network up and running. This could be a great value to your community. So if the community has a power outage modern networking devices do not draw very much power. You have one of these in place you may be able to provide internet access for your community for maybe the hour or two you're going through a power outage. So that's a nice service to provide. If you have one of these like on the front desk for your circulation PC and you have your network also on UPS you're still able to check materials in and out when you're having to brief power outage which is nice. One thing I'll throw out as a tip there if you have a laptop that has a built in battery UPS as part of the laptops for ability. So having a laptop as a backup to use the front desk when you're in a power outage is really good. And again all this is E-rate category two eligible. So the wired network we kind of talked a little bit about that. If you go on to your Windows PC and right click on your little network connection down in the corner of your taskbar, the right corner you can pop it up and you can see what kind of wired connection you have. A good modern connection should show a receiving transmit speed of one gig for a thousand megabits per second. Again if you're not seeing that it could be the wiring. If you've got a really long wiring run maybe you've got a PC way back in a conference room or something that you have hooked up to a television screen and you're not seeing that speed could be because the distance is too far or if it's run through the ceiling and has electrical lights and stuff around it that can impact performance too over a long distance. Again any cable or wiring that you want to have rerun through the library or redone is eligible for that category two funded. Wi-Fi this is where you can really be of use to your community. So the Wi-Fi network, modern Wi-Fi supports two different frequencies, 2.4 and 5. 2.4 is an older standard that provides really, really good range. 5 is much, much faster but it's shorter range. So if you look at the Wi-Fi available at your library you may see library 2.4 gig and library 5 gig and the reason there's two different frequencies. Some of your modern routers don't make that designation anymore. It's just out there as the library Wi-Fi and your smart device will decide which connection is best and use it as it wants to. So it just kind of depends on the Wi-Fi router you have in place where you see those separate networks or whether it's just up there as one your smart device makes the choice. The new generation of phones and tablets that are in coming out support what we call Wi-Fi 6 which is a new high speed standard. The standard of that is 802.11AX. The current standard was 802.11AC. If we're gonna spend money on a new router or new wireless access points you really wanna look at getting something that's the 802.11.AX. The new latest generation of Google Pixel phones and iPhones all support that now. And it gives you much, much faster Wi-Fi service. I talked about a mesh. If your library just has a single Wi-Fi router and maybe it's back in a back office or in a closet in one corner of the library you may have really good Wi-Fi in one end of the library and really bad Wi-Fi in another. What we can do is we can look at doing wireless access points where we can have that cable pulled through the building that allows us to create a Wi-Fi mesh network that covers the entire library. Some libraries that have solved this problem in the past they did it by setting up different Wi-Fi networks in different sections of their library. That worked great at the time that was a limitation to technology but these days with mesh you can make it one continuous Wi-Fi network. And what that means is in the old days you'd move through the building you would drop off one Wi-Fi network and then you'd have to reattach to another one. This allows you to have it just seamless through your library. So if somebody moves through your library with their smartphone they just stay connected to the Wi-Fi network wherever they're at. We can also look at what they have with some devices that are built for long range service. So if you wanna be able to have a Wi-Fi network that extends outside of your building so people can pull up in front and use your Wi-Fi when the library's closed or after hours that's also something we can definitely look at putting the gear in to support that. At the bottom there is kind of a table of different standards that you'll see. A lot of libraries I work with they have older routers that are usually what we call their A slash N so they support the A standard and the N standard. AC is really where you should be these days and AX is the new one that just came out. Power supply we're gonna talk about this so I won't go into a lot of this. Surprisingly UPSes are category two eligible. They're not very expensive. The sample I have there you can pick up the Walmart or Amazon for about 60 bucks. There's really no reason not to have one they protect your network and keep it available. This is the other thing we've run into with our libraries is we go to I do a Zoom and then do a remote desktop connection to try and log into the router and they don't have the admin login for their router and if we don't have that we're stuck. There are workarounds for that. A lot of the times the router will have a factory reset on it that allows us to reset it so we can get back into it. Unfortunately if there was anything unique in the configuration and how it was set up we lose all that because it goes back to factory settings. This is not something uncomfortable with doing remotely where this is where we need to have somebody on site to support if we have to reset the router or I would need to schedule a trip out to be on site when we do it. By sending me pictures of the networking equipment you have I can research the gear you have we can figure this all out ahead of time. We'll know what the router needs to be replaced just through the Wi-Fi just because it's old and slow. If it's end of life so it's not getting any security updates if it doesn't support dynamic DNS if we need to have it we can figure that all out ahead of time. And then what I like to do is then do a Zoom do a remote desk verify the password you have let's me get into the router and we can do everything we need to do and it just works very, very well makes it very easy to do the review remotely. And then obviously if we do a reset on the router because we didn't know the admin password now we have it please, please, please make sure you have that documentation and keep it. So where we send this we've seen this with some libraries is where their IT support was all like volunteers and well the person that set this up doesn't live here anymore we don't know how to get a hold of them we don't know what they set our password up for and we have run into that where we've had to do the factory resets to get back into this equipment to be able to get the DNS filter up and running. I also need the libraries I work with though I do an inventory with we have a product the NLC called OmniBase and I document all the networking equipment that's in place in that database so we have a record of it too. I do not retain your passwords so that is something that is on you to make sure you have those written down and stored somewhere so if you have any IT person or it's six months later and you want me to look at something on the router knowing what that admin password is so we can get back in and see what's going on. All right, I think that's your last slide there Sherm. All right, does anybody have it? Yeah, does anybody have any questions for Sherm? Anything you want to ask about your equipment, technology, SIPA filtering, hardware, software, Wi-Fi, et cetera, et cetera? Type into the questions section. So again, my contact info is in the presentation it's out on the NLC website. I want you to start the process of just seeing where the network equipment is currently. What's nice is again by having all that information ahead of time before you start the E-Rate process. We know what the outlay is gonna be, how much it's gonna cost and depending on again if we have a conflict between your town's budget window and E-Rate, maybe we don't get it done this year but we know what the cost is gonna be so we can request it in the budget and we have it in the budget to cover that 30%, 20%, whatever's not covered if we do the E-Rate next year. Yeah, I would recommend just contacting Shurm just to do this kind of evaluation of your network stuff anyway, whether you're gonna be doing E-Rate or just wanna know, I don't know what we have, there's this closet and it's got a whole bunch of stuff in it and wires and boxes and I don't know. Reach out to them anyways just to at least so you know what's going on in there and then you'll have that for whatever future reasons you need it for. My thing will validate that we have all the proper admin passwords to get into all this gear too so that's just great information to have. So you know, if you need to get in to change something or fix something, you have the access you need to do so. All right, well it doesn't look like any questions came in right now, that's fine. You all know where to find Shurm on our website and I believe we have a slide at the end here that has all our contact emails too. I do wanna answer a question that did come in a little while ago that is just a general question before we get into this year. The question is, can you confirm that if the library currently does not have E-Rate, the library can still participate in this funding opportunity as long as they apply for E-Rate as part of the process? Yes, yes, that's the whole point of the yes, absolutely new libraries, you do not have to be a current E-Rate participating library to do this special construction. Having done it previous years, that's what you know, I talked about that earlier about getting started in the first place. So yes, you can come in brand new this year for E-Rate if you've never done it before. We'll get you set up, we'll get you applying for next year, but you do have to go through the E-Rate process to, the whole purpose of E-Rate is one of the main goal of E-Rate and the overreaching goal is to get fast affordable internet connection to schools and libraries in the country. So that is the ultimate goal. So yes, new libraries highly encourage you, reach out to us, we'll get you set up and we'll get you going on this. But yes, you do, if you wanna go through this, you do have to get set up and apply. So Holly, you're gonna talk about this year? Yeah, basically this is just a timeline that we've used in the past. And you can see when I was commenting before about any deadline related to the grant matching funding which is in December, it has it located in there in this particular image. And I couldn't find the original copy of this so I couldn't modify it. But what I want you to know that you can disregard that that this is not going to be a deadline that you will have to address this year. But if you look at it, this is just the flow of the network Nebraska at the top, kind of how they're supposed to flow through as far as if you decide, yes, you wanna have, Becca provide a, add you to the appendix for the RFP that they submit. And the timeline below is the library lead one which would be the one that you would follow as a library director. Again, we would encourage you to do both. And because that basically covers the opportunity if one doesn't come through, you may have an opportunity with the other one to make, to accept a bid. So it's just information for you if you wanna consult something to look at. And then here, these are just the two resources that we put together for you for this year for the special construction. And the first one, Fairmont, Nebraska, the public library there did actually apply and install their software fiber with network Nebraska. So this is their story of their community which was engaged in making this happen. It's about a 15 minute video and it's all about special construction. From the viewpoint, I think this is a good one to show to your library board or perhaps your city council just to kind of help show how a community can come together and help to bring the fiber to the library. Now in this case, that library, there's no fiber in the community at this point. So this is great because eventually, and I don't think it'll take long, funding will be available from the federal government for connecting fiber to the residents. It's part of the bid program across all states and in particular, Nebraska is starting up with that. So Fairmont's public library has brought in the fiber to the community and there from there it can be distributed throughout the community to businesses and to residential areas. And that's pretty key for a lot of libraries. This is just, I like this one a lot. This is a call to action library resource for you as a library director or with your staff. Just it's the testimonials of three library directors as far as their experience putting in fiber to their libraries. And they're available on our channel with YouTube. Yep, these may be good things to show to your, anyone in charge in your community and your municipality, your villages to say here, watch this, this is how other libraries have actually done this, real life examples. All right, and that just wraps it up for all of our workshop for today. We still have about five minutes left in our time. So if you have any questions you wanna ask us, type your questions in to the questions in the answer section there. You can always reach out to us later, of course. So we'll wait and see if anybody has any questions, but I will mention, I've been mentioning the workshops that I'm doing. This was an overview of the e-rate process and specifically with more detail about this Fiber Special Construction Deal program. But starting next week, I have my regular annual three hour e-rate workshops where we get into much more detail about e-rate and step by step going through the forms and the e-rate process a lot more in depth into e-rate. So please do register for any one of those workshops. It's the same workshop being offered four different times. So you do not have to attend four workshops. So pick which one is the best for you and sign up for it. I will also be whatever, there'll be recording available afterwards as well after they're all done and that you can watch at your convenience if that would work better for you as well. All right, does anybody have any questions? I need to add you to this last slide here, Becca. I will do that definitely before we send these out, just your short info here. I know it's on a previous slide, but I have it all gathered here. Does anybody have any questions? Anything you wanna ask about the e-rate, Fiber Special Construction, Network Nebraska, SIPA? What else did we talk about? Infrastructure. Infrastructure, yeah, type into your question section. Any last words of wisdom from our group here? Becca Holley-Sherm? I just say go ahead and apply. What do you have to lose? That's it. I concur with Holley. Absolutely. Like I said, all of this is, you are not committed to anything until we get much farther in the process. So this is the feeling out stages and finding out what's out there, what is available for you in your areas and what it may cost the library or the municipality when it does get done. So it's just to fiber and beyond is really what it's all about because it is similar as to what Sherm was talking about, the infrastructure, the hardware. This is a piece of infrastructure to a certain extent. It's not technically, but I see it that way because if you just have fiber, okay, so you can get your email faster, you can do lots of things faster, more people can be on the internet there. But if you've got fiber and you have the possibility of offering digital equity resources and programs in your library to your community, it'll be priceless. And it wouldn't be an online workshop without a photo bomb by someone's cat? Sure. Give him or her a treat. She's pretty spoiled. We do a good job of that. Yeah. Anybody have any questions? You wanna type into the question section before we go? Go ahead and type in there. I'm gonna give another minute or two to see if anybody was trying to get anything longer typed in before we do wrap things up. As I said, this was recorded. The recording will be available. We'll have the slides available to you when I send that out. It should be the next day or two. Everything's got a process through go to webinar and YouTube. And we will also have a copy of the template for that RFP. So you can see what that looks like if you're gonna be going into filling that out. We do have, as Holly said, she is retiring. So anytime after this week, next week, December 1st, you would be reaching out to Sam Shaw here at the Library Commission. And I think I'll do that. I will add, even though he wasn't here with us today, but I think I'll add Sam's contact into a phone here on the end. So you all have that along. I mean, you all know, go to the Library Commission website and look us up. But I will add his contact info here on the end as well. So you'll have that as well. But before December, contact Holly after that, Sam. And then of course, I'm not going anywhere. And sure, I'm not going anywhere. Or Becca anytime soon, as far as I know. Well, it does not look like anybody has any questions. So I think we can wrap things up for the day. Thank you everyone for being here with us this morning. I hope this was useful information. Look into it. We want to encourage you to apply and try, you know, just all you can do is reach out and try and reach out to us with any questions that you may have. All right. Thank you, everybody. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.