 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host Krista Porter here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10am central time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays that's fine. We do record the show as we are doing today and that will be made available to you to watch at your convenience. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries in Nebraska or like your state library. So we provide services to all types of libraries in the state so you will find shows on Encompass Live for all types of libraries. Public academic, K-12, corrections, museums, archives, anything and everything really are only criteria that it's something to do with libraries. Something cool libraries are doing, something cool we think they could be doing, we do book reviews, interviews, many training sessions with demo services. We have Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes do presentations for us, but we also bring in guest speakers as we have today. Today we're actually doing an update to a session we did in April 2020. That was the last time that Margo and Eli were here. Hope it's not with us at that point yet. And we talked about what we're going on with the World Libraries and Social Well-Being project and now trapped up. And this has reports and resources and all sorts of great info for you. So I'm going to hand it over to Margo to introduce yourselves and tell us all about what's going on now. It's available to us from this project. Thanks, Krista. It's good to be back. Thanks everyone for joining us. We want to start before we introduce ourselves with a quick poll. Krista, are you able to release the poll? The question for you all out there is pretty simple. Do you currently live in your ideal community? Go ahead and click on the poll. It's live there for you. You should be able to choose one of those options. I can see who's, well, almost everybody has the answer. I can't see the poll myself. Yeah, as they're answering, we don't get to see the results come in, but when it's done, I will share. So a few people haven't answered yet. I don't get 100% voting, so I want to get everybody to go ahead and tell us. I'm going to give you another couple seconds here. And then I will close and share the results. So please let us know. Do you live in your ideal community right now? Nobody else wants the answer? Okay. I am going to close the poll now and share the answers, which are and even 33. From our attendees, it's an even split between all three answers. I didn't expect that. So if you could all, could you briefly explain your answers in the chat box? Why did you select the answer that you selected? You type into chat or into questions, either one, which are one you can find and we will. How do you feel about your, what is your ideal community? We can't see if they're in the middle of typing. That's the one thing about this. So people might be putting something in there and until they hit enter and we see it come up, we don't see. So let us know why do you, why did you choose what you chose for living in your ideal community? While people are answering, I just wanted to quick mention part of the reason we're asking includes recent research from the American Community Life Survey. About people shifting their ideas about where they want to live and what makes like the perfect community from them. Which has been, there's been a big shift in American notions about ideal communities since we did our community interviews in 2019 until now. So we're sort of curious how that's playing out with the people we talk to. Yeah, we do have some answers coming in the questions section. Jack, one person says some things are missing. Probably why it's not ideal community. Someone says I have been here before where the connection with the library in the community is growing and they feel welcomed. That's why they would feel like they're an ideal. Oh, someone does say I disagree with the political attitudes of the majority of my area. Yeah, that's a very important thing. And a difficult thing depending on where you live. Not sure if we'll get any other, if anyone does have any other, you want to share in your reasons about why you chose whichever answer you did. Ah, here we go. It's a long one. That's why. Okay. I chose sort of because my community has a lot of wonderful qualities and works very hard to help those in need. I recently experienced a tornado here and many have come together to help those who lost their homes. That being said, there's still a lot of work that needs to be done in terms of servicing everyone in the community. Sounds like a pretty typical community. All right. Thanks to you all for, for giving us a little explainer in the chat. And if you haven't yet, you can, you can still do that while we're talking. Let's go ahead and introduce ourselves and we'll come back to this question. We're here to talk about libraries building pathways to well-being. And as Christa said in the introduction, this is continuation of a discussion we had, we had earlier. We're coming back with more results and we're coming back with, with some actual tools that you all can use. So let's see, let's start with Hope. Can you tell us about yourself? I am one of the researchers on this project. I'm also the director of the Whalen Free Library in New York, upstate New York. You can see those long lakes. They're called the Finger Lakes and they're very beautiful. An interesting thing about my library is when it was being built in 1972. The community was really excited because they thought it was a McDonald's. They didn't realize it was a library that was going to be built. But it's got a great 1970s vibe. I like the building. So that's it about me. So I don't work at a library right now. I am a library researcher and a student of economics, actually. So I work on this project and I also work on a project called libraries and community systems. Thank you. Thank you. And I am Eli Ganae. I'm the New Mexico State Librarian. And I am also like Margo based in Santa Fe. One unique thing about the State Library of New Mexico, we're one of the very last states that still runs bookmobiles. So we've got bookmobile service that goes statewide. And we have a books by mail program even. So we can say that anyone in New Mexico can receive library services no matter where you are. We'll find you. Margo, can you tell us more about some of the resources that we've developed? Yeah, thanks Eli. Thanks everyone for joining us today. Rural libraries and social well-being is like a super big project. The reason why we got to do a reprise of our last year session. It has research, it has application tools, it has continuing education elements. We're going to touch on all of those today. So it might feel a little overwhelming as we go. And I just want you to know that you can always return to this recording. But anything that we discussed today is available on our website. And I'll drop that in chat. And it's on this resources page. It's also linked in the session page for the event for this show. So I put it in there as well. If anyone uses it there as well. We'll give you a copy of the slides as well. Yeah, if you could send that to everyone. Yeah, Margo did share that. And I did, if anyone's paying attention in the questions, I did share out the link to the slides. Excellent. Thank you. So let's talk about what social well-being means when we're chatting about it. Next slide, please, Eli. Thanks. Social well-being is a multi-dimensional community measure of individual capability, which is like a whole lot of words salad. There's a lot of meaning packed into it. Little sentence. So I'm going to spend a little minute here just so we can all be on the same page as we discuss the other resources and what we do about it. Let's start with individual capability and then we'll work backwards. When I say capabilities here, I mean what you have access to and what you're able to do with that access. For instance, not only having a computer, but also being able to do what you want with that computer. As librarians, we know that someone might wish to grow their computer capability or their proficiency with a technology for any number of reasons, right? So it might be a grandparent who wants to talk to their grandkids or a person who wants to be a graphic designer, right? So there's like everything. So having an individual desire to utilize access and having the ability to utilize that access to fulfill that individual desire. These are all in that mix of capability. So when thinking about our own lives, we can see all the various dimensions where capabilities matter, right? So I'm going to start with a question. So when thinking about our own lives, we can see all the various dimensions where capabilities matter, right? So I want a good life and my good life will be defined by what I'm able to do and what I desire to do, whether or not I'm able and have access to do those things that I desire to do, right? Okay, so when we talk about social well-being, we're talking about the collection of all of those capabilities combined, all of those individual capabilities combined with an acknowledgement that growing capabilities for one individual in a way that diminishes access or opportunity for another individual is both unnecessary and harmful to the whole. So there's no social well-being or there's no growing community well-being if in that growth for one group there's a diminishing of growth for another. This makes sense because what we've found is that across all these dimensions, individual capabilities are determining and determined by the bonds between individuals and the strength and resilience of the bridges between individual groups. So that whole mix is what we're talking about when we talk about social well-being. So it's complex and it's networked and it's interdependent. So it's this very mutual situation. So throughout this talk we're going to use social well-being capabilities and creating one's own good life interchangeably and we mean them in similar ways. When we studied this big thing and how libraries fit into it, we did it in lots of stacks and we still didn't get very far. We chose a very small and constrained sample. We chose only rural communities that were fairly isolated so very small communities had no other amenities and we built it as a collaborative project. So this was built with researchers and advisors. We did it in partnership with eight study communities. Of those study communities, the library directors there, seven of the eight library directors then continued to work with us for another whole year to create tools out of the research findings and they themselves built that. And then nationally dozens of library directors and staff persons tested those tools. We then pulled them back, we refined them and then we launched them with the new year of 2021. We've been using them throughout this year, including through a facilitated continuing education program developed by Hope called tools and action, which is five weeks of guided mentorship through a set of tools. And we've done that with over two dozen libraries and almost three dozen now. So that's the whole thing and for each part it's built from the ground up with practitioners and by practitioners for their use and led by them. Things you like. Even though we use quantitative data in our research so I'm a pro numbers and statistics person. The bedrock of these of our findings and these data are community stories and the themes that we heard when we worked with communities and listened to their interviews. So in their libraries when a person is living a life full of capability. In listening to those stories we develop themes and we call those codes. This list right here is a list of codes that we use to better understand and organize the stories that we heard from people and they helped frame the tools that we created because these were the themes that we heard across all communities. Krista would you mind launching a poll for me. It's the next one. Thank you. I'd be curious to know which of these codes resonate with you. So like what do you seek in your relationships or your work that that really gets at you. I hate this is going to be a select one I get that selecting one might be kind of hard since you know these are big words that mean a lot. But give it a shot. I'll give you a few seconds to think about it while I continue to talk about what some of these things mean. So we heard about contribution and mutual support. We heard about how belonging is developed out of connections but it also is tied very closely to contribution as well. So a person experiences belonging and attachment in a place where their unique contributions are sought out. Other research by Carnell Choza has been done on how this can help with youth engagement or for community attachment over time by seeking contributions even when people move out of community helping them remain attached. And stay connected to to what's going on in town. We heard nature as this huge part especially because we were interviewing people in rural communities. But I think there's a special note here to be made because we're living in a pandemic. And that is that the American Community Life Survey that just published some of its results last month noted that many Americans surveyed they only surveyed about 5500 people. But of the American surveyed more and more people are looking for access to nature and looking for ways to experience life outside of their outside of their town and their community. For reasons that we can all understand right like if you live in a densely populated area and you can't socialize in indoor public spaces outdoor public spaces and outdoor private spaces become ever more important. So this some of these things carry new or shifted truths even now. Okay Krista go ahead and close the poll I'd be interested to see your answer in I'm going to give you another couple of seconds. I can see that not everybody has responded but five four three two one. There we go. A couple more. All right. I'm going to close the poll and share our results. Yeah. Yes. This jives with what we heard. Yeah. And actually, again, this jives with what we've seen in other recent studies about how people's attitudes towards their lives and their relationships and community are shifting, especially due to like our just changed notion of social space and what it means to be a human alive right now. And if we didn't ask you all, if you're here from rural communities, but nature is key infrastructure access to it, what it looks like what it feels like. It is the thing that we heard over and over again, mixed with mutual support that allows a person to feel like they are rich, regardless of their income when they live in a rural community. Okay, you can stop sharing the poll results. Thanks, Krista. Because we're interested in positive outcomes which create and improve individual and collective capabilities. When we're talking about community pathways, we're talking about the themes in practice. So all of those codes and how they go into practice. And so when we sort these and understand the norms and customs within a community that support positive outcomes, we heard that people value belonging. They value self determination or control over their own lives and the future of their community. I think in times of uncertainty, we can understand why this is such a key component of how we feel about our lives. And people look for mutual support. Again, as we're talking about climate disasters or tornadoes, as someone in chat mentioned, mutual support is something that we recognize is key to both our good life and our notion of community resilience and personal resilience, that these things are interdependent and tightly tied together. The kinds of actions libraries took which helped people experience those values locally seem to happen through programs and services that delighted that elicited contribution but specific contribution from specific residents. And that helped each of those residents feel seen and known for both who and how they are in community. So not just like their names, but sort of grace and understanding of how people are. So this, what we noted was that people with divergent personalities, all of the kinds of personalities that a person can have, and all of the kinds of attitudes and behaviors and abilities that a person can have in a tightly bonded rural community were accepted and applauded and leveraged for the gifts that they bring to community instead of attempted to flatten out that diversity. So we found that in rural communities from personalities and dispositions and behaviors that there was this huge heterogeneity, this huge diversity of people that live in these places that experienced full human dignity in those places. Hey, Hope, out of all of the findings and ideas that came out of our conversations with rural residents, how, which ones have been the most impactful for you in your practice as a rural library director? The research was very respectful of the people that we went to study. And each step of the way that respecting honoring somebody else's wisdom was really important. I love that that was one of our foundations. So what I found was listening to people, being open to them, being humble, and ready to learn from them was my key takeaway and something that I carry with me into everything I do, not just library work. You want to talk about the tools? Sure. So, thank you, Margo. That was a great, great overview. So, we didn't want to do all of this work and then not have practical use for it at the end of the day. So, Margo gave a great overview of all the different resources and she talked about how the tools were created as one of the last steps and they've been tested and revised and now they're going to use by a lot of people. So, I just want to talk a little bit more and give you sort of a sense of how the tools were created and what they are. The tools, as you can see, this is just a sample here. The tools are pretty wide ranging so there's some foundational ones like is everyone welcome at your library, awakening to community potential, engaging the community on well-being. There's also a get started tool, which Margo, if you're able to put that link in the chat box, that'd be great. So, if you don't know which tool to start on, then you can start with a get started tool and that kind of helps you identify where to start. So, our approach to these tools is that not every tool is for every person or every community. So, we're very much in agreement, I think, on our team here that every community is really unique. There's some things that are already happening really well in your community and some things that maybe need improvements, need a little bit more strengthening. And you as librarians, same thing. Nobody's perfect. We all have unique strengths. We all have things that we would like to be a little bit more intentional with. I would say that these tools are, although they're based very much on research, and, you know, a lot of interviews, a lot of discussions, some pretty rigorous research work went into these, the tools themselves are really very reflective. And they ask you to give yourself some space and time to do intentional reflective thinking that is long term. So, most of us, especially if you're in a, like a one person shop or, you know, you don't have a lot of staff backup. And so you're like the library director who's the department head of every department. You don't have a lot of time for long term reflective thinking. You're just dealing with whatever the urgent thing is right in front of you. But what we found is that really effective librarians work sort of on a long term scale so they they have an iterative practice that's that's over time. And it's heavily focused sort of on unique community needs, identifying the potential that already exists in your community rather than always looking for outside help, and really serving as a conduit or a connector in the community. So this is a this is a sample of the tools this isn't all the tools but it gives you a sense that they're pretty wide ranging. So the tools themselves are created from rural librarians, and they are for rural librarians so even, you know, Margo and hope and I made some of the tools. But those come out of the work that we've done with rural communities as rural librarians ourselves. We asked all of the all of our research site directors to engage with the research findings to identify something that's really that they could connect with and the research, and that also also like connected with their own experience as librarians. Each of the tools includes an introduction, some of those are video introductions where they actually can actually see the creator of the tool talking about why they created the tool and what they hope it will do. They all include a quote that inspired the tool from the research, they provide some examples, but they're not best practices so they're not prescriptive they're not going to tell you if you do this then this will happen. They sort of think you they walk you through the thinking instead. They're all as I said for long term intentional practice so these aren't one off. These aren't one off programs. These are about investing over time in the community. So they walk you from reflection to action to help you determine areas of social well being that you want to positively impact in your unique community. They are organized in these categories of blogging capacity discovery self determination wellness. So if there's a particular area that you want to work on you can just go to that tab and you can start working through the tools, but really we say start anywhere. If something isn't speaking for you to you if it's not working for you move on to the next tool. It's very much a use what is useful and leave what is not useful sort of thing. So these are some of our tool creators here so again these were the directors that are research sites. And most of these people ended up creating one or two tools, which is really cool. Here's an example of one this is one of the more popular tools it's called as everyone welcome at your library. The, the author is a librarian from Vermont Susan green, and you can actually see Susan in this video talking about her tool and actually talking about her own experience and looking at her community and seeing who was not using the library because they didn't feel as welcome there. So you can see that there's a quote there there's actually a you can actually click to listen to the audio of the quotes. It talks about what's in the tool. And there's a print version in case you want to print off a PDF of the tool rather than work online. In the tool itself, excuse me in the tool itself. The steps as you can see sort of walks you through looking at who's in the community all together as a whole, and then thinking through like who's not in the community. And then putting together how that impacts your library practices. So that's a, that's an example of just one of the tools. Yeah. And Eli, I just wanted to point out something that Susan's tool brings up for library practitioners, and as well as researchers that I just want to note, notice that Eli said that step one is like who lives in your community. And step includes both observation, like living in the community and noticing who is around and really paying attention to the differences that happen between your library and the grocery store or the post office or the street corner. And then also using statistical data or demographic data from your town, not as a standalone, like prescription, but as, as additional information and that if these two things are in conflict, like what you're observing, and what is in demographic data. But this is an area for curiosity and exploration that it doesn't mean that you should choose one of these over the other, but instead kind of hold them both as probably true and figure out what's going on for you or for your counter in your library. Yeah, yeah, thank you very much. Hope, before we move on, could you tell us a little bit about one of the tools that you made and what the process was like? Oh, sure. I made uncertainty. And at the time, the pandemic had just hit. And I was feeling uncertain. A lot of the people that I was talking to in the world of libraries were saying, What are we even doing? What does it mean to be a librarian anymore? So there was a tremendous amount of uncertainty. And I created the tool because I noticed when I interviewed people and as I read through a lot of the interviews, the library directors often work through their own uncertainty by getting help from the community, looking beyond their uncertainty and kind of just being a little reflective about it. So I wanted to create a tool that brings people through the process of thinking about something with an unknown outcome and how they might approach it, accept it, look for help someplace else, and maybe a solution comes too. So it's not for everyone, but it might be helpful for some people. Great, thank you very much. And Hope has been doing this really cool thing where she's been working with the tools as a mentor to rural librarians who are using the tools in a program we call Tools in Action. Hope, could you tell us a little bit more about that process and what you've learned from that? So Tools in Action is a five-week program where I meet one-on-one with a librarian and we talk about the strengths of their community, their library, and themselves, and also some of the challenges I mostly listen. They go through the tools that resonate with them, that stand out to them, and then I listen and perhaps ask a good question, and they come up with some wonderful solutions to address some of the things in their community. These are photographs from Brenda, who is in Liberty, North Carolina, and when Brenda came to the library she noticed that there was a lot of people that weren't coming to the library. So is everyone welcome at your library? She determined no, that there was a significant amount of people that actually had been actively discouraged from coming to the library, both historically and in recent years. So she wanted to have some conversations within the community and decided to do this art project. She went out into the community, she had everybody make a little square, and then she put those squares together and put them on a banner. She got a printer to a company to make the banners so that everyone would know they made something. It's their display at the library. The interesting thing is that just having a conversation wasn't really working. It was kind of clunky, but when they had art materials in front of them, people just started talking. And Brenda and I talked about this, and I told her it kind of reminds me of a quilting bead where when women got together long ago and their hands were busy, their hearts were open, and they were able to start talking. And that is indeed what Brenda found. So she's beginning to have conversations with typically marginalized groups of people in her community. And these are some of the things that I've done in response to the tools that I've done. So I'm not only working with people, I do the tools myself and think reflectively about what we're doing in the library. I've only been at my library for about six months. One of the tools that I did is everyone welcome at your library. And I thought about what it would be like to be brand new, never having been in the library, and what it would be like to come in the front door. And when you first come into my library, it used to have brochures and a bulletin board, which is great. And I want to have the community feel welcome to put stuff up and let people know. But it created this really cluttered foyer. And unfortunately, the way the walls are, you don't see a human face until you go through two doors and around the corner. So I didn't want the first thing that people see be clutter. So I just took the clutter off and I got a banner. Since there were no human beings in the foyer, it's pretty cold and isolating. So probably the way our walls are now, I don't know, maybe we will have a human being in the foyer at some point. But I thought, for now at least, let's put up a banner. It's actually behind me now. It says, welcome to the library. We're so glad you're here. Two really simple things, cleaning up the clutter and welcome. That over time will make a difference. The other tool that I did was the delight assessment and just having little pockets of joy. And I'm taking that term from Paula Davidson in Greensboro, Vermont. When I worked through the tools with her, she used that term after using the delight assessment. She wants in her library little places of joy or delight in her library. And so I did the same thing. The book drop right at our circulation desk. I made into a monster space. You can find these all over Pinterest. This isn't a new idea, but coming with the intention of having a delightful experience, just little places. And these are small shifts. You don't have to do a huge thing, but I think that small shifts multiplied over time is going to make a huge impact. And so I wanted to ask Eli and Margo, what insights have you gained from seeing people interact with the tools? And have you used any of those insights to change your approach to the work you do? Oh, I can start. It has actually changed my thinking quite a bit. We've in New Mexico, we've had, I think, three people work through the tools with Hope already and she's working with a few more cohorts this year. And I think one or two of them are on the, are attending here today, which is cool. What I've really seen is a few really cool things. One is that they keep using the tools even after they're working with Hope. So it's really great that these tools that were co-created by rural librarians for rural librarians are like getting used. They're also getting like passed on to other agencies in the community. So librarians are sharing them with non-librarians, which is really neat. One of the things I've been thinking about a lot is personalized service. So one of the things we found in our research, we kept hearing over and over again, is this concept. We like the term old-timey service or bespoke service, the idea that you treat each of the people in your community as a special person that you're going to provide unique services to. And you're going to know their name, you're going to know their preferences, you're going to buy a book just for them because you know that it's an author that they like. You're going to, when they need help with something, you might let them know who else in the community could help them. That sort of one-on-one old-timey service has this really, when you hear people in the community describe it, it's really meaningful to them. They love being known and they love to be treated in this special way. So that's something that I think about a lot. And here in New Mexico at the State Library, we run the Poet Laureate Program and we're putting together a poetry anthology. So I've been having all of these conversations with hundreds, literally, of poets who are submitting their work to be in this anthology. And the temptation, because we're dealing with so many of them, and there's a lot of emails flying back and forth, is just to like always use templates, you know, just like have a standard response to everything and be really like cold and efficient about it. But because of like seeing how people interact with these tools, and from the research itself, I really like slow myself down and I make sure I like, when I reply to someone, I use their name. I've had to, in some cases, do like snail mail letters to people. And just like adding like going a little bit extra, it takes a little bit of extra time. But it's amazing how great it makes people feel. And it's like, we're sort of like building up this this like community that didn't exist before. And I don't think we can do that in like a cold, efficient way. There's got to be like that, that human touch. So that's just something that's very immediate that I've been dealing with, with lately that I would have approached very differently, a couple years ago, I think. I love that. Old timey service, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they feel seen. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. How about you, Marco? I love all of that. Yes. Yes, everything you like said, yes, everything. I hope you said earlier, I'm going to. A couple of things that have been reinforced for me through using the tools that I think I probably had a had a nascent belief in. So it was a little easier for me to just sort of like give myself over to it. But the tools and the research allowed me to like really believe in the power of things like collective action and mutual support. And then watching people use the tools like witnessing how that works and the sort of transformation that occurs. So I started to work as a teacher, and I've like part of my education is in education. And one of one of those foundational beliefs is constructivism, right, like a person constructs their own understandings and beliefs. And until we did the tools, and I witnessed what happened when someone actually has the space, like the full time, money, physical space to reflect and think carefully and deeply and creatively about their practice and their work. It's really hard to have a shift or a leap in understanding or belief or practice. Like it's just just much harder. Like even this, even this research program, this whole project couldn't have been invented if I was working in a rural public library as a director. Like I would not have thought about this. Or in this way, I wouldn't have been able to develop the steps and the depth that we were able to design if I was still teaching in a rural high school. This would not have happened, and it wouldn't have happened because there isn't the space available to like sit and think collaboratively to think creatively. And so, even if tools in action isn't happening in your state or whatever which it likely isn't because I know where it's happening. One of the gifts that you can advocate to your board for or even with your staff and if you're the person in charge and you have other staff persons, a gift that you can give is this gift of like space and thinking and allowing people like an hour, two hours, five hours behind a closed door where there are zero interruptions like that's like it's just a huge gift that people working in practitioner positions in a public library, in a school library, they just typically, unless they're in an administrator role, typically don't have the space and time to engage. And so that includes CERC staff, right, like CERC staff's role is not to sit behind in an office, but if you want CERC staff to be reflective about their practice and be able to expand how they create engaging spaces, then that space has to be granted to them as well. So those are the insights that change the work that I do. Also, there's additional insights that have nothing to do with the tools. I'm just going to ask, I'm going to send Krista this chat so that she can post this link in your chat about in doing this research, learning the importance and in doing the tools, learning the importance of facilities. Just like everything that you talked about, Hope, is about space, right, like that our space itself is a service. So in doing our quantitative or statistical study that went along with our field research, we learned that the facility being in your town and you being close to that library makes huge differences in terms of life expectancy at birth. It makes huge differences in graduation rates, if you're in a rural community. And then a study that we didn't do that came out of the Chicago Fed was that it makes a huge difference. Capital investment in the library or the building of a new library makes a huge difference in reading proficiency scores, sort of regardless of the income of your town, regardless of the demographics, regardless of the income or expenditures in your school district, like just having a public library makes this big difference in having immeasurable good life units, like how many months and years you get to be alive on earth. Just pretty exciting. Yeah. Thank you, Marco. When I talked to people that I was going through the tools with, one of the first things that people said was, wow, I have an hour just to think about the library and think about my approach to the library. Think a little deeper, be a little more reflective, and they were so appreciative of that. That's a really important component of working through the tools to give yourself the space and time to do it. Margo and Eli, I would also like to ask you what advice you would give someone who isn't familiar with the tools as they are approaching the tools for the first time. Eli? Yeah, so the cool thing about Ruralibraries.org and all of the resources that have come out of the research, out of the projects, is that there's really something for everyone. That can also make it feel sort of like overwhelming, like where do I start. So I would suggest a couple of things. One is, you know, you could start with the getting started tool. That's sort of why we developed it. There are some foundational tools like engaging with your community and is everyone welcome in your library that are good, like good ones to get started with their very like foundational practice stuff. But really, anywhere, anywhere you start is fine. Jump in either with the tools or with the research itself. I think one of the most underused parts of the website is our quote database. So we interviewed over 200 people and we coded like every line of transcripts. We, you know, we recorded the audio, we turn that into transcripts, we coded it. There were like many late late nights, evening hours in front of the TV and coding. And all of that stuff is freely available on the website. You can just you can go and just read quotes from people we interviewed talking about their community and their library. It's like a big rabbit hole you can go down. And it's like fascinating. It's really fascinating. So if you just want to like do something that would be a fun rabbit hole sort of thing to do to get you sort of like motivated, go to the quote database and start reading. Yeah, or if you're an audio file, like if you're a person that listens to podcasts or just like like prefers an audio book. You can we have a link there to our open science framework data repository and that includes the actual audio de identified and anonymized of nearly every conversation so every conversation where we had permission from the person being interviewed to record and then share that audio is available there. Like you won't know the names of the person and and all that it's confidential still. And in many cases it's been de identified for location as well so you couldn't like reverse engineer the person's identity but still, you could listen to a person describe everything that is important to them. So if you think that we just like made all this up or you just want to listen to people talk nice about community life then it's fun. It's like heartwarming we had volunteers help us with audio editing and then transcript the anonymizing and de identifying and those volunteers kept like writing to me being like what can you believe that's like this is so beautiful. So if you just want like some time with beauty. I recommend listening to the audio and data nerds this is like, have this is like, oh, this is amazing. Totally data sets that aren't public but I just shared a link to there's also I am less while we were doing this project specific to rural communities I am less funded a national project in communities of all sizes that looked both at libraries and museums and they just published their research findings they didn't give open data. Sorry everybody, but, but I shared a link with Krista to share with you, and that's their report so it's pretty robust and has Eli what is the section that had like the coolest implications was it just. It was like maybe policy and research recommendations but it had like the most implication rich part it's a super huge study it's like hundreds of pages 140 pages or something. So I'm trying to give you like a hot tip. I want to skip to start with the executive summary and skip to it. I do want to before we run out of time I do want to say though if you want to do the tools and you're not part of the tools and action program. Consider, well, I mean first consider doing the tools and action program you can reach out to to one of us and we can talk through how you might be able to do that. But if you're doing it on your own it would be good to find a buddy to do it with someone else you work with a board member your entire board, so that you're not trying to do it alone. And as these tools are there about long term thinking and as I said before we've all got all this urgent stuff in front of us. So you have to find a way to make the space and time to do the tools. And, you know, it really helps to have a buddy and like have an actual meeting set up where you where you work through it together you do them on your own and come together and talk about them, one way or another you have to find space. That's true, even not for these tools and everything you do as a librarian, you can't just deal with the urgent stuff you've got to one way or another, find time to do the the long term thinking stuff, because it's just as important, even though it's not always right in your face. Yeah, as you mentioned, it is just hit 11 o'clock central time but that's okay. We will, we don't get cut off here. We can go as long as needed for anything that the Margo Hope or Elon wants to share or if anybody has any questions or comments or anything. You can type in your question section of your go to webinar interface and if there's anything more you want to dig down into. Like for myself I say I love I've been looking through everything on the website, the tools, and I love all the resources on there here in Nebraska we do, we have a accreditation program for our public libraries and part of that is they're required to write up a community needs response plan. And all of these tools and things that you all put on here I'm seeing that this is going to become part of my resources for people having the library to do that because it is like you said Margo that you don't just look at the numbers look at your observations of the community and I tell them do you look at your data on the census website but then do focus groups do interviews, you know you can't just you know take numbers and then take it at face value. So a lot of things you're mentioning I'm like yes I've been trying to get our people to do this. And a lot of the things that just looking you know having the time to so we kind of do make our libraries make the time to write this plan, working with their boards as you mentioned Eli or any team being bringing people from the community to be part of the team that looks at this as well to evaluate what is the library doing what could the library doing. We have to do these plans now as of now on a five year cycle. So I just said planning for the future not just immediate but what are you going to do over the next five years because the next time they're due to renew it will be five years from now. So, maybe these are just great resources and things for just helping people and self evaluate and it's just the kind of thing you need to look into and too many libraries or things don't think about that. Yes. So there's an email here research at rural libraries.org if you have any questions or anything you want to ask us pursue with us comments. That's a good email to use. Are there any other questions. Looking at any questions throughout the field and they answered your questions the beginning for the polls. I want to reiterate while while you look for questions in the q amp a. I just want to reiterate that like one of our policy recommendations for state libraries for federal governments for local trustees and policymakers and municipalities is finding ways of supporting practitioners with time and space right like one of the ways tools and action is successful is that we're paying people essentially $100 a week for the hour plus that they spend or the two hours between tools and meeting with a mentor to do it like what we were currently running recruitment on libraries and community systems and states and what we're learning is that many people can attend meetings because they have a second job because they're paid such a small amount of money at the rural library. So I think one of the important elements of working with either from a consortium standpoint or from a state library standpoint with practitioners especially in low resource locations is that no one has time for any of this unless we compensate them unless we build time for them unless we find ways of supporting that time and taking some of the administrative burden off. I think I think the things that we value in local libraries and everything that we found in our study is that there's a value in programming. There's a value in community facing engagement. There's a value in being able to create these environments of delight and social networks and connections within a community, being a hub and social infrastructure, and they come in direct tension with being good administrators. Right like if you're spending all your time writing grants, you're not spending time at lunch with the local food pantry. So like there is a real structural issue at hand when it comes to small library's capacity to do this work. And so what we're trying to say to small libraries is that we see you, we know that there are structural barriers to you doing this work. And we're saying, yes, we get like administrative reporting to your states or your consortia is hard. And we know that the part where you are expanding and impacting social well being in your communities has to do with your heart work and your work with individuals and people in your town. And less to do with paperwork and scheduling. All the love people. All the love. Yeah. Yeah, here in Nebraska, we've had a grant that would provide funding to libraries to work on their accreditation process and that community needs plan. And we have internship grants that we offer that they can use for anything. You bring in an extra staff person to help you do whatever they tend to use it for summer reading program, which I get. There are some that reach out and do other things as well. So try to really help you. You know, we're making you do this but we will give you what we can do the resources to make it happen. All the support. All right, doesn't look like any other questions came in. So I think we can do our wrap up here. Thank you so much to Margo and hope and Eli for being here with us again today. This is a great show of great resources and information and I hope a lot of our rural libraries will use it here in Nebraska and everywhere. I'm going to be using it pushing it out for our libraries to use very strongly. Thank you for having us again. Absolutely. And as things develop and come back again and again, whatever any other programs you're working on to happy to have you on. I'm going to pull back, present your control to my screen to wrap up. Okay, as I said, today's show has been recorded. This is our main Encompass Live website. If you just Google or use your search engine of choice and type in Encompass Live. We're the only thing called that on the internet so far. Nobody else can use that name, but you'll find our main page. These are upcoming shows that our archives are listed right here. Today's show will be at the top of this list should be done and ready for everyone to view by the end of the day tomorrow. Everyone who attended today and registered today show get an email from me letting you know when it's been posted. We also push it out onto our social media. We have a Facebook page for Encompass Live if you like to use Facebook or we remind people about shows and that are coming up and when recordings are available of different shows. We also post onto Twitter and Instagram. I'm not sure. Using the hashtag Encompass Live. That's a little abbreviation for the show. While we're here, I'll show you there is a search feature on our archives. If you want to search our full show archives, you can look for any type of see if there's any show on a topic you're interested in. You can search the full archives are just the most recent 12 months if you want to limit something very current. That is because this is our full show archives, as I said, going back to when and I'm not going to scroll all the way down because it's a huge list. Going back to when Encompass Live first premiered in January 2009. So we've got like 12 years worth. So just pay attention to the broadcast date. The original broadcast date of any shows you watch. Some of the information may stand the test of time. Some of it may become old, outdated. Resources and services may change drastically. Links may not work anymore. Those kind of things. But one thing, some things that librarians do, we keep things for historical purposes. So we'll always have these up there as long as they can place to host them. On the recording link, there will be included a link to the slides that I've got here that I shared. I want to link to the website. A lot of different links that were shared. You'll have that available as well. I also want to mention since we are here talking about we're a lot. So that is for the archives. Next week we are off Encompass Live as you can see here. Happy holidays. We're taking one week off. So I can have a break and everyone else can have a break. We'll be back on December 29th for our pretty sweet tech. Once a month our technology innovation librarian Amanda Sweet comes on the show and does something techy related. She's going to be talking about writing a better world with technology. So that is December 29th. So remember we're off next week. Back to December 29th. And one last thing I want to mention as we're here talking about rural big talk from small libraries is our annual online conference of library commission and the association with co-sponsored with the association for rural and small library. Next year is our 11th annual conference and the call for speakers is now open. Hope has been a presenter for us before. And also I know I recognize at least one of your the people that you listed who created some of your tools. Kate Cozier is also on before. So if you are interested please do submit a presentation to us. We're open through January 14th looking for our speakers and the conference will be on February 25th 2022. It's always the last Friday in February. So that wraps it up for today. Thank you everyone for being with us this morning. Thank you Margo Hope and you guys are great. And maybe we'll see you on our future episode up on topic 5. Bye. Thank you. Bye bye everyone. Have a good day.