 Good morning, and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Christa Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Somebody, I'll be able to say that out of habit. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event, webinar, webcast, online show, whatever you want to call these things that are out there that nobody can agree on the terminology. Still, after all these years, I was actually checking, this is our ninth year of doing Encompass Live. You like the word show, so I do. I do show, yeah, it's our online show. Yeah, and our show is free and open to anyone to watch. We have a variety of things here, basically anything library-related, things going on in libraries, new things libraries are doing, technology, services, programs, whatever that could be of use to libraries. Sometimes our topics title might seem a little out of the box, but don't, you know, trust us, trust us, please, but everything comes around the libraries in the end. That's our main focus here. We broadcast live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's okay. We do record the show every week, and all our recordings going back to the beginning, which are for show as January 2009, are all available on our website, along with any PowerPoint presentations anyone may have included, websites, people who had mentioned during the shows, all that information is available, and I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can get, see those recordings. As I said, the show is free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share our website, our live, our upcoming shows, our recordings with any of your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues who might be interested in any of our topics, they're welcome to come and join us, and we do do a mixture of things here, presentations, book reviews, mini training sessions, interviews, as I said, basically anything library related, and we do bring in guest speakers to come on the show sometimes, but we also have Nebraska Library Commission staff to come in and talk about things specifically that we are doing here out of the Library Commission, and that's what we have this morning. To my left is Richard Miller, the Director of Library Development Director here at the Library Commission, and my boss, and he's gonna talk about grants, grants that we have pretty much annually have had. Well, yes, we had a few years ago. We didn't do them, but we did them last year, so we're back on track. Yeah, to tell us about what's coming up with our library improvement grants for this year, so I will just... Chris, I think we will do full screen, because I don't need to see myself down there, if you don't mind. Sure, yeah. You want to hit it and just do full screen? Yeah. Okay. There we go. All right. See better what we're showing you on our website. Yeah, I think just listening to my voice is okay. We're going to be doing a lot today on the Nebraska Library Commission website. I'm not going to have handouts for you, so you can follow along here, go to the website when you have a chance yourself, and for those of you who have not used this website before, it does have what we call flyout menus. You'll notice that they fly out as we go to each topic here. We are going down to grants, and then we're going to carefully move over to the column here, which says library improvement grants, and that's what we're going to be spending our time on today. So we'll be speaking about this quite a bit. I will be going back and forth with various portions of the website. So please bear with me, and if you have any trouble finding any of these things, try it out yourself. If you still have trouble finding it, you can certainly give me a call at the commission at our 800 number or send me an email, and you can find that email address on that 800 number just about anywhere on our website. Well, the library improvement grants are the grants that we used to make available every year, but we had a few years off because of both state and federal funding issues where we didn't make grants. We did start again a couple years ago, and so we do have library improvement grants for 2017, and listen to this part, contingent upon what happens at the federal grant level, at the federal budget level, and what happens at the state budget level, because we really don't know. It's a new administration as far as the budget goes, both in Washington and here in Lincoln. So we have to say that just to make sure. We are going to go through the application process, but be forewarned that if push comes to shove, and we have budget cuts that are significant, we may not be able to make those grants. Please, however, go through the process because I think there's a pretty darn good chance that these grants will be available. So the 2017 library improvement grants, these grants are made using federal LSTA money. LSTA, of course, stands for Library Services and Technology Act. This is money that comes to us through IMLS, which is the Institute for Museum and Library Services. One of the things that has changed during the last year or so, or the last several years actually, is that IMLS, Institute of Museum and Library Services, is trying to standardize their reporting on what happens with these grant monies that are made. That's why you'll notice when we go through the grant application form that it has a bunch of things that you need to choose. I call them sort of forced choice issues, where you have to say it's this or that. It's for this target group or that target group. It's, you know, you'll see the choices as you go through here. And if you haven't done this application form before, it may be a little bit daunting, but believe me, it's almost like one of our system directors described that is almost like an outline form. You do this, and then you do that, and then you do this, and each one leads and rolls up into the whole picture of what it is that you want to do for your grant itself. Let me review a little bit about how this process works. I told you that IMLS is trying to put together information about the effects of these grants around the entire nation. When we used to do our reporting to IMLS, which we do an annual report, and when we've reported on these grants as well as the other uses that we make of the federal LSTA monies, each report from each of our 50 states came in looking different from every other one. It was almost impossible for IMLS to report to Congress what was being done with this money because the descriptions, the categories, everything else was different depending on what came in from each state. That's why you'll notice that we've kind of standardized how you respond and which categories of grants you're using, et cetera, et cetera. So this standardization came down from IMLS? Absolutely. We have to report, the annual report that we do here from the commission that we make also has been standardized as to how we respond, what we did with it, and so forth and so on. The whole thing is driven by what are called LSTA purposes, and you'll see here on the screen that there are five bullets. There are a few more, but I've chosen the ones that are appropriate for these grants, and I want to take a little bit of time to talk about these because you need to think in terms of, if you're asking for a grant, it has to fit within one of these five purposes here. Now, granted, they're fairly general, so I refer to these purposes as they're wide enough to drive a truck through. So you should be able to find one or more of these purposes that applies to your grant project, but you must identify the LSTA purpose or purposes that apply to your grant. Now, let me do just a couple more things before I start on these purposes. For those of you who are eligible for these grants, which are accredited Nebraska public libraries and certain state-run institutional libraries, and the list is there. You can see them from institutions in Geneva all the way through York on that list there. Those are the institutions and the public libraries that are eligible to apply. I did notice that there's one school librarian on the program today, and school libraries are not eligible to apply for these grants, unless they're involved in a project with a public library or a state-run institutional library. They might be able to get some funding through that, but it has to be a partnership. So keep that in mind as you go through here. I wanted to hit just a little bit about the dates here at the very end. For those of you who have been watching our website, you know that these applications are due by 11.59 p.m. Central Time on January 24, 2017. All of this, of course, is an online application form. If an application form comes in after that time, it is not eligible to be considered. Recipients will be announced by February 14, 2017. So keep those dates in mind. All right, back up to the LSTA purpose statements. I want to suggest that you read these carefully, and I'm also going to make another suggestion before you start filling out your application form that you look through the entire application form as well. Typically, what a library will do is say, hey, I want to do this project. Therefore, I'm going to seek some federal money or some state money if they're looking at one of our other grants that are funded with state funds. Well, that's kind of backwards because it's backwards because what I'd like you to do is to think more broadly about possibilities of what you might do. If you read through these LSTA purpose statements, and if you go through the entire library improvement grant application form, I think it will help you come up with other possible projects that you hadn't thought about. So don't just think about that one project that you have in mind now. Look through all this stuff. It might conjure up some new ideas. The other thing that I would like you to do is that for those of you, and I think that covers every public library that's listening in, for those of you who have done a strategic plan as part of the public library accreditation process, look at the community needs that you've identified and look at the goals and objectives you've written on that strategic plan. If you can get money, federal money here, to help meet those community needs and to address those goals and objectives that you've written in that plan, especially to address those community needs, really, that would be a win-win situation. So those are the things you should be thinking about as you're thinking about this grant. So open your mind a bit. Think more broadly. Don't just think about that one idea that you have. Think about other possible ideas. All right. Let's go to these LSTA purposes then. When you look through here, I underline some things that I think are particularly important and might give you some ideas. In the first purpose statement that starts off facilitate access, if you look there it says at the end of that an educated and informed citizenry, that might conjure up some ideas. In the next one, encourage resource sharing. In the third bullet, promote literacy education and lifelong learning and some of those might be associated with workforce development, 21st century skills, digital literacy skills. For those of you who are perhaps going to be considered, if we get the federal grant to IMLS for the 30 makerspace libraries that we're working on right now, that grant application is due from us on Friday. If you're one of those 30 libraries or if you're one of the four public libraries that's part of the University of Nebraska's National Science Foundation grant for makerspaces and permanent makerspaces in four public libraries, you know that some of these things about 21st century skills, workforce development, digital literacy, all of those tie in with those efforts. So there may be a tie in with that. In the fourth bullet, preservation of knowledge or library collections. And the fifth bullet, promotion of library services through national, state, local, regional or international collaborations or networks. So those are some ideas and some concepts you might be thinking of and you might be choosing one of these LSTA purposes for your project. Remember you choose one or more of these purposes. What will happen is you'll see that on the application form itself, I believe we forced you to choose just one or as your primary, but we'll get to that application form in just a bit. We could cover more than one, but you can just LSA, here's the one primary. That is correct. One of the things we are doing this year again is that we are offering priority to those public libraries that are planning to join the Pioneer Consortium. There's a link as you see to the Pioneer Consortium. If you want more information about the Pioneer Consortium, you can go to that link and that will list the members. There are 24 currently public libraries and one academic library who are members. And there's a link here to membership which will allow you, here it shows the participants, at the bottom it says Pioneer COHA Cost Estimator for 2016-17. This will allow you to successfully fill out the budget portion of the library improvement grant application because you'll be able to estimate what this is going to cost you to get your collection into the Pioneer Consortium. For questions, you'll notice that Steve Fosselman is down here at the bottom. He's the business agent. He's also the library director at Grand Island Public Library. If you have some specific questions about membership and about what it's going to cost and so forth, he can be very helpful to you. So, those folks will have priority. It doesn't mean that they will get a grant but it does mean they have an extra click on the application as we evaluate their applications. Let's go back to here. So, what is required of you as a grant applicant? You have to come up with at least a 25% local match of the monies that you receive and at least 10% of that match has to be in cash. So, if you, for example, let's suppose that you get a grant and you're doing something that is going to require some commitment on the part of your staff to do this grant even though that is not a cash match per se, it can be counted as part of the local match. Now, do remember that if you have staff involved in the grant application and the project that you're going to be asking for, those staff have to be committed specifically to this project if you want to count their time. You can't just say, oh, we'll count about 5% of Mary Jo's time or whatever. It has to be a tie-in with the actual time that they work on this project in order to count that as part of your local match. The other thing that grant recipients have to do is that there are certain documents which I'll talk to you about in just a minute but the one thing I want to talk to you about is this quotation here that's italicized. Anytime if you receive a grant, you announce this grant, you must use this language here to give credit to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, to LSTA, and to the Library Commission. And we've come up with language so that everybody uses consistent language. It says this project is supported in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by the Nebraska Library Commission. Having standard language makes it easier for everybody. You don't have to guess at what language to use. So if you do an announcement on your website or through Facebook or if you do a local newspaper announcement, please use this language when you announce the grant itself. There will be, coming out from our office, there will be a press release which lists all the public libraries and institutional libraries that receive grants and we'll be using this language I believe in the announcement itself too. So I want to talk for just a minute about some of the documents that you will be receiving if you are going to be receiving a grant. One is something called SIPA compliance. SIPA stands for the Children's Internet Protection Act. For those of you public libraries that have been involved in e-rate for a long time, you probably are familiar with SIPA because you've heard Krista talk about this for years. The reason for this is that any federal funding that is received that is for Internet access or that will involve Internet access has to have this form signed by you which indicates, as you'll see, either that your organization, your library, or your entity is SIPA compliant, that is that it has filters on its computers, on all of its computers, not just the computers for public access, but on all its computers, including staff computers, and that those filters can be easily taken off for a legitimate request for information. And the example that we always give is, let's suppose that you will have somebody coming in who wants to find out about testicular or breast cancer. Well, you know your filter will probably filter those out because of the word breast or testicular or whatever. So you have to be able to take those, what's the word, disable. Disable those filters in order to gain access for legitimate use of information. The second box you might check is that the project that you're talking about has no need to have SIPA compliance because none of the funds made available are going to be used to purchase computers with Internet access or to pay for any costs related to Internet access. So that, as you'll notice, has your name at the top, you have to check one of those two boxes, and then you have to have the signature of the authorized representative, which is, I guess it can be the library director or your board chair printed and then dated. And it's kind of interesting because we have applying organization and name of the applicant at the bottom. Those are probably one of the same. But anyway, you need to send that in as a paper document so we have that. That's one of the things you have to do. Another thing you will do is that you will receive a grant agreement. And I'm just going to read to you some portions of this. Your grant will have a number, it will have the grant amount, it will have the date of the grant, and it will be an official legal document that will be signed by Rod Wagner, the director of the Nebraska Library Commission, and by the library director or library board chairperson of your particular public library or institutional library, and then will be dated. And in there, you will agree to certain things. You will agree that you will send in that the commission will make a grant payment to your institution after you submit either payment documents or invoices for at least 50% or more of the cost associated with this grant. At that point, we will make one grant payment to your institution for the full amount. We don't want this back and forth of bills and invoices and whatnot. It's just going to be if you come up through at least 50% or more of the total grant will pay you the full amount. We also agree to assist you in this whole thing. You agree to sign a document called Attachment A, which has a list of assurances, and I'm going to read those to you in just a moment, and you agree that any announcements that you make have that language that I just threw to your attention up here above. And then if you fail to comply with any of these assurances or this grant agreement, we can ask for the money back. That's just general sort of thing with with federal grant money or state grant money for that amount. Attachment A, I promise to talk to you about. You'll see all these and I don't have them up in the screen because I don't want you to have to read all this stuff, but I do want to draw to your attention a couple of the things that are in Attachment A, which is a list of assurances. That means that you, as the receiving institution, are going to assure us of certain things. You're going to assure us that you have a legal authority to receive this grant, and that's the shorthand version of what's about six lines long on that particular assurance. You're going to assure us that you will allow us access to any and all records of this whole thing in case we want to audit this. You will assure us that you follow Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and I won't go into that detail. You'll see that on the assurance form. You're going to assure us that you will comply with all requirements imposed on anybody that receives a federal IMLS grant, and you'll see that that it has to do with two CFR 255 cost principles, and if you need to find out the details of that, we'll share them with you. This is just standard boilerplate language that all federal grants have to follow. You're going to assure us that your principles, meaning whoever signs this whole thing in your board chair, is not debarred, suspended, or proposed for debarment so that you are not able to receive federal grant money. You're going to assure us that you're going to retain title to any equipment that you purchase under this grant for the useful life of this grant, and that you'll contact us if that equipment is no longer needed for purposes of disposal, and we'll give you permission to dispose of that if appropriate. You're going to provide any reports that we ask you to provide, and I'll speak to you about that in just a minute, and we're going to allow you to make minor changes in the approved project budget if it seems appropriate. I know that in the past what has often happened, or not often, but at least on occasion, has happened, is that a library will say, well, this piece of equipment, or this equipment came in less expensively than we thought it would, may we spend this, and if it's appropriate to help the grant, we will probably give you permission. And the last assurance just talks about that statement that you will use to give credit to IMLS, et cetera. The other thing that you will be using is I mentioned that if you have either payments that you can show us you've made, or you can show us bills that you need to pay for over 50% of the grant itself, you will be submitting that to us with what's called the 2017 Library Improvement Grant Request for Payment. That's the form that you'll use. This has the address to which you will submit it, which is our accounting office here. You will list the pay to institution if it's your public library, or if it's your institution, whatever is the appropriate name and address, or if it's your library foundation, or library friends group. Sometimes people will want the payments to go to one of those two 501c3 organizations rather than to the public library itself, because sometimes after their budget is already set, the library will not be able to receive additional payments to change the budget of the library, so that's how it happens. We will have on that grant request for payment form, the name of your institution, a very brief description and number of the grant itself, and the total itself, and then you will submit that form with a signature of who it is that's signing for this grant, and their title, and the date, and then that will be our document that we'll use to get the payments sent to your institution wherever you've decided to have that sent. All right. There is one other obligation here, as you'll notice. It says here that if you are proposing a project that is for access to anything that it should be accessible to people who fall under the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and we have put a document on there that really relates just to e-book readers, but the reason we put that up there is it's got some language in it that will help you understand how it is you need to make any program or project or thing accessible to people in your community who might fall under the ADA National Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Again, if you've got questions, please ask and we'll help clarify that whole thing as to whether that's appropriate for your particular project. Now, here's the proviso that I mentioned earlier. We do not know yet what's happening with our state budget and we don't know what's happening with our federal budget. We do know, for example, that on our state budget we will be taking a 4% cut for the last six months of our current fiscal year. That should not affect these grants because, of course, this is federal money. However, since we do use federal money for a number of other activities we have at the commission here, this federal money might not be available. We usually have, we say about $100,000 of LSTA money for these grants. That may have to be reduced or it may be eliminated. We'll just have to see. But I don't believe that that's going to happen, so please send in your grant applications. Yeah, it doesn't hurt to apply at least. No, it doesn't hurt to apply. If you don't apply and you do get it, then you're totally out of it. That is correct. Now, let's go to the grant application form itself, which is on here. And I'm going to march through this in some detail and let me remind you what I said earlier is that you, I recommend strongly that you go through this entire grant application before you ever fill in an executive summary and before you send in the grant application, march through the entire thing so that you really have a good idea of what you might like to do and it might expand your ideas on what it is you might like to do. First of all, what you fill in up above is self-explanatory, your name, your name and your institution, phone number, etc. Here's number one and I was wrong. You can choose one or more of those five LSTA purposes. So I've given a shorthand version of those here, a little bit shorter than was on our website, which has the full text. But if you need the full text, you can go to our website and look for those LSTA purpose statements. So you will choose one of these purposes and then see which is most appropriate. For those public libraries that are applying for a Pioneer Consortium membership, I think this last one here is probably the most appropriate. Promote library services that promote users for information through national, state, local, regional and international collaboration and network since the Pioneer Consortium is of course a collaborative effort. For the top one, V2, facilitate access to information, access to resources because it's the catalog? Absolutely, that's a good point. And in fact, they could actually check encourage resource sharing. So it's up to you which ones you want to check. You'll read through these and make your own minds up about that. So you could check all five if you want to, I think that would be quite the project though. But if you do, you've got to somewhere in the grant mention this is about that particular purpose. That's correct. You should mention you should reinforce that. This year to the form, you'll notice if some of you used the form for 2016, the 2017 form has added an executive summary. I tried to make the entire form last year that forced choice model that I mentioned to you earlier. And in the only area that people were able to write anything, which I think was the outcome section, everybody shoved everything into that. So we said, okay, we need an executive summary of the grant at the beginning here. So again, a strong suggestion. Look through the entire thing first. And of course, go through everything else before you do the executive summary. This is almost like good planning. How do you want to get to where you want to get to? Well, you sort of plan backwards. So do the entire thing first. And that executive summary box is expandable. So it's not just the amount. I don't remember what the limit is, but you'll find out if you're too long winded. All right. Now, I mentioned to you earlier that if this is the first time you're seeing this grant application form, it may be a little bit daunting because you may not know forms like mode or format or outcome or whatever. But I think if you look at this, in fact, I wrote on a piece of paper here, something as a kind of reminder to myself that you're going to be covering the LSTA purpose. You're going to be covering the project intent, which you see here. You're going to be covering activity or activities that you're going to be using to try to meet that project intent. And you're going to be choosing a mode of activity. And I'll explain mode when we get there. You're going to be covering who the beneficiaries are for this. You're going to be telling us about what the formats are for the modes that you choose under the activity that you choose. And I know you're glazing over right now. And you're going to be choosing project outcomes or expectations. And finally, you'll be giving us details on the budget. And we'll ask you to add some verbal input on that budget as well, because last year we got budget figures that weren't explained at all. So we've improved the form this year. It's not all that different, but it should allow you to give us a really good idea of what it is you're talking about. Now project intent, you know what the word intent is. What's the intention? What is it that you're going to do? You can choose only one of these intents. Now this obviously is going to force you to choose one of these. And think about this as helping you to focus on the grant. Are you going to choose lifelong learning or information access or institutional capacity that's improving your library's capacity? Or are you going to choose economic employment development, human services, or civic engagement? Now all of these, especially like civic engagement and human services, you probably haven't thought about in terms of libraries. But actually that is what you do in your community. You do employ civic engagement and you do provide human services. These project intents are all reflected up above in the LSTA purposes. All of them come from those purposes. And these are all sections that the Institute of Museum and Library Services. These are all areas and intents that the IMLS wants you to say that you're doing. So that again when they get back from 50 states that there are 30 lifelong learning projects, all of them will have been fit into the same category and can be explained using the same terminology and language. Right now, you know, the creative writing that I used to do on the reports that I did, don't pass that on to IMLS, that's all eliminated. We can't do that anymore. It's all forced choice and we're passing that along to you. So you'll notice that under each of these project intents, you need to choose whether you're going to, like lifelong learning, are you going to improve users' formal education or are you going to improve the user's general knowledge and skills? Remember, you can only choose one of these 13 boxes here. When you click on that box, you get a dot within that box. If you've done that on one of them, you're done. You can't choose any more. So think about what it is that you're doing. Looks like I've chosen that. It's not going to let me do otherwise. Well, if your project is for information access, are you using it to improve users' ability to discover information resources or are you using it to improve their ability to obtain and use information resources? So one is discovery. One is to actually obtain and use. There's some of those. There seem to be subtle differences between those. So think carefully. If you're talking about institutional capacity, are you improving the library's physical and technological infrastructure or are you improving operations? Let me pause here just to make sure that you understand this. This one where it says improve, oh, I can do it there. I must have taken the other one away. If it says improve the library's physical and technological infrastructure, that doesn't mean that you can do library building or renovation. This is technological infrastructure. We had a question from one library and I have to try to find that. I was mistaken who actually sent it in. But one library did ask me if they could use these federal funds to make their front door ADA accessible. Unfortunately not. Years ago, LSTA used to have when it was called LSTA, Library Services and Construction Act. Used to have a title that allowed for both building and renovation. That is no longer allowed and I have verified that with our federal program officer and I have something in writing in case anybody needs in writing from IMLS. Those are not allowed. So under economic and employment development, if you choose that, are you going to improve the user's ability to use and apply information to employment support or to use and apply business resources? There are differences between those two. So this will help you focus on what it is you're doing if you choose that one, that intent. Under human services, are you going to use it to improve the user's ability to apply information related to their personal family or household finance or one that applies to their personal family health and wellness or one that applies to parenting and family skills? Those are all three different intents here. So choose one if you're choosing in that particular area. And then under civic engagement, are you going to, is your project going to improve the user's ability to participate in the community or to participate in community conversations around topics of concern? One has to do with participation in the community generally. The other has to do with topics of concern in the community. I could see this last one in particular or maybe even the first one here. But this last one in particular might tie in with some of the community needs that a number of you public libraries have identified within the community itself. I'll use the North Platte example since North Platte Public Library example since I've used this in strategic planning training. Cecilia Lawrence working on their strategic plan identified a need in the community to update and to renovate and fix up people's local houses because it was kind of looking ratty in town. The housing stock was not looking too great in town and you know that that doesn't really appeal to people who perhaps are considering settling there. Well, what Cecilia and her planning group did was they identified that as one of their community needs and they started shopping that around in the community and they found out that there was a huge interest in doing this. And they, as a result of all of this, they put together a series of, I believe it's about seven monthly programs at the library. They're going to have people coming in to talk about fixing up your house, people coming in to talk about interior painting, people coming in to talk about fixing up the outside of your house or doing landscaping yourself, doing yourself landscaping. She said that when she proposed this to a couple of people in town who were involved, who are involved in things like bringing money to town for new low-cost housing or for any of that sort of thing, they really got very excited about this because they said they've been wanting to do this for a long time but all their focus has been on building new. So that's the kind of thing that I don't know if North Public Library is going to apply for anything because they've got this set already but perhaps they want to expand this and that might be something that would fit under something that they identified in their strategic plan. All right, next we're going to activity and mode. Once you have chosen your project intent, your one project intent, then what activity are you going to have here to choose to try to meet that intent of your project? And again, you can choose only one activity area. Now we'll talk about modes in just a bit because you can choose more than one of those but you can choose only one of these activity areas that is going to be the primary activity of your project, even if you have others. And look at the definition here. This says that this is the federal definition and activity accounts for at least 10% of the total amount of resources committed to the project. So you shouldn't choose an activity that's only going to be minor. This should be something that is at least 10% of the resources whether that's local match or the grant that's going to cover this particular thing. All right, let's talk about the activities first of all and we'll skip the modes and come back to that in just a minute. The activities you can choose from are procurement. Procurement basically talks about your procuring, whether it's equipment supplies, hardware, software materials, whatever it is. That's fairly straightforward and you'll notice that you don't have to choose a mode or a way of supporting that activity because procurement is you're going to buy it, you're going to get it. That's sort of it. So if you choose procurement, you're finished with this particular section of the application form. If on the other hand you choose planning and evaluation, then you have to choose one of these modes. If you choose content which has to do with acquisition development or transfer of information, then you have to choose one or more of these modes under here. If you choose instruction, you choose one or more of these modes. Now let's talk about these modes for just a minute because I think they'll make more sense if you hear what they are. Procurement, if that's it, you already took care of it. If you're doing a planning and evaluation project, then it says mode. When information is collected, analyzed, and or disseminated, choose one or more. Now your project could be retrospective in that you're doing something about you're looking at old information or historical information or whatever, and so it could be retrospective, but it might be prospective that is looking into the future. Is your research effort, are you assessing future conditions of the project? It might on the other hand be both. Your project might be looking to the past, but it might also be projecting into the future of this planning and evaluation project. Let's go down to content involving the acquisition developer transfer of information. How is this information going to be made accessible? Are you going to do it through acquisition? Are you going to actually create content, and certainly public libraries are getting more and more into creation of content than they are just into acquisition? Are you going to do a descriptive sort of project? Are you going to do a lending of information project? That is, are you going to be circulating the materials electronically or physically? If you're going to be doing a preservation of content, then you check that one. Now granted, you can choose more than one of these. My guess is that your project will probably lean toward one or two of these, but likely not all five of them. That would be quite a huge project, I would think. Let's go to instruction. If you've chosen instruction as the activity, what will you do to deliver that instruction? Will you do a program? Will you do a presentation? Or will you deliver that through consultation, drop-in, or referral? Again, it could be all three. My guess is you're probably going to be choosing one of those. For example, let's suppose that you're going to be doing presentations. Let's use the North Platte situation. Let's suppose that they had applied for grant money to have these speakers come in. Now it turns out that all the speakers have already volunteered, so they probably don't need to do that, but let's suppose they do an expanded project and they want to bring in somebody from out of town. Maybe they need some money to cover the cost of an author talk. Some libraries do Skype programs with authors. Usually the author will volunteer to do that, and Skype is certainly free, but if the author needs to have some sort of presentation cost, maybe that might go under there. As I said, take your time and look through this. Honestly, it will make sense. Maybe not right now, but it will make sense if you review this and go through it and think about your project, your potential project, or the current project you have in mind. Beneficiaries is pretty straightforward. This isn't a cheating sort of thing because I don't want you to not do some of this application form if it's appropriate, but if the beneficiaries of your project, if it represents the general population, notice what happens to the rest of the application when I check on that. I mean not the rest of the application, but the rest of this section of the application. It goes away, but if you're targeting groups, then you need to go through the rest of this application, these 10 questions. Please don't consider this a punishment. Consider this a way of focusing your application and your project, and it really will help. Again, all of these categories come down to us from IMLS because they want to be able to report throughout the United States what has been funded with federal money and what groups, what age groups, what ethnic groups, whatever is being talked about by this project itself and is being dealt with. So let's go through this quickly. What best describes the geographic community? Most of us will be suburban or rural, but we do have some urban areas. Select one or more of the target groups. You could click all ages if you want to, or if you're aiming it at any of these particular groups, use the groups that you're aiming at. Again, it can be let's suppose you're doing preschoolers and grade schoolers, so you might want to do that. If you're doing teens, you'll want to do that. If you're doing young adults, that one, etc. If you're doing seniors, you know which boxes to click. If your activity is directed at specific economic situations, then select one or more of these, either living below the poverty line and, I shouldn't say either, they might be unemployed, or if it's not applicable, you check that and then uncheck these two. Notice that not applicable is something that you can check on these, so you don't have to necessarily answer these other than to say not applicable. If the activity is aimed at a particular ethnic or minority population, select one or more. In our state, we're likely to select Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, but some of the rest of you might have other groups that you might have represented there, such as American Indian or Alaska Native, probably American Indian in our case. Is this activity aimed at families? You can say yes or no. Is it aimed at intergenerational groups? If you said it's aimed at families, you can still say intergenerational groups here, but you probably can't say, yeah, you can say both of those. You can say, you can even say no up here and B, that's right. Those are not mutually exclusive. I'm sorry, that's my mistake. Is the activity aimed at immigrants or refugees? Is it aimed at those with disabilities? Is it directed at those with limited functional literacy or information skills? And finally, is it directed at groups that fall into a category not already listed? If you check, yes, you got an essay test to fill out here. You got to tell us what you're talking about if it's not covered up above. All right, let's go to formats. Now notice that format harkens back to each mode that you chose up above under activity. So remember, there's a connection between those two. So let's go back to mode. Let's go back to formats of the activity. And I think this is pretty straightforward. You'll notice a lot of repetition in here. So it's pretty easy to fill this particular section out, although it looks long, it's not that difficult to fill out. So looking back at whatever mode you chose above, if you chose a prospective mode, which is looking into the future, is this activity going to be done in-house or is there a third party involved in doing this particular thing? If it's retrospective, the same question. If you chose acquisitions as the mode under content, then are those acquisitions going to be digital, physical, or a combination of the two? So you could check the third one and not check the two up above. If you're creating content, is that going to be digital content, physical content, or a combination of the two? If you're describing the content, are you going to describe it digitally, physically, or a combination? If you're lending, notice I keep going back up to content. If you're lending the content, is that lending going to be done through digital means, physical means, or both? And if you're preserving the content, is that going to be done digitally, physically, or a combination of the two? Are you starting to make sense of this as I go through that way? Well, okay. Well, she's sharper than the average bear, so I hope it's making sense to you folks too. Noticing too that what you mentioned at the very beginning, you mentioned that don't come up with an idea first and then apply for the grant. Look through this application and you can see as you're going through, even before this, all the other parts of the activities and everything, you might not even have an idea of what I want to get money for. Look at the grant application, it'll give you ideas. Something will click and say, oh wait, that activity, we have a thing we do, or we have something that somebody suggested. The other thing that I think it will help you do is, I think it will help you plan and develop if you have sort of a generic idea. This will help you ask the questions like, oh, are we going to do digital preservation? Are we going to do that? Yeah, there are some options there. Look, are we going to pull this off? So it'll help you format, it will help you make a better case for the grant also is what it'll do. All right, so under, if the activity you chose is instruction, here are the, here are the formats and actually the structure is the mode, pardon me. Are you going to do a program? If you do a program, is it going to be virtual in person or a combination? If you're going to have presentation or performances, again, choose one the other or both. If you're going to offer that instruction through consultation, drop in or referral, is that going to be virtual? Are you going to have, are you going to have, who knows, online, genealogical or homework help? Are you going to have in person, somebody come in and say, hey, I'm an expert in social services, I'm going to be here on these hours if you have information about how to attain certain social services or even referral or whatever. Now, this part six project outcomes also called expectations, we put that word there because I think people know the word expectations perhaps better than outcomes. This is the section of the application from last year, which was the only section of which you could write. And as I said, everything got stuck into here. Don't put your executive, don't put your, what's it called in the beginning? Executive summary. Executive summary. In here, this is just for outcomes. What do you anticipate is going to happen? And I always put this question in, anytime we do strategic planning, I always say, what's the difference did this thing make? This is your opportunity to talk about what the outcomes will be and quite honestly, what difference this is going to make for your intended audience, whether that intended audience is your entire population or some or one of those target audiences that you identified up above. Now, we're going to talk just for a moment here about outcomes and you'll need to check everything, every method you're going to be using to figure out whether you have successfully met those outcomes that you anticipate you're going to do. This is an in essence an evaluation portion of the thing without being called an evaluation. That's basically what it is. Are you going to survey people after they receive the service or attend the program or whatever? Are you going to use participant observation? That is on the part of like if you go to the humanities program, for example, they always pass out those little half page sheets. They want you to fill out. Most people don't, but they should. Are you going to review administrative data? If, for example, you looked at, let's say you had kids in age group zero through five coming to your library and it represented 2% of the potential population in your community. If after you did your preschool program or you launched some preschool services, if that percentage went from 2% to 10% that's probably significant. You can get that by reviewing your administrative data. Are you going to interview people, whether on the spot or through a focus group or community meeting or whatever other you use? What method are you going to use to measure those outcomes? Do you anticipate continuing this project after the current reporting period ends? Some projects, this is not an appropriate statement and you probably can just say no. Some projects, if it looks like something that should continue, you probably will want to say yes. That will not gain you necessarily any more points unless you make the case that this is something that is desperately needed in your institutional library or your public library. If you say no, you're not going to continue it, well, that doesn't bode well for the reviewers of this thing when they look at it and say, well, if this is so important, if this was important enough to get money to start it, why aren't they going to continue this? Do you anticipate any changes in the project's scope? One of the things about federal money is that it is there to learn from. If you try to do this and it falls flat on its face, okay, that's okay. Failure is okay. Failure is okay. It doesn't have to be a success. It's a learning experience and then you or someone else can learn from it and do something different next time. And finally, do you anticipate any changes in the project? That's one thing to say too about the failure. That wouldn't be a reason to say you have to give the money back. You're trying something new. That's the whole idea. I'll tell you when the money would come back. I'll tell you something happened to me in a different state when I was working and I won't give you the details of it, but there was a federal project that went out that was supposed to put a computer in a library and an institutional library. It wasn't a state-run institution. I won't tell you what kind it was, but it was in an institutional library. In that case, and what happened was, a higher up within that institution took that computer out of the library and into his office. We repossessed that computer. That's when we take back stuff. No, failure is an option, especially they'll come back. We're not worried about your failing. We hope that it will, as Krista said, engage in learning experience for you. Let me tell you one thing before I go on to the budget. Since Krista is sitting right here, Krista is one of five people who will be reviewing these applications as they come in. Krista, Alana Novotny from our staff, Rod Wagner myself, and Denise Harders from Central Plains Library System will be the review team this year to look at these projects and make some decisions. Let me talk to you about the project budget. Right there at the top it says, please don't give us cents on this thing, round it to the nearest whole dollar amount. We don't want cents put in there. I'm not even sure, since Vern Bias, our computer guy, put this application together. I'm not even sure you can put .00 into this thing. Also, here's where we remind you again that at least 10% of this must be a cash match from local funds, at least 25% match overall, which there can be in-kind costs that would count toward that if there are hours of staff that are definitely committed to this project that can be counted toward that in-kind. We do ask you to put these budget items into these categories, and these we have standardized, so you would list how much of the grant money you're going to be using, let's say if you're buying computer equipment and peripherals, or other, which is under the category of equipment and capital costs. Under operating costs, it's broken up into these categories, which you can read yourself. I won't read them to you. You'll notice that there's a second column here that says how much in this computer equipment and peripherals category is going to be covered by local funds, and then that automatically will run over to a total here. The form will do that total put in here. I think we'll just do that. Let's suppose you're getting $10 of federal money and you're putting in $2 of your local funds, $12 comes up over there, and then the total runs down to that particular category as well. Under operating costs, the same is there, and under personnel costs, but note here that this is not usually an allowable grant cost, but can be used to show matching costs if dedicated to the project. That's the point I made earlier, so that's the only two boxes there under salaries and wages and benefits that you'd be able to put in if you have the money that you paid to a staff member that was dedicated to this particular project. Finally, we want you at the bottom here to describe each of those budget categories. Don't just put down, we're asking for $10 of computer equipment and peripherals, and don't just say the $10, put down here, the $10 will buy or whatever, with that $12 or whatever, we will buy the following. Because what our evaluation team discovered last year, in particular was Alana, who said, hey, don't you remember we said we'd add this and I hadn't. So we add this box. We need a description of what it is you're doing on each of these lines of the budget, so that we know what the heck it is you're going to be doing. We need to wrap this up. When you get to the end. It's about five after 11 on my clock here, but we'll go until Richard's done, and if you guys have any questions, we're not going to cut off here or anything. We'll go as long as he needs to get through the rest, which is almost the end here. And if any of you guys do have any questions, type them into the question section of your go-to web at our interface, anything you want to know more about, anything you're questioning about, how to fill the form or the rules, requirements or anything. Get that in so that Richard can answer them for you. I think I covered just about everything. You said that at the very end, you can save and submit your application. You can submit more than one if you submit another version of the application. We'll see them all. I get them all automatically through email. We'll use the most recent one that you submit, but you have up until that due date and due time in order to do this. There is a list on our website of applications that have been submitted. If you click on that, you'll see it will make me leave this page, which I want to anyway, and it will take me to this list of Central City Public Library and City Public Library, which are the only ones who have submitted grants so far. I want to encourage state-run institutions in particular to apply for these things. We have none on our phone call today. I'm going to talk to Sam Shaw and our staff about trying to shake up some of those people to do that. And one last thing I want to talk about is that if you are doing a newspaper digitization project, please go to our website and type in the search box, digitization. There it came up. That will take you to guidelines for Nebraska libraries considering newspaper digitization projects. Some of these projects have had some difficulties for various reasons, and I want you to be aware of these guidelines which our staff at the State Historical Society put together, and the primary problem that has occurred with newspaper digitization projects, this seems to be a popular one, is that you need to have written clear permission from the holder of the copyright, and I know that in some cases it's multiple newspapers and some of them are very old, and you may have trouble finding the news, the copyright holder, but get permission from the holders of the copyright for every use. You and any vendor that you contract with is going to make use of these. We have had problems with a vendor, let's say which one, that is digitizing newspapers and is potentially going to use those digitized newspapers for a for-profit venture of its own. If that's going to be the case, you need to make darn sure, I almost said another word, that the holder of the copyright has said, oh yeah, that's okay with us, because last session of the legislature there was a bill that came before the General Affairs Committee, and Rod had to testify before the General Affairs Committee as did the Nebraska Press Association, and we're hoping not to have to do that again this year, but we had some newspaper owners who were hacked off, even though they couldn't afford to do the digitizing themselves, were hacked off with one particular public library that did digitization without checking with them first. That's a huge no-no. Krista, I think I'm done, unless we've had some questions coming in, I think that's more than long enough. Yeah, nobody typed in anything while you were talking. Before we do wrap up, does it, oh wait, hey, of course, as soon as I say something, I made a liar, just popped up. Okay, so question is, will funds be available to purchase individual items to start a new circulating collection, basically money for acquisitions? Probably not. Let me tell you why. Unless that new collection has a specific purpose, it is addressing. Let's suppose that you're addressing, you have new immigrants coming into the community. Let's suppose that they open a new beef processing plant and you've got a whole bunch of new immigrants coming in who are not, their primary language is not English, you could very well make a really excellent case for putting together a collection that would address that particular community need, but just generalize we want more books for a collection, that ain't going to happen. Right, so have a focus on why, what you need a specific topic that you need to increase. Yeah, what is it you're addressing? That would be yes, but just where a new library want more stuff, the more vague, no, you need to really focus in. So it depends on your situation. Yep. Anything else? Anybody else want to type in a question and give you a couple of our minutes here to get if you're typing? Unfortunately, I can't see if someone's typing, so I don't know if you're in the middle of something. We can shrink this down. Do you want to put that arrow over? Oh, no, no, I've got it. Well, you guys know where I live. You can call me anytime on the 800 number or you know my email address, richard.milleratnebraska.gov. Ask anytime if you have questions. Don't forget to do dates. Yes, what is it again? Reminders of January 24th, 11.59 p.m. Central time, 10.59 p.m. Mountain time. And the Apple form itself, it timestamped stuff as you're doing it or will it shut down at that time? Well, yeah, you won't be able to use it after that time. Okay, I wasn't sure how to do it. Ronald Nuket at that point. He's got something set up to do that. Okay. I wish you well and your grand proposals. I'm looking forward to reading some good ones this year. Yeah, me too. I know we did have, as you said, some issues with some of the, and it was on our part on the design of the form itself, that stuff we were looking for, there was just nowhere for them to get that info to us. So there's a lot of back and forth. I remember Richard said, all right, this is good, but we need to know more of this. And sorry, it's our fault. And I'm hoping, yeah, with this one, the way it's been modified and updated, that it'll be a lot easier on your side to write these for us and for us to evaluate them as well. All right, nobody is tight. It looks like they always typed in any desperately urgent questions. So I think we will wrap up for this morning. Thank you very much, Richard, for coming and telling us about this year's grants and all across our fingers that we'll definitely have the funding and be able to do it and get you the menus that you need. And thank you, everyone, for attending. The show is being recorded, has been recorded, whatever the terminology is there. And we'll be posting it on our NCUPASLIVE website. And I'll show you here, from our Library Commission webpage, you can get to the NCUPASLIVE, I believe we're under education, yes, because we are. Could you do one more thing? Sure. Can you go back to that page for just a minute? Go to the bottom of that page. The digitization? No, the grant thing. I forgot to tell you, one thing, if you go to the bottom of that page, it might be there. The main one? Yeah, go to the grant page, where we were before. Go to grants, and over to Library Improvement Grant, up one notch, over Library Improvement Grant. I wanted to show you one more thing at the bottom of the page, we just added it, that's why I forgot it, at the very bottom. Just scroll down, yeah. Notice it says Library Improvement Grant Completion Report. If you click on that for just a minute, I do okay. You'll notice that at the bottom, let's go to the bottom of that form, it asks you what LSTA purposes you chose, was it addressed by your project, the project intent, the activity, the beneficiary of the outcome. So everything that you do at the end, and this will be due September 30th of 2017, it has to harken back to the application form that you did. So that reinforces this more. They'll match up, right? No, that's fine. Yeah, so you do the application, then you do the grant, and then you have the completion of the end, which you link all right back around. That allows us to tell the feds what you did. Yeah, and see, so it shows that it all matched up. Thank you, sorry. No problem. All right, yes, so Encompass Live is on our website under education and training, because it's one of our, you can see e-credits and whatnot. But you can also just Google us, which is nice, we've discovered we are still, the only thing on the internet called this, so when you Google Encompass Live or search in whatever your favorite engineer choice is, there we are. So that we're up for today's show. The recording of this will be available on our website later this afternoon, I'll be optimistic. And to be right here underneath our upcoming shows is our archives link. And this has all of our previous shows here, it'll be posted here, I'll be the most recent ones are at the top, and we will have a link to the show. We don't have a presentation for this one, but we'll just have a link to the website and a link to the recording that is on our YouTube channel for you guys to watch later. And I'll email all of you to let you know when that is available. I'll be joined us next week when our topic is Wikipedia, which I know over the years has sometimes to some people been a controversial topic, but my personal opinion and people who were actually from this organization, Wikimedia Foundation, is that Wikipedia is a good thing and we can, as librarians, make it better. Can you read that title for me? I can. Well, actually I had a discussion yesterday. Hashtag one live one ref or one live one ref. We're not sure the pronunciation and we'll find out next week. A citation as a gateway into librarianship on Wikipedia. This is a program that was a campaign that was done last January. It's the anniversary, the birthday, whatever, of Wikipedia. And I'm doing it again this month, next week starting, where if librarians across the country just update, just confirm, enter one valid citation to some article, something on Wikipedia, we can make it more accurate, more useful, and people can actually use it to start their research. No, you do not cite Wikipedia. That's not the purpose of this, but it is a useful thing. It gets you started in those citations at the bottom of all those entries. We can update them. And so, Alex Stinson is the GLAM Wiki Strategist at the Wikimedia Foundation, GLAM standing for galleries, libraries, archives, museums. And he is the, along with some other people, came up with the idea of this program last year and they're doing it again this year. And we're going to have a whole group of great Wiki librarians, as he described them, come on the show with us to talk about the program, the project itself, how you can get involved, how you can go and edit something, and what's going on with that. So, definitely sign up for that with us next week and any of our other upcoming shows we have. We have a lot more coming onto the schedule, so keep an eye on here for new ones being added in for this month and next month and future. Also, Encompass Live is on Facebook, so if you're a big Facebook user, pop over there, give us a like. We post reminders of when the shows are coming up, when we don't want to log in right now. Thank you very much, Facebook. It always does that now. Here's a reminder for today's show, when the recordings are available, new shows coming up, we always post that on there. So, if you're a big user of Facebook, give us a like and you'll keep up on what we're doing. Other than that, that wraps up for today. Just going to double check. No urgent last-minute questions that came in. If you do need to know anything, call Richard. He's here. He can tell you what you need to know about Library Improvement Grants for this year. And thank you very much and I'll see you next time on Encompass Live. Bye.