 All right. 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 10 a.m. Central Time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We record the show every week as we are this morning and it is then posted onto our website in our show archives. And I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of those archives. 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 may be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. For those of you not here in Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries. So we provide services to all types of libraries in our state. So you will find things on our show that are for all types of libraries. Public, K-12, academic, corrections, special museums are really our only criteria is that it is something to do with anything library. We do different types of presentations, book reviews, interviews, many training sessions, demos of products and services. Interesting things from that we think libraries are doing out there we have presenters on. Sometimes their sessions are specifically run by Nebraska, presented by Nebraska Library Commission staff for services and resources that we offer here in Nebraska. But we also bring in guest speakers too from around the country. And we'll get to today's show in just a second, but I first want to do a brief little talk about introduction about what we're doing here at the Nebraska Library Commission related to the COVID-19 pandemic for our Nebraska libraries. We are collecting resources here. You can see we have a blog post here that is posted to the top of our library's website, COVID-19 and pandemic resources. And we also have a listing of Nebraska libraries. We've been collecting information as well as we can, having them submit to us or we are searching out their websites or Facebook pages to show closings. Originally it was for closings and accommodations, what was available. And now as libraries are discussing reopenings if we know anything about that. If you go to the actual page, this blog post, we have where you can get to those lists. And then we have a sub page of information depending on your situation. If you're a business or you're just looking for an employment, have your kids at home still. But then a specific section about libraries, since we are talking about libraries here, we have a lot of different resources here, just things that we have collected. If there's been webinars or information put out, we've tried to link to it here. Summer reading was a big deal, a big topic. So we've got specific information about that and information about reopening your library that we have collected as well. So if you are a Nebraska library, please do keep an eye on this page. We're always adding things to it. And then just yesterday we finally added because it's been released the OSHA guidance on preparing workplaces for COVID-19. That's something that was just put out. So this will always be updated with things for our libraries here. If you are not from a Nebraska library, you check your state resources, your state library, your state library association. They may be providing these key same kind of resources as well. So let's get started with today's show. And I am going to present your control right now to you, Laura. Sounds great. So you should see that little pop up letting you show your screen. There we go. All right. There we go. Got your slides going. Okay. All right. So on today's Encompass Live, our topic is reading for justice, a database for YA and youth literature. This is a presentation of any of you have been with me for the last few weeks. It was scheduled to present at library technology conference up in St. Paul, Minnesota. And it was as many things were canceled. And I have been reaching out to many speakers from that conference to come on to Encompass Live. And this group we have here today, Laura, Katie and David are all we're supposed to present there as well. So they're going to share about this reading for justice database that they're working on. And I'm just going to hand over to you guys to introduce yourselves and what you've been doing here and share with us all about this great, new resource that hopefully we'll get to you soon. Yes. So my name is Katie Redarath. I am a recent MLIS graduate from St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minnesota. I also work as a visual resources specialist for McAllister College in St. Paul. I'm Dr. David McCoskey. I've been serving as an adjunct professor of computer science at St. Catherine University since 2010. And I'm Laura Bell. I'm also a recent grad of St. Kate's. And I work part time for the Minnesota legislative reference library and part time for a nonprofit called Metro Net that serves the seven county region of the Twin Cities. So welcome to our presentation today. Reading for justice database was created at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minnesota. It's a project that started as a database for database management and then morphed into an independent study in the fall of 2019. So today we're going to present a bit on the background and give a demonstration of our database right now in our user interface and then we'll take some questions at the end. I think it's important to let you know that Katie and I are cisgender heterosexual white females. So we've made some assumptions that might not be correct. Well, our inspiration for creating this database relates back to three key experiences we had as students in our MLIS program. First, in our LIS 7030 class for the organization of knowledge, we learned about cataloging and classifications. We learned about the out of date Library of Congress subject headings and how important detailed and accurate records are for finding information. In our LIS 7040 class for information access services, we were asked to shadow a reference librarian. I chose to shadow a librarian from Galaxy Library in Apple Valley, Minnesota. So during my time with this librarian she mentioned a spreadsheet she had made to keep track of particular interests or techniques and children's books. The list was several pages long and it included topics like valuable features, people of color, fathers and books are gentle and quiet books. Additionally, we knew from taking LIS 7030 that the Library of Congress subject headings were subpar and lacking in description for children's and YA literature. But we had not realized that librarians working directly with children and youth had to go to such lengths to identify book subjects. While library catalogs have been improving and you provide many inclusive subjects to research by, it's either impossible or difficult for users to find a complete list of these subjects. Even when there are mostly complete lists, social justice subjects are also listed with all the other ones that might be less relevant to users than the specific social justice topics they're looking for. For our third key experience, I also happened to be taking LIS 7190, which was a class for social justice and children's and YA literature with Dr. Sarah Park-Dallin at the same time we were beginning to develop our database. I knew from that class and the work I was doing in there that there really wasn't a comprehensive list containing social justice classifications for children's and YA lit. While many blogs and live guides and resources on the internet offered great lists of books based on certain topics, there didn't seem to be any sort of database where people could search multiple social justice topics at once or even overlap topics for more complex character identities. So with all this in mind, we were inspired to create a comprehensive database that would allow librarians and patrons to search for children's and YA lit based upon the themes of social justice. So, as I said, the goal of our project was to create a social justice themed database for librarians and patrons that would provide better access to book subjects centered around these themes. The reading for justice database does not locate a book's physical location or availability within a library system, and it does not function as a separate library catalog. Instead, its purpose is to serve as a tool for subject identification for children's books and YA literature, and it is meant to be a tool to supplement a library's existing catalog. It's also worth mentioning that this project was meant to scale up and be able to expand beyond its current form. As we walk through our database and the user interface, we will be referring to it as it currently exists. Near the end of our presentation, we have dedicated some time to talk about our future hopes and goals for our project. In its current form, the database holds 67 books that are categorized under eight overarching subjects and 121 underlying terms used to tag the book's social justice themes. The data collected from the 67 books in the database demonstrates its effectiveness, purpose and functionality by showing how multiple subjects and terms can overlap in one book. We will show you how these subjects and terms overlap later on in our presentation when we give you a demonstration. So, the development of our database. In our first course in database management, we had three phases to our project, and in that final phase, we ended up with eight tables that were searchable in the command line using my SQL. On the last day of database management, Katie and I were walking out to the parking lot and talking about how great our project was and how we didn't want it to just end with eight tables searchable in a command line. So, David had offered for anyone in the course to expand their project into an independent study, and so we made it to the parking lot and turned right around and went back inside and asked David if he would be willing to turn our project into an independent study for fall of 2019. One of the things that David asked us was, you know, how do we want this to go what are our goals, what do we want to see with a user interface and, you know, what are our hopes and dreams. So, he had us develop wireframes first and then suggested using PHP, my SQL, HTML and CSS to create our user interface. It's really important to tell you that currently the database and our user interface is hosted locally only on our computers we have not made this live yet and we'll get to that later. We use GitHub to house all of our code right now it made it easier to share and edit code when we couldn't work on things in person and then the last phase of our independent study was creating test cases to make sure everything was working the way we wanted it to and then they have our peers review our subjects and terms list because Katie and I are cis white gender cis gender white heterosexual females, sorry, a little nervous. Yes, so as Laura said do the scale of our initial project in our database management class. We had only selected two subjects and the related terms initially at the onset of our project. Those subjects and terms included gender terms and racial identities. We decided to use these two subjects after hours of researching book lists and social justice themed web resources. As well as reviewing the information I had access to and my social justice teams children and why a lit class I was taking alongside our database management course. After collecting data on the books we had found. We decided that choosing gender terms and racial identities for our two main topics would give us enough overlapping data to accomplish our goals and demonstrate the effectiveness and purpose of our database at that point in time. So as Katie mentioned our data was limited to those two subjects. So, at the end of database management we had eight tables and this was our conceptual conceptualization of how we thought the database should work how we thought our tables should be connected to each other. So as you can see on this slide, the eight tables are on the left there for you but then the arrows on the right kind of point to how all of our date or how all of our tables were connected so each subject and term table. Each subject had two tables. So there was a reference table and the term table and then the ISBN would connect the gender term back to the title and then the same thing for the subjects and all of our other terms. So we'd have to have two tables for every single subject that we had, and that that seemed very unmanageable when we were imagining this scaling up much larger. So our final database right now has eight subjects and that would have been 16 tables that we would have had to have for each of our subjects. Yes, so at the onset of our independent study before we began to code our user interface, David had asked us to drop wireframes to expand upon the details we wanted featured on each page. We, we, excuse me, we knew we wanted search capabilities for authors titles and ISBNs, and we also knew we wanted our results to display authors illustrators and translators. The wireframe was created for our admin edit page, and we also created wireframes for an additional reports page and user search page, creating the user search page, and talking about the additional subjects and terms we wanted to add to the database helped us to realize we needed to rewrite our database as Laura had said at that point there were too many cross cross reference tables and adding more of them for each term and subject would have made querying our results too complicated. So we needed to simplify the structure of our tables before we could move forward. So on this slide, we are showing what our tables look like right now so we have seven database tables and then we have one center table that contains the work ID the ISBN the title and the image URL for each of our books in our database. We also have separate tables for authors translators and illustrators subjects and terms, and then on the right there you can see the work to term table that is our main linking table to make sure everything will work. So there's a work ID and a term ID and that's what connects those titles to all of the terms and subjects that we have in our database. So that's just a way of simplifying everything as Katie had mentioned earlier to and develop more general queries so we could code functionality of our site much easier. Yes, so now that you have an understanding of the underlying database. I'm going to give you a brief overview of the functionality of our user interface. Our database functions as three main individual pages that are not linked to or accessible through the Internet as Laura had mentioned earlier. The report page displays data from all of the books currently listed in the database. This information includes the title authors illustrators translators and ISBN of the books, as well as an image of the books cover. Each additional page relies upon the accuracy of our reports page in order to produce effective search results. The user search page three boxes provide users with the opportunity to search the database by title authors and ISBN titles and authors may be searched by their full titles and names or by single words and individual names. The subjects and terms are listed below the search boxes which are able to be selected with a series of checkboxes at the bottom of the page users have the option to select or select all. Once users have completed their search, the results appear below the subjects and terms list. As the database is only a functioning prototype at this point in time, the results of the user search are not yet filtered by the best or most accurate results. Similarly to our user search page, the admin search page looks like and functions almost exactly the same. The only difference is that at the bottom of each record, there is an edit and delete button. Selecting the edit button allows an administrator to edit the records data and selecting delete will permanently delete the record. Books can also be added to the database by the way of a create a new work button on the admin search page. The create a new work page is identical to the edit page with the exception of having blank fields instead of fields that are already occupied. So we will now take more time to explain these pages individually starting with our reports page. So these are just a few screen grabs from what our reports page looks like right now. We're presenting our pages in the order that we created them because everything built off of everything else. So all of our search pages come back to this reports page. And this page took us forever to code and build because we wanted to make sure everything looked exactly the way we wanted it to. That all of the metadata was being pulled in properly to the right places all the subjects were coming in all of the terms the image URL was coming in. We used image URLs instead of downloading the photos to our database to save us some space and computer working. Yeah, I think that was everything for the reports page was there anything else guys that I should say about this. One thing you can see already with the report page is the combination of of subject in terms for each work. You can see that it differs and depending on what you're looking for you may find a single work for any particular given term. Yes, so for the user search page as I mentioned earlier it allows for a title author and ISBN search capabilities. Since it is still in its prototype phase the search box is still query step words such as thought a of an and users are able to search by a full title and author name or by entering the author name as their first name just their last name or a single word from a title. Additionally, the list of results is not currently ranked to fit the best match of a user search. This is something we will touch on later in our demonstration. Under the three search boxes are the series of checkboxes identifying the subjects and the terms from our databases tables. We created the layout of these checkboxes using open source code from bootstrap. Users can select as few or as many checkboxes as they would like to and the query will pull all of the books that have those term identifiers. Below the checkboxes are the submit all and none buttons selecting all will cause each box to add a layer of search using my SQL prompts and bring the user to the full reports page which gives them access to every title available in the database. Then we have admin search which works exactly the same as user search with the exception that when you search you get those at edit and delete buttons that you can see on the right under each record. So if you were to select edit it would open into a new tab, you would have the existing metadata for that title would pull in automatically including any checkboxes that were already selected. This is the admins opportunity to add additional authors, translators, illustrators, edit the ISBN or say the image URL breaks, you need to update that that's the place to do it. It's also a good opportunity for say a patron is reading a book and they're like you know this really didn't fit what you said it would. So it's your chance to update those checkboxes and to keep your collection accurate. And then as you see kind of on the top or to the left I'm sorry that success page is what happens when you submit at it so it runs a bunch of SQL commands that will delete everything for that work ID. It runs inserts for everything that is still in those boxes so if you really didn't update the title it's still going to delete the title but then it'll just insert it again for that same work ID. And then if you were to select delete it just deletes everything the the code you see kind of at the top above the yes please delete in the middle there that's for debugging purposes so that will go away it's not going to always be there that was just so we knew everything was deleting in the right order. I know we discussed the power of delete a lot when we were creating this. We wondered whether that should really be in the admin section or whether that should be left totally on the back end and done in the command line. But the more we talked about it the more it made sense to keep your collection current to be able to delete things right away when it's no longer in your catalog. Oh I have create new to so if you were to search in admin search and nothing came up. You will receive a button at the bottom that says create new work and we we created this in the admin section so say the database becomes 2000 books big. We need the ability to search for a book to see whether it's already in this database and if it's not then you can create that new work right away. So the admin then will select create new work it'll open into a new tab and you'll get the same edit page that you would for the admin edit it'll just be blank and then the admin can fill in all of the metadata for the new work. And then it's just a bunch of insert command statements that will add it to a new work ID, like the next one in line in the database. And then our last phase of creating our entire project where those test cases that I mentioned at the very beginning. So, we created a huge document with every possible thing that we could test in our database to make sure the user interface worked exactly how we expected it to. So a few examples of these are can I add a new title doesn't show up in the database with a new work identifier. If I delete something did it actually delete completely there was a time and that's why that debugging was on that last screen was because there was a time when we were hitting delete. And then you generate the report and the book would still be there but nothing else would be there would just be like the title. What's happening so things weren't deleting completely for us so we were able to work out those kinks. And then if I am searching for a certain title does it return all of the subjects that are attached to that title. In addition to our test cases. The list of subjects in terms of sent out to several people and our peers for review, since Laura had mentioned both of us are Caucasian American middle class as gender heterosexual females and David shares a similar male identity feedback on our projects list of identifiers is absolutely necessary. The suggestions and edits made by the representatives of the identified communities was extremely helpful and informative. And further advice, our list of identifiers is updated to reflect a more accurate representation of social justice terms and subjects conducting conducting this peer review of our subjects and terms helped us to acknowledge our biases and surrounding our own identities at the onset of this project both Laura and I had acknowledged that we do not know everything about social justice or its terminology. And we understood that our approach to this project was skewed based upon our own experiences. So we have been careful to try and represent our subjects in terms as appropriately and accurately as possible. The subject headings we have used were pulled from the books themselves, and those that were not pulled directly from the books were gathered from resources we spent time researching and believed to be fair and inclusive. With this in mind, we were also forced to make a few assumptions in order to prevent a default from skewing our data. It's really acknowledged in our society that whiteness or Caucasian American as a default, as well as heterosexuality and cisgender being default identifiers. However, they're not actually defaults and we wanted to make sure our database included them as if they were not a default option. We did run into a problem though, books with characters who have this default identifier were not labeled or acknowledged as having that identifier in the books description. So that being said, as we were collecting our data, any book that's not label a racial identity or gender term was assumed to be either Caucasian Caucasian Americans as gender and or heterosexual. We did not read every book and can therefore not confidently say whether or not those characters truly identify that way. But these three identifiers that are usually defaults were labeled with as much consideration as possible. And this is another reason why those edit buttons are so important in our database is because if we were wrong and a patron were to come up to us and say hey this actually isn't correct, you would be able to edit those identifiers quickly. The other challenge we faced was time. There were many instances in which Laura and I had to rein ourselves in because our goals are so lofty for this project. Aside from some basic HTML coding we hadn't coded anything else with any other coding language before taking David's class. And after just three months of an introduction to database management, we jumped right into an independent study that challenged us to learn a lot of code in a very short amount of time. Needless to say the steep learning curve was something we haven't really anticipated, but David was great about managing our expectations and helping us to redirect our goals towards more attainable outcomes. As we said at the beginning of our presentation, this database currently houses 67 books. Well, we had originally hoped to add more these 67 books represent a diverse set of identifiers that allowed us to create our databases functioning user interface prototype. Still due to time restrictions, we were unable to find books to match every subject and term at this point in time, which we will demonstrate in a few minutes. But now we're going to begin our demonstration by walking through each of the pages we told you about. The moment you've all been waiting for. Okay, so this is the reports page. This is how it is live on my computer right now. So this first title right here that you see is a great example of a title author illustrator and translator with the ISBN and the subjects and terms clearly stated if I scroll down a little bit here. And like the symptoms of being human as an example of multiple subjects and then where you've got one subject that's got a couple terms attached you can see that we've just comma space. Yeah, it's a report page so far. So this is our user search page. So if Laura can scroll down, you see that we have our three search boxes, and then under our eight overlying subjects and 121 underlying terms. So it's a big list but it's all on one page which makes it user friendly so you can see everything and check as many or as few as you would like to at a time. And then if we go back up to the top we'll do a couple searches for you. First we'll do by an author's full name. I'm just going to hit enter to search but you can also hit that submit button results. And then we can also do by an author's last name or first name whichever one. So we used Smith, and there's two titles by different Smiths. And then we'll show you searching by a full title, which will include a stop word all, and you'll see how that affects the queried results as well as how we mentioned earlier that our database currently doesn't order them by the most accurate results. So we typed in destroy all monsters for our title and you can see that it's the third or fourth result that comes up. So this is something we'll talk about for our future hopes later, but for the titles that came up before it you can see that the all in parallel was pulled for the stop word or allegedly and things of a similar nature. Yep, and now selecting a few of the checkboxes at random we're just going to do a couple of them. At the top. I guess I should have listed what I clicked on. Yep, so users can search by just checkboxes as well. And then we had also mentioned that some of our checkboxes don't come up with anything at all, because we only have a limited number of books at this point in time. We didn't find enough books for some of our religious practices and we also know just from the database we don't have a book currently on schizophrenia so Laura is going to conduct a search just to show you what happens if there's not a book with that subject identifier. So results returned. And then as we mentioned also selecting all will select every checkbox at once and submitting that will give you the full reports page for every title that's in our database and selecting none will get rid of all those checkboxes. I can show bouncing back and forth. Okay. So reports page again in that same order you can see the top. Okay. Okay, and now we're going to do an admin search. So my favorite title that I like to use for example is warcross, you can tell by our slides that that's the one I use for all of our screen grabs. So I'm going to cross with the edit and delete buttons at the bottom. So I'm going to select edit first, and it's going to open up into a new tab that you can see here, and it pulled in all the metadata so we've got title is bn the image URL, the author and then we, we got this really cool piece of code through GitHub is open source and you're able to add these extra boxes so if there's more than one author you can just click this little plus and add another author. And then it pulled in all of the checkboxes that are associated with this title that you can see here. So if I were to change anything which I'm not going to change anything today because I don't think there's anything I need to change at the moment I'm going to click submit. I'm going to open another new tab with this success page so you can see that it deleted the authors the translators the illustrators the work to terms from this work or where this work ID is from the center table, and then it inserts all of these statements back into each of its tables. So, then the other thing I'm going to delete this book and we're going to see whether it works I was a little hesitant to try it before this demonstration because I didn't want to break something. So, I'm going to click delete. It's going to open into yet another new tab with the code at the top that tells us the order things will be deleted in. Am I sure. Yes, I'm going to please delete. And then successfully deleted. So, to test this, we're going to go back to admin search. And I'm going to type in war cross again, and hopefully, no result, no results returned so I was successful in deleting my book. And because I still have this in my collection. I'm going to create a new work. And then I can type in all of the metadata again and read it to my collection. Very brave of you to do that right live during the show. We discussed it. If it didn't work. This is an example of it being a prototype and working out a thing to demonstrate absolutely sometimes they don't always work. Yeah, it was a success. So, is there anything else that either Katie or David would like to add to our demonstration before going back to our slides. Okay. We will finish up. Yes, so the subjects in terms we use to categorize the children's and young adult books that we have in our reading for justice database cover social just social justice topics in depth. The functionality of the database allows users to select any and or all the keywords they would like to from our list of 121 terms, as you saw with all those checkboxes, having every subject in underlying term accessible and a clear format on one page makes our database user Since library catalogs generally cover social justice topics in a broader way, our database better bandages, better manages the terms and specifics of social justice categories without including extra subjects and terms related to other broad topics such as animals, geography occupations, or things that would intermix with the social justice terms on a normal on a normal library catalog. So this database is in its current state, a prototype or proof of concept application. There are a number of steps which admittedly should be taken to ensure its security on the wider internet and facilitate its long term maintenance for the future. So if this database becomes involved, or is adopted by a library or larger institution, many changes would be recommended in order to successfully integrate this new subsystem into an existing user facing library system. Our first recommendation would be related to the selection of our current subjects and terms, our choices of these identifiers as we mentioned were guided mainly by intuition or what we had found on the book. But more research and advice from scholarly and community sources would be needed to ensure the accuracy of the subjects and terms we used to identify the books. Our second recommendation relates to the database of search functionality. So our prototype as you saw included the stop words like all in destroy all monsters pulling results from multiple books. This is something that would be removed for the stop words from a more complete version of our database. And we would also change it so that a formal equation assigning weight to each of the search fields would be applied so that when you search for a title such as destroy all monsters that would be the first title that would appear in the search results. So as Katie mentioned, this is a prototype. And, you know, by way of their academic and professional experience, Katie and Laura were able to demonstrate effectively that this was a good idea, and that the proof of concept database would put some substance behind that intuition. And the demonstration that we showed, yes, includes lots of debug messages and some some prototype layout and there's always imperfections here and there. The question still is though, is this a good idea? Does this satisfy a demonstrable need that library systems currently have? And we were able to say with confidence that it does. The question is the question. Next is, what do we do as far as deploying this to a wider audience? We've identified a couple of issues as far as internet security is concerned. Those are listed specifically here as SQL injection, cross-site scripting attacks, mainstream and institutional security. If this database was basically folded into the software of an existing system, I'm going to cite something like Hennepin County, which is the library system for Minneapolis, Minnesota. They could bring this prototype in-house, rewrite it, include their own login security, their own internet security because it's already installed in their system. Conversely, if they would rather opt to license it, in other words, it would be its own standalone system and they would license it. We could do that as well. What that would mean is separating the user interface from the database so that the database would be accessible by way of sort of a business-to-business architecture called Model View Controller so that the Hennepin County, just as an example, system could query our database and just receive back the information that they would need on a particular title by ISBN as far as what terms and subjects accompany that. So they could use our information but their own interface, depending on how they wanted to do that. So, whether the system is adopted by a larger institution such as Hennepin County or does is standalone, it could, by way of the new architecture, be accessible to library systems nationwide. Okay. And with that, we thank you for listening to us and we will gladly take questions, comments, suggestions, and we've put our contact information up to in case anyone wants to just shoot us an email. Great. Okay. Thank you, Laura, Katie and David. You did great. You know, you said you're a little nervous but that you did perfectly fine explaining everything. Even me, I'm not a coder myself at all. I will go in and play around with code and hopefully not break it. But as far as creating some scratch, that is beyond my expertise, but I did understand everything you're talking about. So that's a plus. I think I'm lost and all during the discussion. We do have some comments and questions. If anybody does have anything you want to ask, go ahead and type it into the questions section of your GoToWebinar interface and I'll read it off here. We did have one comment right at the beginning that I think was great. It says, heck yeah, women coders love it. And then appears to be a little happy cat face smiling. I've worked for St. Catherine for almost 10 years now and definitely women definitely have a place in IT. I think, I think chiefly because they bring some really good, well-grounded ideas to computer science. And if this project is any demonstration to me, it's that professional academic intuition is really good foundation for brand new systems, especially ones that serve the larger community. Yeah, identifying that there's a need out there. Anybody can do that and then figuring out how do we serve that? How do we fill that need? You mentioned just the end there about how other places could potentially actually use this. Have you reached out to anyone like the library system or anything to sell it to them or suppose or anything? Or is this just mainly you guys are just doing this kind of in-house still? Not yet. This is our first presentation to a larger audience. We were hoping Lib Tech would actually, or Live Tech, I never get the name right, would be our first exposure to an audience outside our own. So yes, we're definitely seeking a larger audience, whether that's, you know, Hennepin County or the Bush Foundation or McKnight Foundation. These are two foundations here in Minnesota who support efforts similar to this one. And then that Live Tech conference is also that is a conference for techie people like you guys. So that's definitely the starting audience is definitely a good idea to start with those people that will definitely understand everything you did. I'll be able to give you some tips and everything. So let's see, we do have some questions here. Now somewhere from the beginning, and I'm not sure they wanted, there's more techie questions here and about, you know, people saying if they can use this themselves. But as you explained, it's not, you know, publicly available yet. Someone's here to explain neurodiversity. Because you mentioned that at the very beginning as someone of your topics like what is like a definition of that that you either you know of or you were using specifically for this. Yes. So neurodiversity, I'm going to botch the definition just off the top of my head but it covers any topic related to mental illness or mental health and like related terms. So if you want to include depression and anxiety, ADHD, if that makes sense and answers that question. It also covers things like autism where a person lives with it for the duration of their life but adapts successfully. That's what I've mainly heard of it related to yeah. A lot of those are turning out to have more in common than not. So the term neurodiversity is meant to bring those together. Right. So your your output right now is just the SQL database because we got a lot of questions about how this is going to be out. Is it going to be available in a wiki format or a live guide or is that even something you're thinking about yet? I mean that's way in the future still or for someone else to use your, you know, be a building box for. I think in our original conception we were thinking this would end up on some sort of website that we have a little bit of server space with our database on it and that's kind of how it would live. I'm not sure how that's changed though over the last year that we've been working on this. So some thoughts. Yeah, I guess we both Laura and I were going through a lot in the last few months I mean we both graduated we were both seeking job opportunities and got new jobs and are dealing with a lot on our plates and so while we had decided to present this at live tech and see where it could end there obviously with COVID everything kind of shut down and so this opportunity is kind of restarting and opening those doors to see where it can go but yes we will definitely need to have more discussion about how we want to move forward. Right. Right. Well hopefully this I hope this will help you guys like I said as I said at the beginning we are recording the whole show it'll be out there publicly for anyone to access so anybody who you guys shared anywhere you want to pass it on to people saying you want to know what we did watch this. And so if you want to share with any of your colleagues you think might have some good input on this as far as from the coding side from the, any of these communities that you're trying to, you know, I'll be GTQ, you know, whoever might have some you have some comments here from a lot of people are saying I have an idea I have an idea. So they're already trying to give them our way. We'd like to know. One of our main concerns right now is, where does this project go next. And we've identified it as institutional support, we need more support for this work. Then we currently have we're kind of reaching the end of the, the academic school year and Katie and Laura are graduating so who picks it up and what supports it from this point forward. We welcome all the suggestions and all the ideas that that anyone would offer us. They're all great. They're all, you know, future work, but just know that we're trying to figure out what comes next. Absolutely. All right, let's see. We got some other specific questions here. There's a to see us and I'm going to try and abbreviate some of these maybe and just to see a good way to try and test when you talk about testing it and you know what you're trying to break it. So that would have been perfect. Good job. Definitely some great comments. There's such a need for a database like this is definitely people are saying that. Thank you for sharing. Nice job. Interesting information may be good for family services consultants to when they're trying to figure out I there's so many things coming into my office. What do I, there's something I can help to use this. Yeah. So let's start as someone has a suggestion for an LGBTQ plus subject heading terminology. They worked a lot in the community and using using women rather than female because female is biological connotations associated. I am a woman a trans woman or whatever rather than a female. Just just along those lines we may need to include both just because a lot of times the work itself is what informs the use of the term. And sometimes in these kind of anything for anyone who is like on the cataloging side of the library world. You're trying to figure out if someone was looking for this particular for how do we get someone to this particular title that we know they want what are they going to type into the database. What are they going to type into the catalog, whether it is appropriate acceptable or whatever. You want to try and get them to the right resource that they want in the end. And sometimes you have to include everything and anything they might type in to get them where they need to go. Someone know about accessing it themselves which as we know it's not actually a full database out there for anyone to use right now. So that's a keep an eye on it for a future. And I said you had not read all of the books yourself. So what were you using to ensure the quality or authenticity of the books that you do have in there right now. How did you pick 60 whatever it was. Yes, that's a great question. So as I had mentioned I was taking a social justice and Children's Violet class at the same time. So we pulled many of the books from the resources that I was given in that class. Whether Dr Sarah Park Park Dallin gave us web resources or book lists that she had recommended in our class. A lot of the books are pulled from what I read in that course, as well as one of our projects was to complete. What was it we basically had to do a demonstration where we would give a talk in a library and so my classmates made book lists of certain topics based on our subjects and themes. And so the books that they pulled we looked at those that they had recommended. And being titles out there and doing more research on book lists that were recommended on sites such as Goodreads or even library thing subjects and lists that recommended them as being accurate and representative. Awesome love library thing. That's one of my favorite. Yeah. Let's see someone is a member of someone's notes you can search for. Oh I think it might have been into they've missed the beginning they missed the beginning to come into late. I want to know about searching for generous specifically for exotic specific things for example lesbian fiction or lesbian nonfiction biography. That's the checking off the boxes. So in our original creation of this database when we were drawing out all of our little tables before we had actually coded anything in database management, we had discussed genre as one of the options to narrow a search by. So having nonfiction versus fiction and then narrower from that to we just it was too big to try to do in a little amount of time, but that's definitely in consideration future. Yeah, yeah. I think that's one thing she said basically came in late so yeah this isn't actually a full database say work you know something to go and use just yet as it is a proof of concept. I think and it is proven yes yeah. Yes, and in addition to that this isn't supposed to be like a library catalog. It's just to supplement the catalog so even if people were to come and use this to find subjects related to social justice themes then they could go back into the existing library catalog and search by fiction nonfiction genre specific titles. It says they need kind of like an open source type concept. Right. So if there was a library system that used this in conjunction, they could narrow their search first by genre, and then call our system to narrow it even further or refine it even further by category. Yeah. All right so they love this entire concept I hope to see it move forward. Just a clarifying question about the admin side of things that was demonstrated. Once this database is adopted by other library systems with these administrative changes still be available such as deleting adding books etc and would they reflect across all database holders or would that be more controlled. I guess that'd be something to determine yeah. So the admin function is ideally just for administrative staff so library staff who are controlling the, the process of vetting and categorizing different works. So the admin functions generally would not be available to the public because we don't want the general public. You know deleting term deleting works from the database, for instance, that said, if you have multiple people who are assigning terms. Now we would have to refine the way that terms are assigned or the way that terms are evaluated so you would have to have something like a term history. In which case you'd have several different people offering their perspective on which terms would apply to which work. And then you would be in the process of returning a search query, you'd actually be averaging those scores so the places where the terms overlap the most between the scores would receive the most weight. And then the ones where they overlap the least would be receiving a sort of a different or a lesser weight. And then you'd probably have to have some sort of periodic evaluation of the weight of the weights that different terms are assigned to different works. It's kind of trying to be democratic about the process. Is it perfect probably not. This is but this sort of thing easily gets us into information retrieval research. And so we'd want to do further research on exactly how those techniques are performed currently. Instead of and adapt them therefore to the way these more socially conscious terms are applied to works. So I think as far as deleting something goes and whether or not that reflects across the entire database or individual users like institutions using I think it would depend on who's hosting the database if it's hosted by an individual institution. Over here in another institution here they could each delete or add records as they would want but if it's the database is hosted on its own platform and people just have access to it I think whoever is managing the database. That way nothing would really be deleted it would just be pull what you need. Right, right, right. And a lot of times the queries would would show that too. Right. So if if it's in if it's in one collection but not in another, then you know whatever they don't have in common isn't going to get queried from the database. Sure. Alright, so a few other questions here we are a little after 11 am central time by my clock but that's okay. We did start a little late as well and we'll go as long as needed. We won't cut things off just because we're there in time, as long as needed for any of your questions that you have and for Laura and Katie and David to answer wrap up and answer anything they want to so hold on and stay with us as long as you want to. We are recording so everyone will receive the full recording recording later if you do end up missing anything. Anything missing anything in the beginning or the end. Sometimes I love this presentation project brilliant. Can I ask why you chose the term Caucasian rather than white was it because it was a racial identity rather than ethnicity, or what was that decision making that term went through a lot of discussion. Yes, I don't even know where to start for a while it was European American to so. It really it changed a lot through our course Katie do you want to maybe take that. Yeah, we have looked into the census records to just to see like how are people identifying and what is accurate and appropriate in different circumstances. And I think it just basically came down to the location what the census has said I think the census was going with Caucasian American or Caucasian more frequently than white. But we also looked at how are we labeling other identities and racial identities so are we saying like African American are we saying black are we saying, you know, how is that relating and how does that relate to us. Referring to whiteness or Caucasian American and that sense. But yes we spent a very long time like probably at least two thirds of our project debating back and forth whether or not we were going to use white or Caucasian Caucasian American and the like. Caucasian Americans had it odd it's not something you've heard a lot but I said it's something that's being talked about and figured out and sometimes going to well is there some other like census authority that would be good to just say let's it's what people are it's what is being used elsewhere let's use it for the moment but these things can always be updated and change as we decide something else and discover something else is more appropriate now. Right well and the other thing that was challenging was sorry David, um, just like white people not talking about their own whiteness and like what does that mean and how do we want to label ourselves other communities. Have a preference. It's as far as I'm aware white people do not currently have a preference because it's something that's not addressed the way it should be. And so that was another thing we talked about how you know. It's interesting because this is being discussed right now as we are currently people are currently completing their census forms and lots of thinking about what do I pick how much am I Caucasian as opposed to something else and what do I want to identify myself as it's yeah and all the choices they give in there. All right, let's see what you got just few last minute things if anything any last minute desperate questions you want to ask or suggestions or ideas post them in here into the questions section. I did have one person wants you says feel free to reach out to them. They want to discuss more about this with you and I'll pass that I'm not going to broadcast someone's personal email address out here, but I'll be passing on some more that kind of you guys afterwards. Someone does have a suggestion for a book to be added that is a book about Miss Shadra. I hope I'm pronouncing that right Miss Shadra. I looked it up. It's about an Arab American college student struggling to live with epilepsy. Oh, great. Yeah. Excellent. You know, as we mentioned earlier that the terms and subjects we have are just the beginning and the more diverse we can make this the better. Yeah, and let's see. Thank you so much. Excellent presentation from brand new librarians. I am retired but really love keeping up on what new librarians are imagining and working on that's great. I'm so glad to have all all all the whole range of librarians coming to show they're brand new or been out of the field for a while. Absolutely. And someone out relating to the census I just typed in would you consider using the term and I have to look at this. And it's like black slash African American. I guess that's what the census is actually using now is kind of using both of those as one combined. Because people may identify or think differently either way. Yeah, that's definitely something we would consider updating or should update yes. All right. All right, so any other district questions type them in. I'll just do this one last question and I'm not sure if it's even a, not a possibility for now but will you present at a la someone wants to know if you're going to be even. Yeah, I know. I think they're going virtual in some way, I believe it's a work in progress but maybe in a future one midwinter maybe that is a smaller ally. It looks like we just lost David he's gone offline pictures camera view left so he might have dropped connection but hopefully that's okay. Yeah. So a future thought for you other conferences. Yeah, we have to apply. Go ahead. We just applied for the Minnesota Library Association Conference in October. Right. Yeah. Yeah, we're we'll we'll explain it expand slowly. Now I know David mentioned that you guys are both graduating and you don't know what's going to happen after that. Would this be something I might be asking you to decide right now to know that you would consider after graduating since it is like your project during during your school time. Consider just continuing with as a personal project or are you more leaning towards let's pass it on to someone else or maybe a combination of those things. Yeah, I David just asked us yesterday to think about it over the summer and let him know in August where we would like to see this to go in the future so. I think being the originators of it something you definitely may be close to your heart to begin with so. Let go completely which is great and keep you know informing new people and work on it and we'll see. And maybe in another year or two we'll have you come on and it'll be even more developed. Come on the show and tell us more about what you've updates to it. I'd love to have that happen. Yeah. See how it goes since this is brand new. So keep me in mind too. It doesn't look anybody has any of their desperate questions for you guys so I think we will officially wrap up a yellow wrap up here. So thank you so much Laura and Katie and David who has lost him a bit here at the end. That's okay. This was great. I'm so glad we've got this resource out there as you saw. I knew that there's something definitely need and I saw other librarians across the country have mentioned this is definitely something we we need to be focusing more on and that they're looking forward to seeing what comes of this so we'll keep working on it. I am going to pull presenter control back to my screen if I can click the right button here. There we go. That was great. And wrap up the show here too. Are we good? Yeah. All right. So this is our Encompass Live main webpage. The show has been recorded and will be posted here. It should be done by the end of the week. So keep your eyes open for that. These are upcoming shows. Well today showing our upcoming ones but this is where our archives are. It's linked right underneath our upcoming shows. And this just has the most recent one at the top of the list. So when this show is ready, it will be added there. I'm just going to look and see. It will be added here at the top of the list. I'll be linked to the recording of the show. It should be posted to our YouTube channel. And I didn't know if you guys were going to send me also a copy of your slides, like a PDF copy or something that shared as well, Laura, if you wanted to send me that afterward. Yeah. So the copy of the slides, if you want to see those tables and how everything was done there, we'll have that as well. When the recording is ready, everyone who attended this morning and who pre-registered for the show will get an email from me letting you know that it's there and ready to go. It will also be posted to various social media that we have here in Nebraska. We have mailing lists for our libraries. We tweet out, go out to Twitter with the hashtag N-Cump Live, as you saw on the intro slides, abbreviated there. And we do have a Facebook page for Encompass Live. So you are a Facebook user. Give us a like over there. We post reminders. Here's a reminder to log in to today's show, letting you know when previous shows recordings are available around here, when new shows are added to the schedule are added here. So if you do use Facebook, you get a few messages from me on there a few times a week. Give us a like over there and you'll get notified as well. I'll also show you while we're here on the archives page. We do have a search feature here. Just searches the titles, descriptions, presenters' names. You can search the full archives or just the most recent 12 months. That is because this is our full archives from the beginning of Encompass Live. Our first show was in January 2009. So we're over 10 years now into it. And we have our full archive here. I'm not going to scroll all the way to the bottom and make you dizzy, but pay attention when you are in here to what date something was originally broadcast. A particular show. Some of the topics will be eternally useful to you. Reading lists, information, historical information, but some things may become outdated. There may be old resources in here, old data build systems. Links might not work anymore, things like that. But we are librarians, so we do archive things for historical purposes. So we will always have the full archive here. So just pay attention to that as you're doing your searching here if you want to. As I said, everyone will let you know when this archive is ready. You all, everyone who attended here live will also get an email in about an hour actually of it is a confirmation that you attended today with a PDF attachment of your certificate proving your attendance at today's live show. I know some people always look for that for their continuing education and professional development need to submit that. So everyone who attends live will get that. So that will be it for today. I'll hope you join us next week when it is our pretty sweet tech. Once a month we have our Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission, Amanda Sweets, comes on the show and does a more definitely tech focused session. Sometimes in between hers we do techy related type things, but if you are definitely your IT tech, you like this kind of thing, you're into it. Her show's last Wednesday of the month is always Amanda Sweets doing her pretty sweet tech session. And next week she's going to talk about how to make digital literacy less boring. I don't know, it's boring depends on your opinion. And those of us presenting it probably don't think it is. People out there receiving it, I don't know. But she will come and take us some tips and tricks on how to do that. So please do sign up for next week's show and any of our others we have here on the schedule. You see I've got June fully booked and I'm also confirming some dates for July, always adding new shows onto here. So keep an eye on our schedule for our upcoming shows. And then that wraps it up for today. Thank you very much everybody. And so just say your good luck in your future endeavors, Laura and Katie. And thank you David for being here with us even though you've popped off now. And so thank you everybody for attending and hope you join us on another episode of Encompass Live. Bye bye. Thank you. Thank you.