So guys, today I have another brand new product for my camera equipment. This is the Matrix 600S. It's a wireless video transmission system that can be connected via HDMI or SDI inputs as well. Now, the reason it's called 600S is because this has a 600 foot range of transmission with a 0.08 second latency. And for me, that is incredible and very powerful. So I'm super excited to try this out. It's by Moment. I've also reviewed one of Moment's microphones in the past and if you haven't seen that video, I'll put a link in the description in case you guys wanted to check that out. But let's go ahead and unbox this and connect the transmitter to my camera and the receiver to one of my monitors. I have a couple of monitors in my studio here, so I'm gonna showcase to you guys the benefits of why someone would buy this. So let's go ahead, unpack this and get straight into it. Okay, so we have ourselves the user manual, give you some basic instructions and what the LCD display actually showcases to you guys. Inside here, you'll see there's the receiver and there's the transmitter. Now, you can tell it's going to be very powerful just based on the size of it. And for me personally, if you are a professional filmmaker and you do a lot of video recordings where you need to see everything on the monitor, this is going to be the perfect solution for you just based on how high quality this will actually perform. Inside here, you have yourself the USB-C cable. So it's very basic. There's no additional accessories really inside the box. So you can pretty much be sure that once you do get this, you can get up and running straight away. Couple of other useful specs. This has a built-in antenna and also this is ultra low-powered as well and it's fanless. Sometimes when you do have devices like this, the fan noise can interfere with the audio coming from your camera or recording equipment. This is not the case with this one, hence why it's such high quality. So you will see from the back of these that you would need to power them with a battery pack. They can also be powered by USB-C, which is great. These are the two HDMI inputs there. Then you also have a SDI input on both of them there. And just at the bottom and on the sides of both of these, you have the quarter-inch thread just so you'll be able to mount this wherever you like in multiple different places, whether you have tripods or camera rigs. There's plenty of different options for this. One caveat to note is this only allows you to wirelessly stream 1080p at 60 hertz refresh rates. Now speaking of monitors, this can easily be displayed on on-camera monitors. There's plenty of them out there. You can also display them on TV. So whatever you like, any HDMI input, then this would work absolutely fine. If you don't have a USB-C power source to power both of these on, then you can actually put two battery packs in this. These take the standard NPF battery. So they don't come with any, but there's plenty of options that you can buy online. I have a two-pack here and I'm going to be connecting this. These are the Sony NPF F90 range of batteries. Very easy, you just slot it in like so. There we go. Now we have power source. So the fact that this is completely wireless and very easy to mount in different locations makes this the ideal solution for wireless video transmissions. And that 600-foot range just makes things so much better. Now, before I connect this to my camera, let's turn this on to see what happens on the LCD displays. So to turn it on, you can see there's an on-off switch just on the left-hand side. I will turn both of these on. And they should be paired right out of the box, which there you go. You can see it's now turned on. There's three buttons here on the bottom. The directional buttons up and down are on the ends there and the menu button is in the middle. So if you just hit that middle button, there you go, hold it down.  Let's go into setting. You can do pairing. I'll change the language. It's pretty basic. And you can see they're both on channel eight currently. So I'm pretty much ready to go. You also have yourself the signal strength there. It's telling me that there's no video output currently, but I will do that when I connect the HDMI cable. And then it shows you the battery life just there on the bottom right, which I think is a great touch. And just in case anyone wants to take a look at the compatibility of the outputs for both HDMI and SDI, then you can see them here by pausing the video. And like I mentioned, the maximum output is 1080p 60 Hertz for the HDMI on the receiver. Okay, so now I have the receiver connected to my monitor. As you can see, it's just got the moment placeholder there. I've connected it with a standard HDMI to HDMI cable. This are not supplied, so you just have to bring your own. Now that this is connected, I just need to hook up the transmitter to the camera. So I've just got my Sony 873 here detached. I've got the transmitter ready. Now what I need is a HDMI to micro HDMI so I can connect it to the camera. Okay, let's go ahead. Put that in there. Turn this on. Turn the camera on. So now that it's firing up, you'll see the monitor back there. Start wirelessly streaming the video from the camera. And there we go. You can see once it's powered up, it works perfectly well. So I'm just here in front of the tripod. Now if I bend down here and I'll zoom out a little bit on the camera, just to showcase to you guys how much of the latency is when I'm speaking in terms of what the phone is recording. So as you guys are now watching me on the monitor, I just wanted to showcase how much of the latency there is. And for me, it's almost pretty much real time. So this is a very convenient way to shoot things at range and in different locations. Now I'm super impressed at how easy this was to set up. It's literally plug and play. So if this is something you're looking for, this is the product to get. One of the benefit that you might want to buy something like this is that if you have too many wires all around your camera and filming equipment already, this just makes it hassle free, wire free. And it's just so convenient to have especially in a studio like mine. Now I have wires running all through under my desk. I've got it connected to my camera, to my monitors. I've got two monitors. This is something that I would definitely use just to free up some wire space in addition to the high quality output that you get from the wireless streaming. So check out my description below. I've got all of the details and the links to the Matrix 600S. By the way, that name is super cool. And check out the latest pricing information as well. This is now most likely going to be my number one wireless video transmitter that I'll connect to my on-camera monitors. If I do a lot of filming outdoors I'm going to make sure to pack this in my camera bag. It's well worth it. If there's anything else you guys want to know specifically about this product, as usual, drop a comment down below. If you found this review useful, make sure to like this video. I have new videos out every week. I cover camera accessories, filming equipment and all things tech, which I know you're going to like. So make sure you go ahead, hit that subscribe button and I will catch you guys next time. Take care.


All right, let's love you guys. Welcome back to my channel, it's the Donna. So we're doing this thing where we are researching schools. I just wanna make sure that it's live up on my channel so I can go ahead and just check that out for you guys really quickly. But we're gonna be going live every Tuesday and what I'm gonna be doing is researching the schools that you guys asked me to research. I'm essentially gonna get through all of the programs that are either developing or in production already for PA programs. But I mean, we're gonna start with the ones that you guys really wanna see. So what I got last week was Emory and Yale. So what I'm gonna be doing today is Emory's program. I will do Yale's next week unless somebody else like dumps a bunch of comments in the comment section below on a school that they want me to actually research and it's not either of those, that program, okay? So we'll do that, but let's go. So I like to again, go to the CASPA site. Here you can click on the participating programs and you'll see all of the developing programs, the ones that are already in existence which are these, the participating programs and then you'll have all of the developing programs as well and this is done in alphabetical order. So look at all these programs. This is a lot you guys. Oh, actually let me make sure that I'm sharing my screen with you all, share screen, let me share this one. Okay, all right. So these are all of the developing programs here down at the bottom. So newly in production and then the participating programs. And I wanna make this a little bit larger for you guys so you guys can see it. Bigger, let me see how this one, I don't know how to, there we go, let's do that one. So it's a little bit bigger for you guys so you guys can see exactly what I'm doing. Let's see how that looks. Let's try this one. Okay, hi Leah, good morning, good morning to you. Okay, so these are all of the developing programs here. You can see all the participating programs and we're gonna go to Emery. This is done in alphabetical order, okay? So Emery University is in Georgia. Their deadline you guys on the right-hand side, it has the deadline for you all. Their deadline is already September 1st. Did you fix it? What, yeah, I think it's fixed, look, it's fixed. And coming down to make sure that I got you guys set up right, okay. So here on the right-hand side, you can see what the deadline is for the application. So their deadline has already passed, but I mean, moving forward for you guys to know all the deadlines are on the right and you can check them out there, okay? All right, so let me just go to Emery and I will go straight to the PA program and I can share that aspect with you guys as well. And again, leave your comment in the comments section below on what schools you will want me to do next. So far, I have Yale as the main school, but there are other programs and I, you know, obviously there are over 300 PA programs, so I have no problem doing all of them, okay? All right, so this is Emery's PA program. This is their actual like department. This is Department of Family and Preventive Medicine. Let's go out and go down Physician Assistant Program. All right, so they are recognized as one of the top five PA programs in the country, which is cool. I mean, I guess that's something cool that you can say, yeah, I went to one of the top five PA programs in the country. I don't know if your potential job offers are gonna ask you, hey, what program did you go to? Specifically, I wasn't really asked, but it is something that you can boast about. So program goals to support students, while they're training activities, recruit mentor and support a diverse student body. That is good. So I mean, I think as you, we continue on, you're gonna see a lot of schools promoting this diversity and inclusion. It's important because we live in a diverse world. And so the fact that this is one of their program goals is important. So I think that it's something that you all should absolutely be looking at as well when it comes to schools that you're interested in. And then they have this community engagement as well and outreach. And so you can click on all of these different tabs to exactly see what they're talking about. This looks like kind of like a mobile clinic here is what they have going on, which is pretty dope. To be able to provide care in like rural areas, you know, in a camper that you can move. Student clinicians, volunteers, yeah, rural South Georgia to provide two weeks of free high quality medical and dental care to over 1,600 migrant farm workers and their families in June. That's really cool. So I like that. At my program we did, they were kind of like, it was in rural Virginia as well. And they were a little like pop up clinics that we did throughout the year, which is cool. And so the fact that you can have like this mobile aspect is pretty dope. All right, so on their website, they have what a PA is. So be sure to know what a PA is. But what you came here for is, you know, specifically the prerequisite requirements. Let's look at their accreditation status. Always good to check out. So granted accreditation continued Emory. Okay, so that is good. You know, you can be continued provisional or probation. Provation means there's still some things that you need to work on or else you will lose accreditation. Continued means you're doing good stuff and probation means you're just a new program in developing. I look at that class looking pretty diverse, you know, diverse group. May want to include a little bit more diversity but there's a large amount of people there that shows a good amount of diversity. So that's pretty good. Let's see history of Emory. So these are the things that you might want to look at. You know, obviously if you are interested in the program, this is where you kind of do your deep dive. Look into the history of the program, look into their goals because you want to be able to actually have something to talk to them about when you get offered that interview, right? So we're going to be speaking interviews into existence. So if you're interested in this program, if you've applied to this program, when you get an interview, you're going to need to know what the goals of the school are, you know, and just have an idea of it and have an idea of what they're doing.  That's something I'm really interested in. I want to be a part of that mobile clinic and if we have the opportunity to do that in our first year of PA school, what a blessing that would be. You know, these are things that you can use to talk about. And so it's important to actually have that, okay? PA education programs. What is this? Let's look at that. Division offers a variety of educational programs developed to meet your goal. Okay, so you have the masters of PA degree. What other program do they have? Medical, masters of medical science and physician assistance degree and masters of... Oh, okay. So they offer a dual degree, which is pretty cool. If you're interested in doing public health and PA, like so you can work for, you know, your public health department in whatever state you may want with that public health degree. That's something that you can actually do. And I like the fact that they have both degrees offered there. I didn't know that about Emory. So I'm learning new things here myself. I thought it was literally just the PA degree, the masters of medical science. Their program is 29 months long, okay? So I told you guys before that PA programs could be anywhere from two years to three years, be it 24 months to 36 months. And theirs is kind of like right in the mid range of what PA programs usually are. They're around like 24 to 27 months. This one is 29 months. Let's see if they say how long this one is. It doesn't, but you can go into it. And I guess you would figure out exactly how long that is. So that's cool. They offer two degrees, okay? Let me go back. Let's look at their faculty and staff. Let's see who would be teaching you guys. And if you have any questions for me, please leave them in the comment section and I will be sure to make sure that I can answer that. All right, come on faculty and staff, let's see. Oh, look at these people. They actually look like they having fun and they cool. Who's this guy in the middle? This one, he's, he bought that live. Everybody's looking at him. Maybe he is the director of the program. Let's see. All right, so Jeremy Amayo is assistant professor, Susanna Alfonso. She is the medical director. William Bryson, Tabitha is administrative assistant. Shelly Ann Fluker, associate professor. She's an MD in school. Amber Davis, PAC, Antonio Graham. He's the assistant medical director. Jody is the associate program director. All right, let me see. Where's the director? All right, so Kay Johnson Bull, she's director of admissions, associate director is Alexander Kendall. What's interesting is that the director wherever he is is at the bottom, which is, I mean, typically they're like first, the Keita Smith assistant professor, business manager. Y'all got a lot of different coordinates. All right, so maybe I missed it. Let's go back up because they don't know if I saw something that said director. So she's the program coordinator. Does that mean she's the director? Let's see. Nope, nothing there. Not giving me any information there. Oh, here it is. Mahal Lund, program director. All right, so Ms. Lund is the program director. She's a distinguished fellow. And then you have these associates. So who's this guy that, who's this? Who's this guy right here? I don't know, but I wanna be in his class because he looks fun. Everybody's pointing to him. But there you have it. Those are your faculty and staff, okay? Meet our PA students, really. Oh, Emily Lynn. Is this all of their PA students? No. I expected my interview at a top five school to be intimidating and abrasive, but all I found was warmth, welcoming and genuine interest. Oh, that's nice. I'm gonna promote the school. All right, so that's cool that they have a couple of their students on their program graduates. I don't really care about their program graduates. Oh, wait, maybe we do. Maybe they're talking about specifically like, no, these are all alumni stuff. No, I don't care that much. All right, let's go to admissions. So admissions requirements. This is what we came here for. All right, let's see. All right, so applicants need to have accumulative and science GPA of 3.0 on a 4.0 scale, okay? You have to have gotten a baccalaureate degree from colleges like a bachelor's degree from an accredited college. If you got it outside of the US, you must complete at least one year as a full-time student at a US or Canadian regional accredited institution. So technically, again, to my international students that keep emailing me and DMing me about going to PA school in the United States, this is another program that you can actually attend as an international student. We spoke about Adventist University, was it, no, it was Advent University, like their PA program. So we spoke about them last week. This week we're talking about Emory. They both accept international students, but for this particular program at Emory, you have to have completed a full year or 24 semester credit hours at an accredited US or Canadian regional institution, okay? So that is important for you to know. That's your in there, all right, if you had any questions about that. Okay, let's go to prerequisite college courses. All right, so you need natural sciences, a minimum of 23 semester hours. So I mean, if you're interested, like if you take these courses right here, if you take all of these prerequisites, you are one away from your actual requirements that you would need, okay? So biology, which is generally speaking, what you're gonna have to do, biology with the lab, general chemistry, and obviously like this is just, this is one semester of biology right here. And general chemistry, this is like two semesters because you would have three credits and a one credit lab. Okay, so eight semester credit hours or 12, what is this 12 quarter hours? That's essentially a year of chemistry, okay? Anatomy and physiology, eight semester credit hours, and organic chemistry or biochemistry, either or. You need a statistics, I don't know if they, I don't see them making like any specifics on what kind of statistics. So if you're concerned that you took bio statistics and then you wanna take like or general statistics, which one will actually work, just ask them, but it just says statistics, so just know that. And then they recommend micro and genetics. All right, it says each course must be completed at a grade level of C or better, and must be completed prior to July slash August class matriculation, okay? So again, something for you to remember that it does not mean that you cannot have outstanding courses by the time of application.  So maybe you're taking biochemistry next semester and it's a planned course for you. So you can still apply with some of these things outstanding. However, they have to be completed by July or August because apparently I believe Emory was a school that has the early matriculation, which it would be July, and then their general matriculation, which is August, okay? All courses is subject to approval by the admissions committee and cannot be taken on a pass fail basis as a club credit or audited, okay? So again, thanks for you to know about you cannot have a pass fail, club or audited class. You actually have to have a grade for them, okay? GRE official scores within the last five years are required by all candidates, the school that we reviewed last week was not required. It was just kind of like recommended. It would be taken into consideration. The PA cat was required, but for Emory, we're saying that it is required for you to take the GRE, okay? Let's see. So it doesn't have anything specifically yet on what their average score is. And so we'll continue to look and see. A minimum of 2,000 direct patient care hours is what is required to be an applicant for this program, okay? So EMT, paramedic, health educator, RN, patient care attendant or nurse aid, clinical assistant. You did the Peace Corps. All of these are things, therapists, research assistant. Those are hands-on direct patient care experience. These hours must be completed at the time of submitting the application, okay? So you have to have at the minimum 2,000 hours at the time of submitting the application. CASBO, you can always add more hours in there, but obviously they want this already done, okay? Emory PA program does not grant advanced placement. All students must complete all Emory PA programs courses. Health experience requirements is not where we're at. Let's see. So here, ooh, whoa, you guys, look at this, man. Okay, so your direct patient care hours does not include shadowing time, so that is something to keep in mind. But this is what I was like mind-boggled about. This says the average accepted applicant completed, has completed over 7,000 hours. 7,000 hours, y'all. Okay, let's do some math on that. So if you're working a 40 hour week, let's say 7,000 divided by 40. A 40 hour week, that is 175 weeks. So 175 divided by 52 weeks in the year. That's over three years of direct patient care experience is what these applicants are coming with, okay? It says 3.3, and that's if you're working a 40 hour week every week in the year. So clearly these students are coming after they either have been like CNAs and stuff throughout their undergraduate degree and they've been working like consistently in that and then maybe you've taken a gap year or two or they take three or so gap years after graduating from undergrad and then they apply to this program. But 7,000 hours is what the average accepted applicant is getting, meaning that there are people with even more or slightly less. That is interesting. So keep in mind to be competitive, you have to be hitting these marks. And then these are the various different specialties, I guess you can say experience that they have come to the table with. All right, man, that's a lot. It was a lot of hours. Okay, additional requirements. So if, you know, English is not your first language then you would need to take the TOEFL exam and CASPA and supplemental applications, including non, okay. So their supplemental application is $75, man. So again, a CASPA application, if Emory is your initial school, then it is $175. If another school was your initial school, that school would be $175 and then every subsequent school like Emory would be $55. But on top of that, you have to pay a $75 supplemental application fee if you are offered a supplemental application, okay. And that is non-refundable whether you get accepted or not. And it says you need to have two letters of recommendations or reference letters with that. Let's go into our technical standard and let's dig a little bit deeper and see what that's about. Okay, so there's just talking about like what the attributes of their students should be to be successful in the program, okay. And we can back up out of that, back out of there. Applications, so admissions required, did we do application already? All right, so CASPA opened at April 38th of 2021. And again, their program is already closed in terms of submitting applications that closed September 1st of this year. But likely it will be again, CASPA will open up around that April, that last week of April. Next year on 2022, and likely their deadline will be again, September 1st of 2022. So you can get a head start by looking at some of these requirements and understanding when is a good time to apply, making sure that you have all of these things by like, you know, sent in by June, July, so that you have enough time to get all of the application material in. So their application obviously is available April once CASPA opens, deadlines, first interview process. All right, so the purpose of the interview day at Emory program is to ensure good match between the program and the applicant. The most qualified applicants will be interviewed for a full day virtual or on-site interview on a rolling basis. Apply early, but not before the minimum required clinical hours are obtained. Again, so that minimum hours of 2000, you have to have that before you apply, okay? That cannot be outstanding. There are some classes that can be, but the requirement, the requiring hours cannot be outstanding. Furthermore, just again, keep in mind that their average student is coming in with 7,000 hours. So that minimum requirement of 2000 hours, you're just, you're literally just kind of scraping that arrow right there. So try to kick that up before you really think about applying to this program. And they offer either virtual or on-site, which is cool. Cause that will cut down on some of the money that you would have to spend on the application process because the interview is all part of this application process. And when you think about it, you're spending money on applying to these programs, you're spending money on supplemental applications.  So these are all things to keep in mind. It says the MREPA interview day includes interaction with their students, didactic and clinical year students, a virtual tour of MRE and interaction with faculty. There is a multiple mini interview format, which again, that's kind of what I did where I had like little interviews with, I had like three interviews with different groups of faculty. And then we had a group interview as well. And this is used to assess, as they said, communication skills, understanding of medical, ethical issues or health policy. That's what my group interview was, problem solving, maturity and interpersonal skills. MMI's are not used to assess an applicant's medical knowledge, which is cool. I mean, you're going to a PA school to learn medical knowledge, right? So it's nice that they're not trying to assess that. You have a $1,000 non-refundable seat deposit if you're offered a position. And you have two weeks to accept after you've been offered, okay? And so for whatever reason you, that this is the school for you or you're trying to wait to hear from another program, you only have two weeks before your spot is lost. So that is something to keep in mind. All right, let's see what else is here. We did technical standards. Let's go to financial matters. Okay, so, I mean, this is actually pretty good. Yeah, this is actually pretty good. So their tuition for the first, I guess, one year is, actually it's like $90,000, all right? So for the fall, it's $15,000 each semester, your fall, spring, and summer, I don't know what these athletic fees and activity fees are, mental health and counseling fee, all right? So if you are, take advantage of all of these things because you're paying for it, clinical administrative fees, immunizations, transcript-free fee for new students. Okay, housing fee. Do they provide housing? I'm paying $325 for a housing fee. Hopefully they're providing you with housing. I don't know, but anyway, I don't know what this housing fee is about if it's just housing in the program per se or like actually like helping you find housing, but you're paying for all of these different things. It comes out to be $47,923, essentially $48,000 for that first year. And in addition to that, you have other fees that first year of $9,000, health insurance, which I mean, I don't know if you can like bypass this if you have your own health insurance, but health insurance, smartphone, computer parking. Look, if they're giving you a smartphone and some health insurance and internet access and all of these other things, then great. I don't know specifically what all these fees are about, but this might be something you might wanna look into because this is $9,000 additional that you're gonna have to pay on top of the $48,000 that you're already paying. Okay, so almost $60,000 for that first year. It's saying $56,361 and that is for one year. So you're gonna double that. Emery's program is seven semesters, so $126,000 is the total cost of going to Emery's PA program. Oh, let's look here. So here's their dual degree. So I mean, there's a dual degree aspect of things and if you want to look at that and just hit, you know, a review of those costs, let me see if I can just go there and share that screen with you. Financing your degree. No, let's just, oh, I'm sorry, guys, let me just find this. Okay, let me go here and I'm gonna stop sharing that screen so that I can share the other screen with you all. This is for the dual degree. If you're interested in sharing that screen, for the dual degree, if you're interested in that. So it has four semesters, the public health, or you can do a three semester accelerated public health or just the masters of science and public health. So different costs here, 18 at the lowest, and 24,000 at the high end. The dual degree program, which is two semesters public health, accelerated MPH, external graduate, 28,000, masters of public health. So, I mean, it breaks it down here, but it doesn't really tell me what health and wellness $94 per semester. So it doesn't really give you like a complete full-time semester of what everything will be, like how the PA program does, but that is something that you can look into if you're interested in that. So let's go back to Emory's main site so I can finish this off with you guys. Financial matters. Share that. Okay, all right. So let's just go back. We'll just back back out of this and then go back into admission. So we did financial matters. Let's look at that pants results. Love this. This is a great picture. She looks excited. I was super excited when I graduated. So I know you're feeling. I know how you feel, girl. All right, so let's look at the pants results. Okay, so they're doing pretty good. So they're going back all the way to 2016, which is nice, giving you a good five-year overview of all of their stuff. So number of candidates who took the pants, 52, number of exam attempts, 54, number of exams passed, 52, 50, right? So two people didn't pass that year, but there's still national exam pass rate for class graduation year. So they were still above the national average, I would say. It's, what, 93% here? Let's see, 54. I don't understand how 54 first-time pants takers. So three people, I guess, didn't pass and they took it again. Number of exams passed, 53, 54. Still about the same. What is this? So there's 53, so 2018 was a tough year. As people, you can see that they took it several times, 67 attempts. So several people didn't pass several times. Oh wow, yeah, like that was a hard year for them, I guess, because the number of first-time takers that passed were 41 when 53 actually attempted. So that was rough in 2019. Only two didn't pass and only one didn't pass in 2020. So this is always good. I always like looking at the past pants, the past pants. The past pants pass rates, man. That is a tongue twister if I've ever had one. But I always like looking at that because I think that it's important to see like what the students are doing and exactly like how it's kind of like a good indicator of like the students and the teachers, I would say, like how they help their students. All right, so this is the interview. So it's a full day interview, 7.30 to three. They're again, talking about the many interviews, multiple many interviews, student life tour, that's what they said a virtual one, or if you're, I guess, in person, you might go through with them admissions process. It talks about how they're rolling admissions. They will contact you within one month of the interview to share the admissions committee decision. Man, that's a long time. So for me, I interviewed like, I think on a Wednesday or something and then I got a call on the Friday. Like it was pretty quick, but to wait four weeks, like it's a torture, but, you know, at least you know, they have like a time period on exactly when they're gonna contact you. And that might just be because there are a lot of people applying. So it's good to know exactly like how long you might be waiting. Candidates on the wait list are ranked and will be offered positions based on availability. Wait list candidates who have been offered a position will have two weeks. Okay, so again, if you're offered, you have two weeks to give your $1,000 seat deposit. Students accepted into Emory may apply for a one-year deferment by writing to the director before the beginning of orientation. The admissions committee will review each case and decisions are made on an individual basis. Students whose deferment request has been granted must reach out to the director of admissions no later than April 1st. Those students not granted deferment must reapply to the program through CASPA. Okay, I don't know. So does that mean that is it, if I'm requesting a deferment, does that, I don't necessarily need to take it, right? Like why, maybe I don't need to reapply. I don't know. I would want to kind of just really clarify what this aspect of things is talking about reapplying because yes, you may want a deferment for some reason or another, but maybe that reason changed and it has changed and you're gonna be okay. And you want to take your acceptance again. So just be mindful of that, okay? Because if you don't get that deferment, you're going to have to reapply. All right, so we've been through all the admissions. What is this? Profile. I don't know what that is. Okay, pre-preceptors. Oh, so this is if you want to be a preceptor. Oh, this is the farm worker rule program thing that we read about that I showed you their kind of like mobile clinic that they had there. They have their graduation. PA program resources. What's this aspect of things? All right, so what I want to see really and truly is what their average students are, but I don't see where I can see that financial analysis. Is it technical? We've been through all of these because that, and this is the thing, right? You're like, anytime I'm looking at a program, you guys, I always want to look and see like, all right, what is the average student? We obviously understand that the average student is coming in with 7,000 healthcare hours, but what are those like other things that we want to know? Which is like their GPA and both cumulative and science GPA, we got the hours, but what are they coming in on with those other tangible numbers that we can see? And I don't see that. So I mean, you're just gonna really have to shoot for the stars because obviously you can tell already that those that are applying to this program are pretty advanced in terms of their hours and maybe they might be super advanced in terms of their GPA as well.  But that's Emory's program. I mean, we've gone through all of their pages. I don't really see anything else, anywhere else that we've missed. So what I did again to do that was just go to Google. And I said, Emory University's PA program, so you can do that yourself. And then just go right ahead and see all of the things that I've gone through. You can always come back to this video and look at it and look through what we've done together. Let me answer a couple of your questions really quickly. So Bria said, what year in college is best for applying to PA school? So I would always, I think that the best time to apply, if you're trying, and that's all dependent on if you are trying to get into PA school directly out of undergrad or if you want to wait, right? So if you're trying to take a gap year, then it really doesn't matter, you know? How many gap years you want to take? You want to take one, two, three, then it all depends on when you're trying to get into PA school. So for me, let's say I graduated this year or let's say I'm in school right now and I'm about to graduate next year, then if I wanted to get into PA school right out of undergrad, I would have been applying to PA school at the end of my junior year. So I would have been like approving all that information, my letters, the recommendations, shadowing, volunteer, healthcare experience, all of that I would have been getting in my junior year of college and of undergrad. And then I would have taken that and put that into my CASPA application, which would have opened up April 30th of this year and applied. So that while I'm going through this whole application process, my senior year, I'm interviewing, I'm getting interviews, I'm looking at programs, and then I hopefully get an acceptance and I can immediately go into PA school, be it July or August or September or November or December, whatever the start may be or January, wherever it is in that upcoming year, but there's no gap year, okay? Now, if you are trying to take a gap year and you need like some extra time to get those hours that these schools are requiring or to boost your GPA, then it really doesn't matter, it just depends on when exactly you're trying to get into PA school. So if it's in a year or two years, then you base your application on the cycle prior to the year that you're trying to get in, okay? So hopefully that answers your question. Leah, let's see what Leah says. Could we look at Rush or Loyola University after Yale? I mean, sure, if that's what's being asked. Like I said, I typically try to just go in alphabetical order, but if there is a school that you guys are asking me to look at, I will absolutely look into those programs. And I know I got some West Coast School requests as well. Anessa, she said, if you were interested in this school, when would you have your application submitted? So for me, like I was all, after my time initially of applying to schools and realizing that the earlier you applied the better and Emery said it on their website, right? They said the earlier you applied, the more chances essentially you have of, getting your application seen and getting accepted or offered an interview. So for me, if I was interested, I would have absolutely had my application ready and submitted by no later than July 1st. That would have been my particular deadline. But if you really want to like kind of get in there early, if you can, if you're not waiting on any of your undergraduate stuff to kind of get process, then you should be able to get it in by like the second week of June. So if you can do that, because CASPA takes up to two weeks to actually verify your initial application, you're giving yourself a lot of leeway so that you don't, you're not like missing any application deadlines, right? I want you guys to remember that when an application deadline says like September 1st or November 1st, if you have, then it's, let's kind of like look at this thing. So I wanna let me share my screen with you guys just so that you guys can see exactly what I am talking about. Participating programs, okay. So here you see all these like colors here, this green, this orange, blue, white. These are all of the deadlines, okay? And so at the top of this, it says program deadline requirements. It gives you the blue deadline, orange deadline, green deadline and white deadline. So let's read what these mean, right? So blue deadline means application must be submitted by 1159 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on the deadline date. Program materials do not have to be received by the deadline. So let's look at what program materials are. Did I click that? I don't know. It's not work, I don't, there we go. Okay, if the specific program you're applying to have any additional application requirements, use this section to provide requested information, CASPA program materials. Okay, so the program materials section includes additional information and requirements. The questions documents tab is only available for certain programs, prerequisite, the prerequisites tab is only available. So these are all of the things like prerequisites, documents and like their home tab, like some of that special information. All of those do not have to be received by that deadline, but the application itself must be submitted by 1159. Okay, that's what it's saying here. Orange deadline says, at least you have to have the application, payments, transcripts, at least two letters of recommendation. They all have to be submitted by 1159 on the deadline date, okay? So these are some of those program materials that would not have had to have been done in this blue deadline aspect over here, but orange, it has to be in there, okay? Green deadlines, application must be verified and that is what I'm talking about. So CASPA takes up to two weeks to verify your application. So once I hit submit, that is not a verification of my application. That is just a submission of my application. And some of these, like the blue deadline, you can submit your stuff while it's still getting some of this other information in. But if it needs to be verified, that is like one step further, that means they've gone through, they've looked at your GRE stuff, they verify that that is accurate, they've looked at all of your letters of recommendation, everything CASPA has got it done, your application is ready and good to go. That has to be done with the green deadline. And then the white deadline says programmed has not reported its deadline requirements, meaning like whatever, you would have to either look at the program's website and see what those requirements are or call them, okay? And it says to ensure your application is verified on time, try to complete your application at least four weeks before the deadline. And so going back to your question, Nessa, if I was actually interested in this, obviously, I'm weighing more than four weeks because we can, I think, yeah, let me just go back because Emery was a green deadline, which means that it needed to have been verified by the time of the deadline date, which is September 1st. So therefore, if you're doing this by July 1st, you have August all the month of August and then into September. So from July to August and then August to September. So you have two months, essentially eight weeks of time to actually be verified and get all that in. But I like to at least have like a month to two months, even three months if you can do it or greater application time prior to actually sending off an application. Future.quin says University of Pitts Hybrid Program. It's new. Oh, okay, cool. I'll definitely look into that as maybe it's a developing program. And Christina says, can you take the MCAT in replacement of the GRE? So yes and no, all right. There are some schools that will allow you to use your MCAT scores in replacement of the GRE. But that is like very few and far between. The majority of programs require you to have the GRE because grad school and not med school. But if like for whatever reason, they know that some of you all like we're interested in medicine and going into medical school as you took the MCAT initially. And so if you've taken the MCAT, some schools will allow you to actually use the MCAT score in place of your GRE score. But that's not every program. And so you just have to look at what their program requirements are, look at what their standardized test requirements or recommendations are. And then you can submit it based on that. But that's typically how it goes. GRE and PA CAT are really becoming the kings of the PA school application process. All right, so that is it. That's it for Emory for today, you guys. Obviously this rebroadcast will be on my channel so you can look at it at any point in time. We did one school last week and we're doing Emory this week. And maybe we'll do Yale next week if I continue to get more. Or Rush or Loyola, I don't know, we'll see. I'll make sure to leave your comments on what schools you want left in the comment section below. And then I will make sure to actually look at that and see what you guys are asking me to do. All right, thank you guys so much for watching. Be sure to follow me on Instagram and on the PA and on Instagram and get that to university. I will talk to you guys next time. Bye.


The Northland Arboretum in Brainerd will be transformed into a winter wonderland this holiday season, starting on Thanksgiving Day. You can take part in the drive-thru light show. In its 11th year, there will be new light displays, and the iconic old Brainerd Water Tower light structure will also make an appearance. It's a large production of light, but well worth it for the satomas. When you're talking to people, asking them how they're doing and how they enjoyed it, and I remember one couple going through and they're like, you know, this was great. And I'm like, oh, thanks. You got to come again. And one of them just went, hey, have a merry Christmas. And for whatever it is, that just hit me like a ton of bricks and kept me hooked to working on Sertoma Winter Wonderland and keeping this event going. The times and dates for the winter wonderland can be found on our website at lptb.org slash news. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


Good morning, and welcome to this week's Encompass Live. This week's included Encompass Live. Hi, I'm 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 things, that write 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 do record the show as we're doing today, and it will be available on our website for you to watch later at your convenience. And I will show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of our show recordings. 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, anything that would be interested in any of the topics we have at Encompass Live. I'm assuming most people watching this will be from Nebraska, but I say this every time anyways. If you're not from Nebraska and you're watching this, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries. In other states, that would be your state library potentially. So we provide services and resources and training and grants and all sorts of things to all types of libraries in the state. So you'll find shows on Encompass Live for all types of libraries. Public, academic, K-12, Corrections, Museums, Archives. Really our only criteria is it's something to do with libraries. We do book reviews, interviews, mini-training sessions, demos of services and products, all sorts of things. We have guest speakers that come into the show sometimes, but we also have Nebraska Library Commission staff that come in and do presentations for us. And that is what we have today. Today it is part two of our Meet the NLC, Meet the Nebraska Library Commission sessions. Last week we did part one. And with half of our departments, I guess, institutionally, it works out that there's four, and we've got like eight general areas here at the commission. So last week you met Rod Wegner, the Library Commission director, Vern Baez, the computer services, this is Kelly, information services, and Mary Sauer government information services. And today we have a whole new group here, and I'm going to be one of the speakers today. And we'll do introductions as we get to each of our sections, I think. And the reason we're doing these Meet the NLC sessions is there's a couple of reasons that we're coming up with this. In the last year or so, there have been quite a few sessions done at conferences or other meetings or events asking us from the commission, can you come and talk about what you all do there? And the commission's been around for 100 and something years that I find that. Is it 120? Somewhere around 120. Yeah, we had our 125 anyway. But there's still some people that don't know everything we do here. A new staff, we do new things here. So it seemed to be an ongoing thing more repeatedly last year than any other previous recent years. So I said, well, we should maybe do something over on here. And also, this show, Encompass Live, we premiered in January 2009 with Meet the NLC part one and part two. That's what we did as we started off the show. So as of last year, last year was our 15th year. We have 15 years of Encompass Live. Oh my gosh. And we have over 700 recordings on our website, all of our recordings. If you ever want to go back and see the original one of these, go for it. Don't pay attention to anything we said in those, because that is 15 years old information. But it's still out there. So I thought as I'm going to give you a nice round number, start of our 16th year, we're going to now meet the NLC sessions, part one and part two. So today we are going to, and as we started last week, the recording for the last week show is already out. So you can watch that first part already. And today's recording will be up by the end of the day tomorrow. So we're going to talk about what is the Library of Commission. You learn more about what is the Library of Commission last week, actually. I'm going to go over that again. So watch last week's for Rod's introduction to the Commission in general. But we want to talk about who we are and the kind of things we do here. And first up is actually me.  Besides, we'll also be available afterwards with the show recording as well. So some of us have a lot of links on there or screenshots and whatnot to things. Don't worry about trying to scribble all that down or anything. When the recording goes up, we will give you access to these slides as well. And I believe I did it right. All the links in here are hot links. So when you look at your slides, you can click on all of these and pop to whatever pages we're talking about. So I am the Library Director of Library Development, our Library Development Services Department here at the Library Commission. And we do lots of things in support of libraries. Basically, my job and actually the whole commission's job is to help librarians do their jobs. Help them, you know, we don't... Some of us work directly with the public. Some of us work more with the library. And so we kind of help on both sides. And that URL there, that link there that I put up is like a generalist of all the things that are possibly, even in any way, shape, or form related to library development. And I'm just going to highlight a few of them today. First, I want to introduce you to the staff in Library Development Services, Sally Snyder, who has been the commission for a long, long time. Many of you probably know her. She's our coordinator of children and young adult library services. Anything you think is related, she's your person to talk to. Holly Duggan is our Continuing Education Coordinator. So anything that's earning CE, doing basic skills classes, professional development. She would be the person to talk to you for that. The newest person added to our department just this month? Last month. Yeah, last month. December, yeah. He's been in the commission for a year already. Andrew Sherman goes by Sherman. He's a library technology support specialist. And he just recently was promoted to that position and then moved over to library development because he works a lot more closely with me actually on things, e-ray and technology and broadband related. And it made more sense for him to be in my department. So he's the newest member of library development. And Mary Guivel, our office specialist who keeps us all on track.  You also work with her with earning CE credits and selling out certificates and all those kinds of things. So the person to talk about is accreditation and certifications. And there are lots of previous, there are workshops on this and other previous and couple slides get a lot more in depth into this. It's going to be like a one minute overview. Here in Nebraska, we do have a public library accreditation program and we have librarian and library board certification programs. My predecessor, Richard Miller used to get confused about which was which, what's accreditation, what's certification. And he came up with this way of him to remember that people are certifiable, but buildings are not. So people get certifications, your library gets accreditation. There's a link to each of the main pages for all those. As I said, there's major, there's full workshops about them. The accreditation process is a way for libraries to earn, be able to, you know, promote that they have gone through all this work and help with lots of services that meet criteria that we have set up here at the library commission. The process starts in July, so July 1st, so this spring, if anyone is up for accreditation, you'll hear from me. It's a five year, your accreditation is good for five years, you don't hear from us every five years to do it. You do need to do a community needs response plan, which is kind of like a strategic plan, but not, it's just focused on the library. In order to be accredited, both your library director has to be certified and your library board has to be certified. That's why I have the information up there about that. I have to earn a certain number of hours of continuing education credits and in some cases do some coursework to do either one of those. For both your library directors, we have a public library director's guidebook that Holly Duggan and other staff here has put together. A really, really good resource, I highly recommend to every library director and look at that. It's basically everything you need to know about being a director, a public library director. And we have a similar thing for our library boards, the Latin Nebraska library board manual. So with that, anything your library boards need to know about how to be a board member. And there are links to that on each of those, the certification pages. So those things are always grouped together on our website because in order to be accredited, you have to have both those certifications along with a bunch of other criteria. In order, something else that we offer is our basic skills classes. This is something that Holly does, Holly Duggan. Some librarians get degrees from higher education, master's in library science degrees, but not everyone does. And we know there's many librarians who just can't do that. They don't have the time, money to do it. And then just don't even want to, working part-time as a library director in a small library in Nebraska, probably not something you're thinking about. But you do need to keep up with how to do your job and to earn credits to become certified if you want your library to become accredited. And we offer these free basic skills courses. They cost nothing, they're all done online. There's a schedule throughout the year of when you take each of the classes, most of them. And then if you do all of these classes in a three-year period or three years to do this work, you earn your certification. So you don't do this all in one year, that would be a lot. Don't do it all in one year. There are six required courses you have to take. And the schedule is up on the basic skills website right now if you want to see when all of these courses are happening throughout the year. Except as you can see, we've got a few that we're starting to, Holly started getting some of them to be more self-paced. Our communication class you can take at any time you want to now. It's not even at any certain time of year. But on that one, you can do it. Our introduction to Calvin classes also self-paced. It runs the full month of April, but you just do it whenever you want to during that month. Most of our other classes last two weeks, and they're during a certain time period. And you have to do it during that two weeks time period with instructors that work with you on those. So in order to earn your certification, you have to take all six of these classes. And then you have to pick seven out of these 10 to do your electives. Now, doing all of this is only if you want to earn your certification. You're welcome. It is free to any library staff person. Actually, any Nebraska citizen might just be interested in being a librarian or working in the library. You can take any of these courses anytime you want to. It does not have to be for the purpose of earning certification. It can be just because I'm a new children's youth librarian. I need to learn a little bit more about it. I'm just going to pop in and take that one course, the library service to the youth session. All of these classes are taught by the rest of the library commission staff or our regional library system directors. Other continuation education opportunities are out there as well. If you need to earn CE credits for your certification or just if you want to learn something, you should know what you're doing. This show, help us live. Y'all are going to earn an hour of CE for watching this, and you can earn CE continue education credits for watching all of our recordings too. United for Libraries. This is through the American Library Association is for trustees, library boards, foundations. The Nebraska Library Commission pays for an account for all libraries in the state to have access to the resources in there. So if you have any boards that need training to let trustee courses and things in there, they need to earn CE or just learn how to do their jobs as board members. That is the place to send them to. Web Junction is also something that we pay for to help keep it running free resources, free webinars, free trainings in there that can help you earn CE. These are just selected funds. There's lots of things out there.  There's links to the CE records for the librarian and library boards on those main pages for those certifications. Something else we offer through library development is our grants. All of our grant programs are done through library development. So Youth Grants for Excellence, CN Training Grants, Library Improvement Grants, which is federal library service and technology act money and internship grants. That's the main page for grants. Right now they're not open. They're done the year before for the upcoming year. So the 2024 grants were already applied to and should be sometime this month hearing from all of us about if you've been approved and receiving your grants you'll get for 2024. So look in the fall, just for when we open these up again. The CE and training ones, however, they are done in two batches. In March, I believe there'll be a second round opening for those, for anything you're getting tending in the second half. Like you're doing the second half of 2024. We break that one up. So if you need funding for anything, look at our grant programs that we have here. We also do a lot of things, a lot of things in Youth and Children's and Young Adult Services, a summer reading program. The theme for this year's adventure begins at your library. All libraries should have already received the manual or a USB, that is the manual to purchase the community for your summer reading if you're going to be going with that theme. She does a best of children's and teen books every year. So similar to the One Book One Nebraska, we do one book, oh no, best of children's teen books. That's her list. Sorry, I jumped ahead. That's her list of new books from the last year. She does young income slides. She sometimes does it at a conference, an LA conference, the rest of letters of some kind of conference. She's done the children's one already for this year. The teen one is actually in two weeks. So her list of all of her books that she's come across are on that handout page. And then she has her One Book for Nebraska Kids and Teens every year, like where you can have children or teens read the same book and discuss it. And the titles for 2024, Parachute Kids by Benny Tang and Between the Lines for Teens by Nikki Grimes. The information is up there for out there for those. Another thing I do here is E-Rate. E-Rate is federal funding for public libraries. All the rest of libraries are eligible for it. You can get discounts on your monthly internet costs and any equipment you need to purchase to make that internet work. Right now, applying for the 2024 year is open. Now is the time to do it. I did training. If you go to that E-Rate website there, there's a full workshop and slides on how to do it. And if you need any help, call me, email me. I'm the state E-Rate coordinator for public libraries for E-Rate. And I can handhold you through the whole process. So if you need a discount on, if you think you need a discount on internet or you need to bump up to Fiverr and want a discount, this is a program that can help you do that. I think this is the last slide. And technology. Now that we have Sherman in our department, this is the kind of thing we do throughout the development. One big thing he has done is set up DNS filter. Filtering many libraries, you must filter, have some sort of filtering, blocking inappropriate things on the internet in order to receive any sort of federal funding. That would be E-Rate funding, and that would be LSTA grant funding and any other federal funding you receive. Here at the Library Commission, now we have a program where we will provide a DNS filter, a certain type of filter for you for free. No cost to your library. Sherman will reach out to you. He will work with you. He'll get installed on your computer, on your network, whatever you need. And we monitor it and take care of it for you. So if you never knew what to do with the filter, it was too much to figure out. You couldn't afford it. Go to that website. Free for all public libraries in the state of Nebraska can get filtering, and we will maintain that for you. Also, if you're interested in updating your broadband or your technology or what's going on, how do I keep my computer secure? He's the guy to talk to. He's done a couple of end-of-the-slides for us about them, but he will come to your library and do a tech review who will work with you over the phone. I'm just talking to you about what do I need to make things work better and work faster technology-related at my library. That's me. What's up? Yeah. I'm just using the arrow to use the sign. Yeah, we didn't think that. Hi, my name's Tessa Timberley, and you might have known me as Tessa Terry. I have a new last name, so that's something I'm getting used to. So I am the communications coordinator, and I handle our communications, public information, all that great stuff. Some of the things that I work on in my department, I handle all the commissions, social media, news releases, the annual and biannual reports. Nebraska Center for the Book is something that I work on quite often. Any graphics or photography that come out of the commission usually go through me, and then programming collection promotions. So our social media, our three main ones that we do pretty much everything on that we post to our Facebook account, which we have several Facebook accounts for different things. Like we have an encompass account. We have a Center for the Book Facebook page, a One Book One Nebraska Facebook page. And then I think librarians learning together, but our main one is the Nebraska Library Commission Facebook page where we post everything that we're doing. If we have a basic skills class coming up, we post about it, new books on Bard, we kind of touch all departments. If they have something they're offering to librarians or the public, we put it on our Facebook and social media. We have an Instagram account, and that's nlc.social. And then we also have a Twitter account at nlc underscore news. So those are our main ones. And I would really encourage you if you are a library, if you have accounts on these social media pages, or if you're a librarian with accounts on these or a media specialist in a school to follow us, we usually follow you back just so we can see what libraries are doing across the state. We follow lots of out of state libraries as well, just because we like to see what people are doing and learn from them as well. We're out of state libraries or state library associations. Yep. Just to keep up to date with where people are at and what they're doing in their libraries, so we can all be connected in that way. And these are just shots of our pages if you wanted to look for them on your social media accounts. One of the big things I handle is our annual report. Every year we put out a report, one year it will be an annual report that covers one fiscal year, which is July through June, and the next year we'll do a biannual report, which covers two fiscal years, usually the year before and then the previous year, the current year. And this is a really great way to stay up to date with just an overall picture of what the commission's doing. It looks at what projects we've funded. It looks at the databases that we have. There are articles from every single department at NLC. Our department heads write them and update them. So they're about what's happening at the commission, that fiscal year, any new programs we've initiated or how current programs are going. So if you're interested in the commission as a whole and you just want to get an idea of what's going on, that would be a great place to start. The other program that I have probably the biggest hand in outside of Nebraska Library Commission is our Nebraska Center for the Book. It is a nonprofit that's housed here at the commission and they have a lot of great programs. I'm their point person here at the commission. So we handle their website and we update that for them. And I do a lot of the behind the scenes work for their programming. So the NCB newsletter, One Book, One Nebraska, letters about literature, the Nebraska Book Festival, the Nebraska Book Awards, and the Celebration of Nebraska Books all come through the commission and we have a hand in them and help organize them and work with the board of the Nebraska Center for the Book. And we're into talking about stuff. Yeah. So if you guys have any questions about the communications department, how we work, we do a lot of programming just with all the department heads. So things like promotions for Ancompass Live, Meet the Presenter. We do the Bookface Friday post, Amy Owens, and I do that every week. So we're trying to find different ways to look at our collections and promote those books to you. We do a new books on Bard Post, looking at the books that Gabe and his department have uploaded and have ready for their department. We do a Nebraska Memories Throwback Thursday post every week to keep people updated on what's going on with those. So there's always something going on. Yeah. There's always something going on trying to highlight the different programs that we have so that you guys know about them is pretty much our goal. So I'll hand it over to Gabe. Okay. I'm Gabe Kramer. I'm the director of the Talking Book and Burial Service. You can see that's our staff right there. We're currently hiring for a readers advisor if any of you want to apply. But we've got our own studios that we'll talk about in a bit. We record our own books. But the Talking Book and Burial Service is the state library for the blind and visually impaired and physically handicapped of Nebraska. It's easy to sign up. You can just go to our website. There's the link. If you are an individual, if you are a facility, which would be like a nursing home or a school, you may sign up for our service. Most importantly, it must be signed by what we call a certifying authority. So not just anyone can sign up for our service. You have to qualify. You have to be blind. You have to be visually impaired. You have to have a reading disability of some sort. It must be signed by medical professionals, social worker, teacher, et cetera.  We prefer a librarian to either be someone that has their MLIS degree or is at the very least the director of the local public library. Not just someone that works at the library. The delivery of our products. We use the United States Postal Service, all of our machines, the cartridges, Braille, newsletters coming and going from the patrons. It's all free. No postage is necessary. Then our products offered. I've brought some things to show and tell here. We have our digital talking book machine, which looks like so. We have our cartridges. They're about the size of a credit card. They're just glorified USB drives is all they are. We duplicate our cartridges in-house via what we call duplication on demand. We can customize your books any way you want them. If you want to read the entire Harry Potter series, we can put it in order books one through seven. There's no waiting for books. So if you use overdrive, for example, there may be a limited amount of certain title that you want. We have an infinite number of copies of books. So if all 2600 of our patrons want to read the same book at the same time, they can. We also have BARD and our BARD mobile app. That is for people that don't want to use the cartridges sent to their house. They can just use their phone. I would say about 90% of the collection is available via BARD, so you pretty much never run out of books if you want to go that way. We have our Braille eReader. This is new. This has only been out for about a year. It is electronic Braille. So you can download a book with a Braille file and you upload it to this device. And as you read along, the Braille just changes. And then we also have print Braille. Children's Braille we have in-house. And our adult Braille, we co-opt with the state of Utah. So all of your adult Braille needs would actually come from Utah and not from Nebraska. They order it through us. They order it through us. Yep, that's correct. So our readers' advisors, again, we are hiring right now if you want to apply. They're your first line of contact. They will help you out with everything that you could possibly need, whether that's filling out an application, setting up service, selecting books. Maybe it's trying to find that hard to find book. You know, you heard about a book on a radio or television program, but you don't know the title, but maybe you knew the author asked. They're very good at knowing those things. And just general questions about the program. Again, we have our own in-house recording studios. We record both books and magazines. And I should mention something that's not on there. We have about 25 volunteers that come in and narrate all of our books and magazines. They give us anywhere from 90 minutes to four hours a week. Our magazines, we have 19 titles, Local Regional Interest. The magazine's listed there, pretty much anything with the word Nebraska in the title we record. Plus Taste of Home, Midwest Living, Mother Earth News, things of more regional interest. Our books, our collection development policy for books is books by local authors, books about Nebraska, books about the Great Plains. And then we always record the One Book One Nebraska. This year's One Book One Nebraska Dancing with the Octopus. We're hoping to have finished here in about a month. And there is our contact information. Phone number, we do have an 800 number for those outside of the Lincoln area. Email and our website. And next up is Debra. And I'll apologize in advance if I declare my throat sort of regularly. Sorry about that. My name is Debra Dragos and I'm the director of the Technology and Access Services Department. And the rest of the people who are related to my department are up here, Alana Nabotny, Susan Nicely, Amanda Sweet. Our cataloging position is currently open, but it closed the application process closed Friday. So we're currently reviewing applications. So hopefully we'll find someone here soon to fill out the position. And then Jennifer Rampey rounds out our department. She helps so much with a lot of our paperwork and et cetera, all the invoicing. In our department, we work a lot with products and services that the library commission actually shared or provides two libraries. And we work with groups to purchase items, getting them discounts and things of that nature. The first service that I want to talk about today is Nebraska Access. This particular page is for the general public. Lisa and Mary may have talked a little bit about some of the services that are provided from this main Nebraska Access page last week, the website selected by librarians and the state agency publications. Today I'm going to talk about the databases for Nebraskans, which was the original Nebraska Access portion, and then also Nebraska Memories. We'll start with the databases for Nebraskans. These are databases that the library commission purchases for all Nebraska residents. This is the main Access page. And we currently provide three different portals. As you can see here, there is an option for all Nebraska Access databases, high school databases, and then elementary middle school databases. So we provide passwords to all libraries. We also provide IP access or IP recognition if that's an option for a particular school or public library. And then they can choose which of the database selections is most appropriate for their particular patrons. Once you enter the portal, once a patron enters a portal, they can find a list of all the different databases that are available. We do offer, I don't have the entire list here for you, but we offer biographical databases, a small business database, a consumer health database, a legal database, genealogy database, and some other more academic level databases, as well as children's databases. On the Nebraska Library Commission website, we have more resources that are aimed at the librarians. So for Nebraska Access on our Library Commission page, we do offer what we call the librarians toolbox. And here you can get information about how to link and authenticate your patrons to databases. You can get marketing materials. You can get little business cards or templates to make little business cards to hand out passwords to your patrons if you would like so that they could use these resources from home. We also offer group discounts for a number of different products and services so that libraries can get a lower cost, hopefully. So we have several different, three different pages. Our first one is for databases and resources. So any library that's interested in purchasing any other databases that are listed on this page will actually sign up for that product through the Library Commission. Susan Isley heads this up. And then you're invoiced through the Library Commission. So you do not have to then, number one, you get a discount and number two, you only pay the Library Commission. You do not have to pay each of the separate vendors. So how many, I will be here on this, this is just a screen at the beginning, the A's and B's. Do you know how many? This has got to be a huge list. It's quite a lengthy list. Yeah. So we worked with a lot of different vendors. We have a second page that is specifically for discounts on books and supplies. And this page, a lot of these discounts are granted yearly. So as you scan through this page, you might see a few at the moment that still say this is for 2023, but Susan is working with each of these vendors to get the updated discounts. But if you're looking for bar codes, if you're looking for different products through Demco, you can come to this page and find the Nebraska discount. If you're looking for books, you might want to check out the two distributors that we have on the, two big distributors that we have on this page, Baker and Taylor and Ingram, because you might get a bigger discount through them with the Nebraska code as opposed to going through even Amazon. Sometimes you do get a better discount. So you might want to check this, check out the options here. Our third discounts page is for conferences. Oh, before I go on, let me say one more thing. With the discounts page for the databases and e-resources, we do offer trials every once in a while when a vendor is offering a new product or has offered us a new discount on a product either way. And we have a mailing list called Trial, and I'll show you later on how to sign up for the mailing list. But if you sign up for the Trial mailing list, you'll get a notice when we are running any of those trials. So conferences, an announcement does go out over the general library system mailing lists when we do have a discount for the conferences. And I'll mention about that Trial is mailing list. And some people are very worried about getting too much email and beginning to do things. Actually, it's not like every day or anything. It's like once a month, maybe even less often. What's the trial? Trials. And generally we try to run the subscriptions for the services from either July through June or January through December. So you can't always subscribe any time of the year. So we generally run trials in the spring or in the fall so that you either start a new subscription in July or you start a new subscription in January. So there aren't a huge number coming out on that list. Another service that the library commission pays for completely for all legal public libraries is the movie site license. That allows libraries to show movies, certain movies within the library at no cost. They can do a public performance of those movies. This page, and you'll notice the URL is up at the top, but this page does answer a lot of the frequently asked questions about what you can and cannot show with those licenses or how to get special permission to do something that falls outside the license. Those licenses are mailed out yearly with the summer reading program materials. So they did just recently go out for the 2024 year. If you have questions, Susan Isley is the coordinator for that. We also coordinate the Nebraska Overdrive Libraries consortium. You may recognize this page, which some of our patrons still use. Other patrons are using the Libby app, and this is how the Libby app works. We currently have 194 libraries that are part of this consortium. We collect money from them yearly to pay for new content that goes into the collection. The library commission also contributes funds towards purchasing materials from three different pots of money. We worked with the state legislature to get funding that's called Nebraska e-reads, which goes into the monies to purchase materials. We also use some federal funds to purchase materials. So I juggled the budget. Susan handles a lot of the tech support. And we have found it to be a highly used service. There were over 1.4 million checkouts in 2024. And I'm sorry, 2023. I was just looking at numbers this morning again. While we broke our daily record on the 2nd of January, we had over 5,000 checkouts in one day. But we're on track already this month to have over 120,000 checkouts just for this month. So it's a very popular service. So in addition to the two public-facing sites, we do have a resource site for librarians. And this is the main page where you can get to the pages where it shows you which libraries currently participate. You can get to information on how to join the consortium. You can find monthly reports. We do a ton of statistics. And we also provide the numbers that are pre-filled in the Bibliostat for circulation and holdings and all those types of things. And if you'll notice the last link on this page, the help and FAQs for library staff and users, this is something new that we did last year. We do get certain questions over and over again. Like, for example, why don't you have every single book in a series? Well, staff can go to that page and say, here, Pageren, this is why we don't have every single. We can't. We just can't keep every single title in the series. So resources for librarians on this page. Another service that we provide is Nebraska Memories. We provide the platform through OCLC to house digital images of different historical materials from a number of different institutions around the state. We have worked with public libraries, schools, museums, historical societies, universities, just a variety of different institutions to digitize materials such as photographs, negatives, postcards, documents, maps, a number of different things. Anything that's related to Nebraska history. We will help them digitize materials. We will digitize some materials for them to get them started on a project if they would like. We help them create the records that describe the items. Does something need to be old of a certain age that can be in there? It can't be like last year book or something. We ask that it be pre-1972, but we do have a few newer items than that, but we do ask pre-1972. And they do have to have either, they have to own the copyright or they have to have copyright permission to provide anything past 1923. Anything before that's a public domain, but if it's after 1923, they have to own the copyright information. So previous page showed you the public site where people can get in and search or browse materials. This is the site where people from institutions can go to find out how to participate in Nebraska memories and there's also information and best practices in scanning if they want to do their own digitization projects. Okay, tech kids. Amanda is our technology innovations librarian and she thought it would be really useful for libraries to have the opportunity to check out equipment and different types of technology to try out what their patrons be before they invest their own funds in a lot of these different things. So you can see a list there of the majority of items that we currently have. And you'll notice we have 12 to 15 copies for kids for each of these different types of things. I take it back. Robots we have eight up to eight items can be checked out at a time. But we have drones, we have augmented reality, virtual reality, the robots, just a variety of different things that you can check out, request, and then use with your patrons. We do generally have a 30 day checkout period. That does not include time that we put in at the beginning and the end for shipping. We do ship them or if you're close to Lincoln you can come in and pick them up and return them in person if you would like. For each of the items, Amanda has put together information about the item, the age group that it's appropriate for resources on what you can do with this particular item and then also some lesson plans and things like that. So you don't just get the item and then have to figure out what to do with it. Amanda has put together information so that the library staff can learn how to use it themselves first and then have ideas of how to use it with their patrons. Amanda, and I didn't actually do screens for these, Amanda also monthly does the pretty sweet tech talk on Encampus Live. That's the last Wednesday of the month generally. And then another one that I last minute, sorry, I forgot to put in another project that she works on is the Nebraska Libraries Web Project which we provide a WordPress website for public libraries if they would like. And the URL for that is just libraries.nebraska.gov if anyone is interested in participating. The tech kids last month's pre-sweet tech at the end of December was about the tech kids to these new ones. You want to know more in-depth about these that you can borrow, watch a recording of December's pre-sweet tech on Encampus Live. Okay, cataloging. As Christa mentioned earlier, we do have basic skills class and there is an introduction to cataloging as one of those required courses. Beyond that, we offer a cataloging certification program. There's a basic certificate level and an advanced certificate level if anyone is interested in taking additional classes on cataloging. Most of the classes are offered through Moodle. Some of them are self-paced, some of them are scheduled at a specific time period. And just two more here. I'll just mention quickly, we do encourage sharing amongst our libraries and a number of libraries who catalog their materials through OCLC do also use OCLC for interlibrary loan. And some of our libraries who are part of the Nebraska Overdrive Libraries Consortium have purchased their own copies of items and also share those with patrons from other libraries. So the library commission to acknowledge that and help out a little bit with the funding of those services, we do offer lender compensation. And this page talks a bit about that. And the last thing that I wanted to mention, I talked a little bit about mailing lists. We do have a page that lists all of the mailing lists from the library commission. So one of the group discount services that we offer is a Cat Express group service and we do have a mailing list for that. We have a mailing list for the Nebraska Overdrive group that all of the mailing lists for the library commission are available on this particular page. So that's it for me. Did you have that? Whoops, I did something. Sorry. That's great. Let's pop that back up. Yeah. And actually, I'm going to pop back to that mailing list page because I should mention something I didn't mention myself is we see here, there's one that's talking that says the list is called Systems and then very body to the beginning when it says CPS, Essential Planes Library System. We have four regional library systems in the state which are kind of like outreach of the commission. They're their own independent entities and they are kind of outstanding as our like boots on the ground people that help libraries. They do training and they come to help you and we'll work with you as consultants. And if you look on the web, over here there's a link to the regional systems and it pops out to the pages for each of them on that file menu there. But they each have their own mailing list too that they all post it. So if you are in a particular region of the state you should get signed up for your library systems regional mailing list because then you'll get notifications from your system about things they're doing and then we post to them as well you can visit the, I think it's called a super group or super mailing list called Systems where we send things out to all the system mailing lists. There is not an NLC mailing list. There's not a library commission mailing list. There is four regional systems that we send a lot of general stuff out and then there's a specific ones for cat express, for trial. There's an E-rate one as well if you're looking for E-rate related notifications. So I definitely recommend signing up for whichever one of these would be most useful and appropriate for you. All right, so yes. So just to have any questions, there's one up there that I'm going to get to here. That is a link there to, oh I didn't update that. I had to update that link. That's a little, but there will be a link there if I want to do these slides to where we have all of our staff lists so you can find all the phone numbers and email addresses for anyone in any department you want to talk to. And it's our E-100 number here at the commission. Does anybody have anything else they want to add that they thought about or are sitting here while I go over here and check out what this question is we have? Oh, that's true. Nice up here. Oh, it's a comment. Okay, it's not really a question, but it's a comment. You were talking about how the, it says increased web-related checkouts with your homebound? Question mark. Yeah. Is that probably why? Actually, Yeah. Yeah. I, and that's one of the reasons I was looking this morning to see what the checkouts were yesterday. And it actually was number two for the month. January 2nd was our highest, but yesterday was the second highest. Really? And Monday was the fourth highest. Wow. Because I think it was April, or January 3rd was the third. Yes. So holidays and weather-related. Sure. That doesn't get too good. People may still, I don't really have extended their holiday break possibly in the beginning. People were lucky enough to do that. Yeah. All right. Does anybody have any questions? Anything you wanted to know about, about the commission that we haven't covered anything that was confusing? You want to know, learn more about anything you were hoping we would mention that we didn't? Well, we can talk about things that we're all involved in and try to answer questions from other departments if they know the answer. Type in the questions section of your webinar interface. It just hit 11 o'clock, 1101 here, but we started a little late. So that's fine. And we'll have plenty of time for anybody who has any questions. While I'm waiting to see if we do have any, I'm going to switch off here and bring up our commission website. Anything we got some thank yous coming in. Thank you analysis staff. You're welcome. We hope this is useful. Like I said, we've had some reason the last year. So lots of requests for tell us about what you do. And we wanted to redo it too. So hopefully this will be helpful. A lot of the links we mentioned are here on the commission website. Our main website URL is the nlc.nebraska.gov. You can get here, you can search for anything you want to. We've got fly out menus for a lot of things we talked about this week and last week that you can pop over to as you want to. More. All right. I don't see any of the disparate questions. So I am going to wrap it up here today and I'm going to go over here and use our Cloud Mini for Education and Training to get to my Encompass Live website. There's no way to get to it for the show. You can also use your search engine of choice and just type in Encompass Live. So far, we are the only thing called that on the internet. No one else is allowed to use the name. I have a copyrighted or trademarked or anything, whatever you need to do. But our page comes up in our archive. So this will bring us to our main page. These are upcoming shows we have coming over the next couple of months. We do have a Facebook page, as I mentioned. If you do like to use Facebook, give us a like over there. We do reminders. You're reminded to log into today's show when the previous recording is made available. This is about other things going on. So if you'd like to use Facebook, give us a like over there. Or we use the hashtag and come live a little abbreviation of our show name when we post things on Twitter and Instagram. Also look for those hashtags there and keep an eye on what's going on with our show. So these are upcoming shows, but I did want to show you our archive list is underneath there, a link to the archives. Those recent ones are at the top of the page. There is last week's NLC Part 1, so you can go ahead and watch that recording and see the slides for that. This show is being recorded. It will be posted up here by the end of the day tomorrow, along with a link to the slides. Everyone who attended today's show and registered for today's show will let me know when it's available. And then I'll push out under our social media as well. Here in our show archives, I wanted to show you there is a search feature. So if you want to know if you've done a topic, a show on a particular topic, you can search for that. As I said, we premiered in January 2009, and this is our full show archive. So you do have a filter here. You can do the full show archive search, everything going back to the beginning. Or you can just limit it to the most recent 12 months. You just want some current information. And that's very important because, as I said, this is our full show archive, but I'm back to the beginning. And I'm not going to scroll all the way down because that's just going to be crazy. But so everything is here. Everything is on our YouTube channel. But some things will stand the test of time. It would be great things. You can still watch the recordings and get good information. But some things will become old and outdated. Resources may change drastically or no longer exist anymore. Links may be broken. People may work in different places and then they're presented for us. So just pay attention to the original broadcast date of everything you watch on here. Everything has dates. You know when it was first done. That information is actually from that date. So this one here from 2018. So just pay attention to that when you are watching any of our old, older shows. But this is something we do as libraries and librarians. We keep things for historical purposes. And as long as we have a place to have them, hold them, which right now is our YouTube channel. We always have them available out there. I'll just keep adding to it. We have over 730 something shows. I'm not sure of the exact number. I can't remember. But there's a lot of them. We do show pretty much every week of the year. We always take it off the year of the Nebraska Library Association Annual Conference. So it's always been just 51 weeks. But some years there have been, you'll notice there's fewer technical issues. People couldn't make it on the last minute illness, whatnot. So you'll notice that not every year has a full 51, but that's why you can't, it's not a big number, you might think, because if you're here on the air, we missed. We try to do it every weekend. So that wraps up for today's show. Thank you everyone for being here today. Thank you all for joining me and talking about what we do here. It was helpful to everyone. I hope you join us on one of our future episodes. And next week we're going to talk about auditing library websites. Laura Solomon is in the Ohio Public Library Information Network. She's going to be here with us. I'm not going to be here. She's going to come in remotely. You're not going to make people travel across the country to come here. That's the beauty of this show being online in a webinar. Nobody has to travel to join us. They can just come in remotely. So she's going to join us remotely to talk about evaluating your library website doesn't need updating navigation, user interface, all those kind of things. So if you're wondering, who is our website doing? Is it good? Is it bad? Should we fix something? Change something? This would be a show to you. So please do sign up for that one. And any other of our other shows we're coming up. Pretty sweet texts, as Denver mentioned, the last Wednesday of each month, our list is done here. I'm waiting to hear back from... I don't know exactly what a metis topic is going to be, but I'm going to get that from her. I'll just give you a quick update as for you quickly so you know what she'll be talking about. But you can always sign up anyways. Just a super case. If you are a techie person who's interested in tech, that's definitely what we talk about. I talked about Sally's reading list she does. The week after next is her teen reads of 2023. Teen related books that she has read or found. She already has done the children's one best in children's books of 2023. She did that in November. She did two kind of companion shows that she does teen books and children's books. And she did one for the summer reading program doing book titles that might be good for summer reading. So you can watch that one as well. So that wraps it up. Thank you everyone. I'll see you on the next episode and then come back. Bye-bye.