What I want to try and rattle through in the next half hour is kind of two talks. I couldn't really pick a title So on one hand, I'm going to teach you a bit about how I make these. So this is a hand-built electric guitar and I started doing this a while ago and I tried doing it like I was at Liverpool Make Fest recently and what I try and do is show people how these are made And I keep getting people come up to me go, oh, that's amazing. I could never do that And that's demonstrably not true because three years ago. I haven't set foot in a workshop and I'm a software engineer So I have no physical capabilities whatsoever And so the kind of other title of this talk is from Idiot to Imposter, which is like I Know that I come to events like this and I hope In the same way that you will get inspired by something and go on to want to kind of action that kind of passion later But as you leave this place or you know either today or after some more of the festival you get back You may have hit Amazon and bought some deaf boards. That's usually my advice And then you hit work or looking after family or whatever it is that Then you kind of lose the momentum Moment things start going wrong. And so with this this time I try to structure things to Make it more likely I would succeed and it's kind of so I want to intertwine those two two topics So let's see how it goes this is an electric guitar like this one here It's not the world's most complicated instrument once you get to know it It's not piano or violin or a saxophone or something like that So it's actually quite a good place to start out with if you want to get into building instruments It's got a few parts to it. We've got the body you've got the net you've got the electronics that can make it work But it's you can see kind of see the components fairly quickly on a on an instrument like this And that makes it a really good place to start So when I got into the idea of I wanted to build an electric guitar I did a lot of research. I understood kind of the parts, but my first one I started Thank you here With a bunch of parts. I kept it at that level of abstraction So a lot of the topics that I want to cover JP's already mentioned. So the idea of Not trying to do everything all at once but starting small iterating every time Like every time I try and build a new guitar I try and go a little bit out of my comfort zone and I try and keep most things more manageable So this was me as a software engineer keeping the concept You know, I'm going out of my comfort zone. I'm building something physical but I've kind of simplified the problem a lot by Cheating I just bought a bunch of parts and I'm you know, I'm just gonna cheat and try and get to some Sense of achievement quickly. I'm going a little bit out my comfort zone as I say because I'm doing some physical So this body I bought was the cheapest one I could get I knew it would need a little bit of woodwork and I figured that I'd keep that bit manageable and try and Start on that path, but overall I'm trying to keep things kind of simple The other kind of advantage of doing this obviously that I've not spent a huge amount of money on bespoke custom roof free tools and Very exotic woods. So if I get to the end of this and it's a disaster And I actually discovered my passions making kilts or our house films on souffle's then I can change right? I've learned something I can move on that sign So having assembled This kind of pile of parts on the kitchen table. I need somewhere to To to kind of enact I don't have much kind of you know room to do woodwork at home The this here is Cambridge makespace So it's a community workshop or a maker space or a headspace call it what you want to There's lots of these around the country. There's one even in heaven bridge. I believe redirect fire There's one over in Liverpool called does which I occasionally go and visit and these are great spaces and You go there for the workshop because there's space they have You can't say off here. There's a woodworking kind of facility where I have a bunch of tools that I can use But they also have some laser cutter some freely printers. There's a glass kiln over there's electronics bench There's some sewing machines off here There's lots of kind of tool and that's kind of why people sign up and go for this because they see all the toys and think well That's awesome But I choose the word community workshop deliberately because the community is half of Why you want to be here? I couldn't do this if it was just I had access to tools What I need is access to experience. I didn't realize that when I joined up But that's this is what what's important is all these people you can see here the members They all know stuff that I don't know and None of them build guitars Right, not that I'm aware of But they all do Makery stuff. So there's a guy at the back there on the electronics bench He probably knows how to solder better than me and I'm gonna obviously gonna have to learn how to solder electronics at some point So I can you know in exchange for helping him with one of his projects or a beer or just out of you know People just do it because they want to help Being in an environment like this Without other people it's just a huge key to succeeding So if you whatever it is you take away that you want to get passionate about Trying to find a community to be a part of be it physical or virtual You know just Surrounding yourself by other people moving forward in whatever it is they're doing is great and over time I slipped from being in that 80% that JP was referring to when I I signed up to make space I didn't really go that much. I thought it was a good idea. It's like a gem You felt good about it, but never where I went To now I'm kind of slipped into the 5% because I've got the time to help I'm more active I kind of help improve the workshop and over time that will wax and wane right and there's workload change and things But it's it's yeah being part of community is is a hugely important So yeah, I got these people to teach me how to use like pillow drill and It's even the unobvious stuff. So as a software engineer, I thought there were two types of screwdriver There was the one with the minus sign at the end and the one with the plus sign at the end, right? That's that screwdrivers covered. It turns out there's more And just being in a place with more experienced people I read the civil coming up to me and say Michael That's that's the one kind of screwdriver for that. So it's not even proactively seeking help just surrounding yourself by people who Have more experience and you know of a positive attitude So through that kind of you know, I took the body I learned has to cut some holes in it and put some other holes in it There I made my first guitar Does this make me a master luffery yet? No, clearly not. Um, does it matter? No Not in slightest. This is still the guitar. I play most days when I do my morning practice This is here my seventh guitar and this is all kind of hand-built and kind of you know Kind of old-grand but this is still guitar that I made because I wanted a guitar that made a particular noise And so it does the job and I still play every day if I hand this to someone who's a guitarist They'll they'll not start questioning. Wait a minute. Didn't you just cheat and but they don't care. It's a musical instrument so In taking those baby steps You know, you can achieve things and kind of start to see your progress and measure them a kind of not in a I want I want to grasp but just Having checkpoints if you set yourself a very grand ambition, it's hard to see your progress It's hard to work out what's going on particularly when it all starts going wrong. Is it inevitably well? So that was guitar one and You know, so so let's delve down slightly so the electronics and electric guitar are fairly dumb, right? So the Nationally, I did two years of electronics at university and I've forgotten pretty much all of it Which is okay because I say that I don't need to understand much here. You've got on the electric guitar you have Kind of this one has two pickups and these are essentially A bunch of magnets with wire called around the detective vibration strings and turn into a small very small current You then have optionally volume and tone controls which are just variable resistors and I've got select to hit let's me change between them But ultimately I could have just one of these and a jack to connect the cable to and it would work And it would be playable and if you get many cigar walks guitars, that's all we put in them And so there isn't much 2d electronics This is a quite complicated wiring. It's got ten components, right? And most things like one of the big pickup manufacturers called Seymour Duncan has on their website pretty much all the All the circuit diagrams, so I don't even have to sit and figure them out I can just go to the Seymour Duncan's website and say, oh, it's got two pickups and free controls or whatever And it will generate the circuit diagram for you. So you don't need to kind of have a great in-depth of And this will be true of most domains, right? You try and focus on the bit that's interesting to you and kind of push the others to the side so like the pickups I Really would like to mine my own pickups because it sounds Interesting right? There's some kind of magic here.  You vary the amount of wiring you do And you get a really different sound how close that? But it would be a total rabbit hole and I would never learn to do woodwork if I did that and I've made a very conscious decision to stay away from this As cool as it seems I'm learning enough and again, it's very tempting to go down every rabbit hole you come across, right? I make most of this but I did I was time to try and do metalwork to make the bridges because I don't make those But again, that would just be a total distraction and that's okay If that's what you want to do go down that rabbit hole But just acknowledge that you can't do everything so if you're going to go and mine pickups or you know Make sparrons for your kilts that you're making maybe just focus on that and do a good job of that and Kind of outsource the rest. I'm fortunate I know a chap in Chester who makes pickups and I get you know I work with him and can outsource that bit the body So the body on electric guitar is what most people kind of look at It's the bit that differentiates it most from other guitars. I mean it kind of in a immediacy sense On a typical solid body electric guitar like this. It's the bit that matters the least Right, it's the bit that you focus on and that's why because we can do all these kind of funky designs and stuff Because it doesn't really matter It just has to be a thing that bolts everything else together And so it's a good place to start with my next guitar, right? I bought all the bits for the first one for the second one I'm just going to make the body and I'll still buy all the bits. So I'm still iterating keeping it simple Going a little bit out of my comfort zone each time So I got people in the makespace community will do teaching sessions on on different bits of kits So I attended one on the CNC router, which is a computer-controlled wood cutting machine. Essentially I downloaded a design off the internet for the guitar, so I cheated again It looks very much like the design for the last guitar. Deliberate. I'm keeping it. I'm trying to Make sure I understand what success looks like Right, so if I tried to design a really wacky guitar on my second one I put it together and it's slightly wrong. Well, what bit did I get wrong? I don't know whereas in fact all these guitars at this point look like the one I bought at university So I have to rest of guitars that all look the same But it's deliberate because I know I can then assess whether they're good or not Or kind of and kind of understand again when they go wrong as they know what we do where the where the mistakes are So so yeah at the end of it. I have a nice right body for for this guitar and Yeah, did I cheat again? Yes, I have master luthier at this point. No, does it matter? I don't think so Because I've made progress I've learned I'm moving forward and at some point this guitar was for my brother And he was over the moon at this kind of beautiful bit of kind of wood that was unlike other guitar bodies he'd seen The wood was cheap off eBay So the bodies again, you can you know, again, it's it's less scary making the body because If you get it wrong, it doesn't really matter You can kind of smooth out that divot that you took out and and kind of no one really knows The one bit you have to get right is the fret positions on On the neck. So these are the frets So this is a guitar This here is the scale length. So the thing that's kind of important on an electric guitar is This is your nut and here is the saddles on your bridge. This is called your scale length Um on this guitar, it's 24 inches on the previous guitars. It was like 25 and a half The bass the bass guitar is just the same only it's a longer scale length. So they are like 32 inches Um baritone guitar kind of 27 inches a ukulele somewhere down here I don't actually know the number but ultimately they're all working on the same principle. You're just very the scale length Um, I'm not sure how many people were prepared to this I probably should have put a warning up that we were about to do a gear shift from woodwork to uh javascript. Um As I said, I have a lap software engineer. Um It's how do you work out where the frets go? It's actually not that hard It's only this line here that really matters in all this and if we look at the This messed up power is just like doing powers. So you can do that on a pocket calculator, right two to the I divided by 12 where I is like one two three four, right? We've got a divide and we've got a minus and we know the scale like because we've measured the point from here to here So that means if you're building a guitar It doesn't really matter what number is here, but once you've worked it out If you sit down with a bit of paper and a pocket calculator You can just do this kind of take you 15 20 minutes whatever and you can work out a position of all these Right. So again, even though you need to know this number and these frets have to be accurate relative to that It's not rocket science to work it out I'm as I say, I'm a computer scientist and inherently lazy. So I write a webpage do it for me Um, so these numbers here are just calculating the positions for a 25 and a half inch scalex guitar and You know, it's found out the other guitar builders are lazy as well because a bunch of people now use this tool that I wrote for myself Which is a nice way being able to kind of give back bringing Some of my expertise from my domain to bear on the kind of thing I've taken up means that you Often have a different view on what it is you're doing or a different approach And I'm not exactly the world's best luffy, but I've been able to help other luthiers, which is kind of cool.  So it's good However for the for the First time I did the frets. I cheated. I bought a neck without frets and I just put them in The reason I did this at all was because For guitar two with my brother wanted Gold kind of hardware on the guitar on the grounds. Presumably has no taste but the If you look at most uh, guitar next they'll have silver. I've sorry not silver I've stained the steel or nickel frets and I I wanted gold fret wire for this my brother That's the gold hardware. Damn it.  I broke my own rule here um So to do the frets you cut this wire up into strips and then you hammer them into the slots um That's a bit annoying because the slots are really narrow and ultimately you're trying to kind of press them in While hammering so they don't really want to go. So this takes me like, you know a couple of hours or something um However, because you've hit them with a hammer, they're not all flat. They're all kind of up and down and it's So as I'm sliding my finger the note only changes when I hit a fret, right? So it's the fret that's defining the note and if if this fret was too low Instead of getting that I might get that note which would be sad when you're in the middle of your, you know Rock god moment on stage and you ring out the wrong note because I've messed up the fretting So I have to you're masking tape up the fretboard. I take some straight edged files and I file all the frets down um That takes a bit of time However, these frets which are nice and round when I bought the wire are now flattened and so As I do that, there's a kind of if if they're not round my finger will stick and again, I'll not get the nice The kind of slide I want So I have to take more files and round round the fret back over Um, I really hate this um Yeah, and then obviously I've because all the sandpaper here is because you know having um Filed them If I do that you'll hear the strings scratching over the fret um And that would be sad as well And so all in all it takes me two working days Now this is a hobby a side like you know when you take up these kind of The things it is the thing you do when you're not at work or looking after your family or you know combination of the two or whatever So a working day is what's that for most of us? It would be we'd be lucky if that was a week of hobby time, right? So if this is taking me two working days to do that's probably taken me a couple of weeks to get to this stage I hate doing this Because i'm not a patient person and in fact so I found in prep I found this picture Of that my brother's guitar strung up and I now just reel in these are all not rounded off That's not nice. They're too high. It's dreadful and I know it's dreadful because I had to do it three times to get it right And this nearly broke me as you know, it says like I just can't get this right. I've committed to do it It's just going wrong and um Yeah, it It took me I think the first picture I've got of this is like November. I finally got it done in january um But the thing that kept me going is The guitarist for my brother he asked me to make it for him having seen mine Because he's not paying for he just you know, I'm doing it because I want to An excuse to do stuff, but I said to my brother. I will deliver him a guitar So I have someone out there who hopes I will succeed right And the thing that kept me going when after the second time another two weeks has gone and I still Not done a good job and it is not an instrument. It is just a bit of sculpture at that point And why am I going to spend another two weeks here? It's because there's someone who hopes I'll succeed out there and that's something I encourage you to find in whatever it is you try your hand at is I use the word customer, but I don't mean customer. I just mean someone who's engaged with what you're doing Uh, I write a blog every week of things that go right and wrong and part of the reason I do that is again Like people expect me to have done something every week no matter how small So when it's all overwhelming and I'm looking at this thinking I can't do this again It encouraged me just to do a little bit each week And just move forward a little bit. So I've got something to write in my blog So he's kind of finding that structure where there are people out there who can Who are kind of willing you to succeed and and finding that could be signing up for a show Again taking part in the community anything that helps you Externalize that kind of desire to succeed Um, and it's worth it because this is my brother On stage at King Tutswawa in Glasgow behind me are like 200 people having a blast and In all my life Of shipping software and making things. This is the most proud and happy I've ever been right I was in a venue that I used to go to when I was an undergraduate And there's everyone's having a blast and in some small way I'm a part of that Um, and so that kind of persistence pays off But I would have given up had it not been for my brother because I would have gone and done for me else Um Cool the neck the frets sit in the neck The neck is the bit that is like with the frets and is the bit you have to get right It's the bit that no one looks at or thinks too much about But it's the bit the musician interacts with And the neck is frustrating in the way that you put it together Um So you start with a plank of maple in this case You kind of cut off the bits kind of from the side. There's the thing in the middle called the truss rod Who's seen a truss rod before? Um This here is the metal rod that goes inside a guitar neck And the nice thing about it is it's adjustable So if I twist at the end you can come and have a play if you can't see it bows out in the middle Um, the strings when you put the strings on a guitar We'll try and pull the headstock around this way And there's about 50 kilos of pull there Um, so this is giving some rigidity But it's also adjustable because different strings will require different kind of balance And so that's how you control the action of the strings above the frets And kind of if you are happy unhappy your guitar because the strings are too high or too low a small Like an eighth of a turn at most on the truss I had a truss rod adjuster is will uh, will will kind of move you in a direction So something to keep in mind Um, most people are scared of adjuster gigs and where it does snap the neck So, but it's fine as long as you do my new adjustments Um, anyway, so I've cut this out. I've put that and that's like another half working day again So, you know a significant time you glue it up with the fretboard Um, oh, yeah this remember I did this Um The good thing about being in A workshop that right the bad thing about being in a community workshop is it never has exactly the right tools you want Or if it does they're blunt Um However, you know, there are upsides to be in a community workshop beyond just the people themselves that make it worth persevering One is you have tools that other people don't necessarily have So in addition to calculating the positions in this table up here I have this button over here that says generate DXF or scg So I can actually take this and put it onto the laser cutter as it makes space And so I I I'm not like a caveman with a pencil and a ruler I put the entire neck into the laser cutter and just say etch me a line where I should cut the frets I can't use the laser cutter to cut the frets because the channel it makes is a v shape I need a kind of straight edge, but it it saves me I've got a friend who who makes guitars professionally It takes him like an hour hour and a half just to mark out the frets to soaring time. It takes me two minutes And that's because I'm in a workshop which has all these fun toys So look around and find, you know, what you could turn to, you know, it might not be the perfect tool But you can bend it to your will so then I'm doing all these actions from here on in where I'm removing material and that's terrifying Because you're investing time in this thing. There's some money as well, but it's mostly time that's precious so I keep Kind of spending half days here and there every time I touch it another half day to do this I'm rounding off the I cut the headstock shape out I have to drill the inlays every time I touch this I'm removing material and there's one good outcome And an infinity minus one bad outcomes And it's terrifying the tense like so, how do you do the back of the neck? Well, you just take a brutal rasp and remove the bits you don't want I procrastinated about six weeks before I did this for the first time Again, the only reason I did it was because I'd promised myself and I'd said to my parents I was going to make this guitar for a friend for Christmas and Christmas has a fixed date That's how I created that kind of structure Fixed date in modern times, maybe we should say So you kind of spend all this time you get to the end And here's here's me putting on the tuner tuners So I put one in fine put the second one in screw it in fine put the third one screw it in Oh, dear The head sheered off To say I was upset at this point Um Because I've just put in all this effort and I I've just demonstrated that I am the idiot. I think I am You know all these people say oh, you're making guitars. You're you must be awesome.  I spent how on this And this is where again community plays a big part So I have a second kind of community which is Luthiers like instagram. We just share photos of guitar builds in progress We kind of like to see what other people are doing.  So it's kind of So I post this picture mostly wanting sympathy If I'm brutally honest, I felt sad and frustrated and annoyed. I posted this picture um The next morning I found three professional luthiers from around the world had sent me say, oh, it's fine. It always happens Uh, here's what you do And so I ran back into makespace. I recreated. I'm an engineer.  It's patched under where the the tuner is going to go That was another thing they told me to do And this is how you patch wood holes like, you know guitars are probably about five percent toothpicks and glue um And it's it's actually work and it's because I've shared a negative thing with a community, right? Like if the temptation when you're in part of that Community is to just post the positives. Can you want to look good, right? I think that's natural I don't know if it's anything to be ashamed of But it's also important to post your failures because things go wrong all the time and you're doing two things here One is you're opening yourself up to people being able to say, oh, no, that's okay. That happens here Let me help you And also you're normalizing the fact that this is bad things happen, right? I've not yet worked on a guitar where something hasn't gone wrong this guitar, which I think looks okay Um, I actually had to patch it where to see and see router to try to break it And so right it put everyone who picks this up and looks like oh, that looks amazing. They don't think oh look Yeah, oh went wrong there. Didn't it mate? Right, I mean you guys are going to think that now, but you know not kind of the rest of the world don't Okay, this is kind of the last bit because it's An adjunct to the guitar. We've gone through the body the electronics The amplifier is an important part to your guitar. This amplifier here Is the one on any amplifier I built I didn't want to build an amplifier. So from that point it's an abject failure The what I wanted to do was build more guitars However, the way I wanted to get into doing my own designs rather than copying other people's designs Was I wanted to learn CAD kind of drawing Kind of them 3d modeling on computer getting them out to Manufacture and an amp is a box. So it seemed a good first project, right? The insides electronics aren't kind of outsourced that but the box was what I made first in CAD So I spent a couple weeks learning how to Design design box how to tell the computer to cut the box out and then cutting the box out And I'd encourage you when you do this you end up kind of this box and a finished amplifier It's always my goal is making guitars This was just kind of sorry kind of distraction in one hand But it had a purpose But I think I'd encourage you to do when you do this is take them to completion Because I made that look like a linear process and it's not like what happens is you don't stop playing Thank you You draw the box and you think you're you're good at this now and then you go to try and Lay it out and then you realize. Oh, this is too tight a corner I can't do this. I have to go back here and yada and then when you try and make it you realize You can't lay it out on the sheet of wood because the wood's actually not as big as you thought it was So you have to go back here And it's a so pushing through small projects to completion is always important Because it will reveal the gaps that you would otherwise have missed And then I was able to draw a guitar which then became a guitar, right? So This is kind of the rust of tips And I say I use the guitar as an example here Whatever your passion is whatever it is you leave here inspired with on wherever inspiration next hits you These are kind of this is a structure that I've used to try and help me succeed Community is a huge part of it just getting other people to interact with And again, that's that kind of iterate do small things often rather than try and do one massive thing There you go. That's uh, that's that's me


The Healthy Base Initiative Project was created to encourage a healthy and fit alternative to the trend toward obesity and tobacco use. The Office of Military Community and Family Policy, Office of the Secretary of Defense, is carrying out the Healthy Base Initiative. The program is part of Operation Live Well, which is aimed at encouraging all members of the military to make healthy choices. Obesity and tobacco use among U.S. military health care beneficiaries add more than $3 billion per year to the defense budget in health care costs and lost duty days. To help combat this problem, military installations are encouraged to provide environments that promote good nutrition, active lifestyles, and tobacco-free living. For more information or to get involved, visit MilitaryOneSource.mil. From the Defense Media Activity, I'm Petty Officer Tyrell Morris.


Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I'm Emily Nimsacand here at the Nebraska Library Commission filling in for your regular host, Krista Burns. Encompass Live is the Nebraska Library Commission's weekly online event. It covers a variety of library activities and topics presented by NLC staff sometimes or sometimes guest speakers like we have today. These one-hour sessions are free and they're offered every Wednesday at 10 a.m. central time and they include things like presentations, interviews, book reviews, web tours, many training sessions, Q&A sessions, basically they cover a lot of different things. Today, as I mentioned, we do have a guest speaker, Sally Gibson from Creighton University is here to talk to us about letting the patron drive. Take it away, Sally. All right. Thank you, Emily. Hi. As Emily mentioned, I'm Sally Gibson. I'm head of technical services at the Reinhard Alumni Library at Creighton University. The Reinhard University has three libraries and the Reinhard is the undergraduate and graduate school. We'll deal primarily with the arts and sciences and the business students and so we decided to start with demand-driven acquisitions and patron-driven acquisitions. I hope many of you are familiar with those terms. We began in May 2011 and so I kind of want to give you an update, an overview of why we decided to try this, how it's going, what our concerns are, and where we're hoping to go in the future. So, I'll start with, all right, let me start with collection development at the Reinhard Library. And we have our book budget that we divide between the departments and the library and 75% of that book budget is given to the various departments in the arts and sciences and business. The faculty are the main selectors for our collection and they have multiple approaches to selecting materials for the library. Some departments gather and submit their orders at the end of the deadline which we give them for March and so they'll do nothing throughout the year and then we'll just get all their orders towards the end of the year. Others will work throughout the year and submit orders and kind of continually build the collection as the academic year is going on. Others will just send over the publisher catalog and tell us, order everything that's in here which as you know, it really shows that they thought about the process and things like that. So, it's up to the librarians to kind of fill in the gaps, look for the multidisciplinary titles they're getting lost, kind of look for introductory materials. We have a collection about my librarian who noticed that for the foreign language materials no one was really going through and getting basic grammar books on those various foreign languages they were able to fill in there and we also kind of try to look for things on current events and current awareness so that our collections up to date. Now the faculty, many of them really enjoy being selectors and are very proud with the relationship that they have with the library and they really feel that it's building a stronger collection with their input. We get kind of frustrated sometimes because I certainly last year for the 2012 fiscal year, communication studies, they're ones that tend to wait until the end of the year and submit the orders and they ended up not submitting any orders for the entire year and so then we had to go in and kind of pick some titles up in communications since they hadn't submitted any orders. We don't have a print approval plan which I know is common at many university libraries but we do have a slip plan and we work with Yankee which is our primary vendor and so that kind of gives us some idea of the titles that are coming out and what's going on so we tend to have, we have a method, sometimes it feels like it's a little bit of a hodgepodge approach but we are attempting to build a strong collection and we certainly are strong in the area of theology that's been a primary focus at Creighton and that one, the theology department feels that they do a very good job and things like that but we definitely have some areas where we can work on improving. So what's happened with the use of the Reiner Collection and when we were looking at starting demand driven acquisitions in May of 2001, I kind of went back and looked to see what we had done in 2010-2011. We added 4,872 print titles. We've got the Springer eBook collection, the entire subject collection since we work with the medical school and the medical library, we felt that getting the entire package even though there'd be some subsequent areas that weren't of interest to Creighton was the way to go and so that's really added a large bulk of our eBook titles there and then we also had the E.Bury Academic Complete Collection and we started that about three years ago when we did the entire subject range and that's been really popular. We kind of played with the eBooks in 2000. I think when everyone got those net library collections and kind of was trying out how it was working and things like that and I think many of us were kind of frustrated with a checkout feature and kind of using the interface in general and so with the E.Bury rendition, their interface was easy to use, clean, it's been really successful. It's taken off, it seems to grow each year. In 2010-2011 our eBook usage increased 29 percent. This past year, 2011 and 2012, it increased 49 percent so the students really are using that E.Bury interface, they're using those eBooks and I really felt confident that that was an interface that we could use and work with. Our print circulation is down 5 percent so we're kind of holding steady. We're a little bit down but you know certainly the eBook usage is taking off and I think that's where student comfort level is, they want to get in, get out, get their material, have it available and so we felt that by working with advanced driven acquisitions and eBooks would certainly be successful. So we also looked at kind of our eBook usage versus print usage and I had a sample of 46 titles that we had held both in print and eBook. It's not our intention to buy titles in both formats but because of the academic complete collection we did have some overlap because we'd already purchased the print titles and then we happened to get in the eBook format. So I was able to kind of look at the sample, I did a variety of subject areas just to kind of get an idea of what's happening. Certainly I thought the eBook usage would be higher but it's kind of a mixed bag, we had 17 titles that were not used in either format, 11 were used only in print, 7 only in eBook and 10 in both formats and again it's kind of hard to look at these statistics because as you can see I had user sessions of 233, I had 24 checkouts but with the eBook obviously your statistics are going to count each time someone goes in the book and then when you've checked it out you don't know how many times they refer back to it when they use it throughout their checkout period but it did kind of give an idea and I would expect the eBook usage to be higher that I would hope and that you know checkout period you just you can see that I checked it out and that's about it but I could see that they are using the eBooks and I'd heard from other presentations that I attended that if you had books in both formats they tend to have higher usage and you know certainly no one has the budget to go and buy all their books in print in eBook especially when we're trying to build our collections we want to have as many options and titles available it doesn't really make sense to use your limited funds on buying a title in two different formats but if we have to have some overlap then that was a way to certainly examine what was going on and then I kind of looked at the eBook versus print circulation or usage and I looked at the time looked at some subject areas from 2008 to 2011 for each year I just looked at the titles that were either checked out or used and you can see that the eBook usage is growing each year it's getting it's spending more and more and biology and business certainly have the highest usage for eBooks but they're still only in the 50% range biology is at 56% business is at 57% so the usage of print is not stopping or going away I mean they'll graduate they're gradually building to more eBook but they still have a long way to go in terms of just being a primarily eBook usage of the collection history and political science are certainly coming on strong religion for 2011 the usage is at 19% so we do have a strong print collection in the area of theology religion but it is building each year and so most of the subject areas are between 20% and 30% in terms of the eBook usage so I really felt confident that if we started getting titles on the demand-driven acquisition platform that the comfort level with you using eBooks is there and so we won't have anyone who is not especially at the student level who's not comfortable with using an eBook so why try demand-driven acquisitions and I will say for the public libraries out there I think they tend to chuckle this is kind of more of an academic library and fight phenomenon public libraries have always kind of bought what their patients wanted and requested and they've been really in tune with getting what people are asking for and academic libraries have tended to kind of build and try to have something available just in case and maybe someone down the road might need it you know this might be coming out later on we need to have it now and so demand-driven acquisitions is really helping academic libraries move away from the just in case to more of a just in time phenomenon and it's certainly giving us more electronic content people are not wanting to come in and check out the book and go home they're wanting to you know look at it online have it available refer back to it later if they're doing their paper at two o'clock in the morning they can go in and get what they need especially if they discover they don't have enough items and they need to do some searching to find some more resources also a cost-saving ability we certainly all have bought the book that did not get used for ten years and then you ended up weeding it out of your collection it no one ever opened it you know it's in pristine condition brand new but no one wanted to look at it if they haven't looked at in ten years probably not gonna ever look at it so certainly it was a purchase that didn't need to be made also this is gonna change the way our collection development process is done as I said before faculty do a lot of the selection if I've got those titles already in the catalog for people to discover maybe that'll kind of shift some of the collection development onto the students this also could be an alternative to ILL you know if we can just do a short-term loan or even purchase the title rather than interlibrary loaning certainly we'll get there a little bit faster then they'll go in find it and use it right away and also patrons can be better formed about emerging trends areas of research and the change in their program direction sometimes they're a little bit slow to find out what's happening if there's been a change in focus new faculty members come in and maybe they haven't gotten many titles in their subject area before but they suddenly are doing a class that's got a strong emphasis on this new direction and we just don't have many items in the library yet and this is certainly a way to kind of fill in the gap and see what the usage is headed and what people are needing and what they want to have access to now there are some concerns about demand-driven acquisitions about two years ago eBury did a pilot project and they worked with various libraries throughout the country and they kind of did a large load of items I think you had to load like a hundred thousand titles into your catalog and then you just kind of went to see what was happened and Duke University was kind of the horror story they went through $30,000 in like two weeks or you know just this they put it out there for everyone to use they wanted to see what was happened and it kind of was a budget buster they really went through and did a lot so we all kind of were like well you know I can't really spend $30,000 in two weeks or even a month or even two months and certainly you know I certainly can't keep that pace throughout the year so there are some concerns about you know how do you control the budget you know how do you monitor but they Yankee and any of the programs have some options in place so you can kind of keep it keep a handle on what's happening also digital rights management restrictions you know are we kind of limiting the use of the titles are we unnecessarily causing some problems is certainly when they are coming to you know not many people want to print out an entire book but you still can't do that in many cases the publishers are limited to a couple chapters couple pages you know certainly trying to not have people print off all the books and then how large of a pool do you need of the titles you know a hundred thousand titles certainly sounded way large and I was hearing you know maybe needed a 25,000 titles maybe needed to start small and only do 5,000 titles maybe a thousand titles and it's really what was the right mix and what was what was the best way to go and at the time we started people are kind of all over the board I think every library approaches it's differently you really have to find out what's best for your library and what direction you want to take and what your comfort level is and also we didn't want to shortchange our collection you know who knows what was going to be bought and were we comfortable with that we certainly take pride in building a quality collection that meets the needs of the Creighton community and we want to continue with that path we don't want to suddenly have titles that really we wouldn't have bought otherwise so what's the optimum size so I was pretty conservative for our initial load I kind of went wanted to kind of take a little tiny step into the pool you can say and so I started with about 500 titles for my initial load and then how long do the title stay in the pool again everyone's done it for wide variety approaches some people leave them in for six months a couple people are planning for a couple of years I'm planning on leaving them in there for a couple of years I really feel a lot of times that the topic comes out it's used later certainly it's not like it's a bestseller that everyone's hearing the buzz about these tend to be more academic titles university presses and so it's definitely something that they'll discover and they kind of need a couple of years to discover the titles and it's not really harming anything to have that title available and do you want to limit by publishers you know certainly this is one way to make sure you only have titles that you are comfortable purchasing also do you want to that how many do you want to do a short-term loan there's a variety of ways you can set up your program and many people do the short-term loan and then they'll purchase and so you can determine how many short-term loans you want or if you don't want to do short-term loans at all I do want to set a price cap you know certainly if you're not comfortable having someone have the ability to buy $200 book you can set the price cap at any level that you're interested in and then how will the vendor help me I'm going to need a variety of reports I need to know what's going on what's happening with the collection what's happening with the DDA title pool what kind of feedback and support am I going to get from the vendors and you know what am I actually doing and finding out and I need to know how are they going to help me and then what's the role of the selector I think some people are a little concerned that their role as a selector for the library collection is going to diminish if we've just kind of turned it loose to the masses and let anyone pick what they want and so these are some things to consider kind of find out you know what's going on what's your comfort level and see what's happening so I kind of want to talk about what demand-driven acquisition does now at this point there are several vendors that provide the service we're working with Yankee but EBL provides it EBSCO provides it and they all kind of have the same premise the user will have some activity or trigger that causes either a loan or a purchase and for ours with Yankee if someone looks at an e-book for 10 consecutive minutes then that's going to trigger a short-term loan or if they look at 10 unique pages or if they have a page that's copied or printed they really have to engage with the material if they look at the front or the in matter then that's not going to count as a trigger also if you've got someone who opens the book looks at the page and then talks to their friend for 15 minutes while e-berry software has the ability to determine that you know this is really dormant there's no activity here and so you won't get charged for someone who opened it stopped using the material but you know certainly met the 10-minute rule so they have to be actively engaged and actively using the content for you to have a trigger and then there's three short term loans that are available you can do the one-day short-term loan which is 10% of the list price you can do a one week which is 15% of the list price and do one month which is 25% of the list price and we decided to do the one day short-term loan to kind of see how that was going I felt you know if they got in they used it again then we could buy it because they probably are actively engaged with the title and studies have found that the items picked from patron driven acquisitions tend to be used again so that was something I wanted to kind of look at and be aware of it's you know if we did the one-day loan is that really giving us the optimum for getting the titles that we need that are of use and that will be used again because we certainly are trying to avoid the long-standing habit with many libraries of buying something that never got used and then we also worked with Yankee to kind of monitor our plan so that it mirrored our split plan we kind of wanted to have a wide variety of subject areas set a price cap at $125 originally we wanted to do a price cap for humanities social sciences and business at 125 and then have the sciences at 175 but we're only able to set one price cap so we just put it at 125 and that way we kind of would only purchase titles at 125 and below then we did the short-term loan and then we purchased the item we also did the single-user option now many people think oh ebooks we need to have multi- user you've got you know what do you mean there's only one single user but many of the publishers are only providing the single-user option and so also we really felt that most of the time these that titles that we were purchasing were really only going to be used by one person now eBury is coming out with something this fall where you can kind of upgrade either temporarily or on a permanent basis if you have a title that has a single-user option and someone tries to use it when it when someone else is using it then you can do a short-term loan and that will provide access to the person but again this is only available for the titles that the publishers have said yes we all allow multi-user options or you can set it up so that you can upgrade to the purchase of the multi-user option when we started and previously you had to determine before you even purchase whether you're gonna have the single user option the multi-user option and now they're kind of giving you a way to kind of upgrade if possible so that you can go to the multi-user option but currently with the single user option you do get a message saying that the title is currently in use and that you can ask to get an alert that tells you that the title is available and I tested it out and when the person closes the book then the person will get the alert about 15 minutes later but again I think there's just something in many people's minds that e-books should always be available for everyone and they can't believe it's in use but e-bra has also done several studies that kind of look at the overlap between users is usually minimal it's not a lot unless you have a class obviously where everyone is supposed to read a chapter and everyone's trying to get in at the same time then you're gonna have overlap but in general these books tend to be used by one person at a time and a single user option is usually fine so we did our first record loads in May 2011 and again I said I was rather conservative and I only loaded about 500 titles and so by October 1st of 2011 I was up to 990 titles and I was really kind of discouraged we had some usage we had some purchases but I didn't have a lot of activity I was kind of hoping for more activity and so in December I decided to kind of do a larger load and change up my profile and so I added about 10,000 titles in December to kind of bring up the pool and another rule that's kind of emerging that I think is working for Creighton is kind of have double what you would purchase any year for the print collection so in 2010-2011 we bought 4,800 titles and so by doubling that and having that in our DDA pool I kind of had double what we had purchased in print and the next half kind of the spring semester we certain our usage went up in terms of the short-term loans and the purchases and I also decided to allow publishers that did not allow for a short-term loan to be in there previously I said no if they don't allow for short-term loan I don't want it in there because I want to have the option of doing a short-term loan but in December I added titles that if you used it once you bought it so now in September of 2012 we have 10,000 titles in our catalog they're searchable in the library catalog they're searchable on the eBerry platform and then we also have summon a web-based discovery service and they're available there we're using the eBerry number the title control number as a way for us to know that this is a DDA title we also worked with Yankee and we put demand-driven acquisitions in one of our 900 fields so that we know that's a demand-driven action acquisitions title and the records created not cataloged we outsourced our 30 work and so I didn't want to send records off that we didn't actually own because I certainly don't want to pay for authority work for something that we might delete down the road and then we can FTP our discovery records from the Yankee site and we load them weekly and at first when we were loading we would kind of open them and mark at it to look at them see if we were happy with them but now I feel that they're good to go and we just load them we don't even bother to look at them anymore and so here's what a discovery record looks like and we're pleased we feel that it's flushed out enough it's got enough information people can find what they need and you know we worked with Todd and what we wanted to use for the column or we use internet for our ebooks and then we have the nine five five we have the Yankee demand-driven acquisitions and then you can see that they've got subject headings and information along those lines and so we're happy with the discovery record and feel that that's sufficient information for people to find it so what's happened in the year so we've had 204 short-term loans and 67 purchases and so we've only spent five thousand seven hundred and seventy nine dollars so the fears that I have that maybe be out of control we're unfounded it's certainly manageable this is a amount that we are more than comfortable it's spending I was happy to spend even more and then you can really see the difference between having the larger pool of titles in your DDA collection from May to December we only had 31 short-term loans and we had five purchases so in that eighth month period we just had that limited amount in the next eight month period we were up to 173 short-term loans and 62 purchases and the usage statistics are really kind of mirroring the academic school year we really had a lot a lot of activity in March April May and June we have a pretty active summer one session which happens in June and so we really you know we probably had between 20 to 40 short-term loans each month and then about 15 purchases during those months and so it kind of you could see that it's happening as the academic school year has geared up your loans and your purchases are going to increase there and definitely mirrors what's happening in the school year now Yankee will send out an email every time you have a short-term loan so you'll get an email saying that you had a trigger activity and sometimes they'll combine a couple of the titles but you can see certainly as it's happening what you're spending and what's going on and then they'll send out an email when you purchase the title and it'll say notice of activity and that then you can see that you've bought the title so you can see the difference on the emails between the loans and the purchases but those do come directly to you so you're able to kind of monitor what's happening and what's going on with your budget because I think we're we're still concerned about that but you can definitely see what you're spending what your loans are and then also look at what people are buying and may we had someone who purchased a literary criticism on the Hunger Games and I was very excited because I didn't think we would have had that title in our collection at that time but it was certainly right at the height of when the movie was out and someone who wanted to have literary criticism was able to find some information on the Hunger Games and they got what they needed so I felt like in terms of timeliness of the collection we're certainly there now with our DDA title list because we are loading those titles as they're available and therefore making them available to the Creighton community. So then what's happened with the different subject areas and this is based on the book store categories but as you can see we're all over the board but we also kind of mirror where our high number of e-book usage was because if you'll remember when I had looked at the categories business and economics that was 50 percent of e-book usage for the collection and checkout so we had certainly that was our highest for a number of ones but political science history and religion social sciences coming on strong computers actually get a little bit more usage on the e-book platform than they have gotten for our print collection so that's nice but again having all of the subject areas available was helpful because we certainly are in a wide variety and we're not focused on just one subject area so it is getting used throughout and then when you look at the publishers John Wiley has been very popular ABC Clio and then the Paul Grave McMillan that was one where they did not allow for a short-term loan and that you had to if you used it then you bought it and so we ended up buying 23 of those titles and then when I've gone back and looked at the statistics you can you'll get a report weekly on kind of your DDA activity and one of the columns will tell you when the book was last used and I found that 11 of the titles were only used once and all of those were the titles that we bought them the first time they were used rather than doing the short-term loan so now I've removed that feature so I tried it tried it for you know a semester of having the publishers that did not allow short-term loans we make those available but I've changed that I've gone back to just I want to do a short-term loan and then I want to purchase the title because I feel that's the best use of our pool and the best use of our money because it's certainly the highest usage of the titles that didn't get used again were the ones that we bought on the first time so that's not alleviating the problem that I was trying to address where we bought things and they never got used and then Taylor and Francis and Cambridge University Press were the kind of the next highest publisher so certainly publishers that we would buy in the print collection and e-book collection we would select ourselves and what the community is purchasing is matching what our expectations were and so then we look at kind of the use of the Reiner collection from 2011 to 2012 and then we added about a thousand less of our print titles we added 3800 the e-book titles was about the same and many of that does come from the e-berry academic complete collection the springer collection our e-book usage was up to 49 percent and then our print circulation was down to 11 percent so it kind of matches what I expected we're kind of holding our own with the print e-books taking off but I really feel like we're making these titles available and they're there for the people to use so that means to kind of the dda questions what have I found out what's been addressed what am I looking at now what do I need to be concerned about in the future and I feel that for Creighton the number of titles in the pool having it double what you purchase in print each year is a good match I'm really pleased with the loans and the purchases that we had in the spring semester and we seem to be on track this fall semester for usage that I would expect so I felt that double what you would buy in print is a good rule of thumb to use how long should they stay in the pool right now we're just going to leave them in for a couple years we're going to wait and see what happens it's not really causing any harm to have them there and we'll certainly make them available and see what happens now what type of reports will you get Yankee will send now a weekly report telling you the title what was loan what was the list price how much the trigger cost they'll also tell you when the first usage was and when the last usage was and I find this very helpful because I could see is there a pattern on are they used again and one of the first titles that we bought no fear of failure was used for a class one year later in June and so that kind of shows that you need to give it some time to see where the usage is because certainly if it's used in February might be used in February again or it might be used a couple months later and then when I looked at our purchases to kind of see do I need to do the short-term loan for a longer period than one day right now I don't really have a definitive answer we had 11 titles that were only used that one time then I've got 10 titles that were kind of used a week later so maybe for those you know one week short-term loan would have been sufficient I would have not have had to buy it and then 22 titles were used within the one month period and then I've got 24 titles that have been used throughout several months and used again and again so I don't feel that I need to change our policy to extend the short-term loan period I'm still happy with one day and that but certainly something I'm going to monitor and see if that's something I need to change right now maybe a month is sufficient but we do have most of the titles were used throughout the months but it's only 35 percent so I don't really feel I have a definitive answer yet and then do we need to purchase cataloging records we had decided that we would do cataloging records from Yankee they gave you that option they're $2 a record now as I showed you before the scope discovery records pretty fleshed out and has a lot of information so what we have done is if the titles purchase then we just change the 001 field instead of using the e-brain number which is kind of our signal to ourselves that that's either in the academic complete collection or it's a DDA title but in other words we've not purchased it we changed the 001 field to have the OCLC numbers and then we know we bought it and at that point we don't really use the cataloging record and we haven't changed it so I'm probably going to stop purchasing the catalog records and that we're happy with the DDA titles and how those records display and what information they have and we feel that that's sufficient and then I kind of looked at you know what have I saved you know are we doing pretty well in terms of the budget and looking at the short-term loan titles I spent $1,000 on the loans but if I purchased those titles I would have spent $8,866 so in one year I've saved close to $8,000 on titles that really were only used that once for a short time you know one day and I haven't so I haven't bought anything that you know what's going to be used again we certainly kind of addressed that issue by having the loan and then we did have some savings there of $7,800 and so I'm really happy with the way the program is going and the DDA is kind of matching our print circulation our highest areas of circulation our philosophy and religion language and literature sociology and history and that we have seen a lot of activity in those subject areas and again business is matching where there's a lot of e-book usage on the eBury academic complete area and so we've had a lot of loans there and so overall I feel like I've got some of my questions answered of what I'm doing Yankee and eBury are constantly kind of refining what they let you know and what's going on the report has changed a little bit they used to give you titles that maybe someone looked at the front or in matter but didn't actually trigger a purchase they no longer do that now they're just giving you the list of titles that were trigger or purchase and then also you can go on to the eBury platform that's where you can get the you can get records mark records that you kind of like there but you can also tells you what records need to be deleted and we've had had some titles that were in the DDA pool that are no longer available on the eBury platform for whatever reason and so I just go in weekly and kind of delete and get that report and do the deletes and get the information there and then the eBury platform what you can look at your usage there too and see kind of the downloads or the page views and things like that and then I've said it so that we do not download single-use eBooks for the academic complete collection since I have multi-users that people are allowed to download that but for the titles that just have the single user we're not downloading that and that's so that's something to think about and maybe look at but right now we're not going to let them download and so I do feel that I'm getting sufficient information to kind of monitor what's happening with the collection and what I need to do and I feel that we're also examining our collection more in previous years we kind of just bought what the faculty told us to buy and we still do that to the majority of the extent but now we're kind of looking at you know what areas are getting used are they getting used more on the eBook side are they getting used more on the print side do we need to make these titles available what's going on and so it's really giving us some information and some ways to think about our collection and managing our collection and what we want to do in the future and so I'll end with I'm really happy with how the demand driven acquisition program is going and certainly something we're going to continue in the future and that's all I have if anyone's got any questions I'd be happy to answer them thanks Sally yes if anybody has any questions there are two options for asking them you can either type them in the question box and I will see your text question there or if you do have a microphone we currently have you all muted but if you would type into the question box that you want me to unmute your microphone I can do that and then you can just ask your question over there so either one of those is an option for asking questions I know in the past I've been asked you know for the short term loans so I just take that out of the book budget or have I had to take it out of a different account since it's really more of a rental or lease rather than a purchase but we're able to just take it out of our book budget and kind of treat it like a purchase so great that's a good thing to know you don't have any questions coming in here yet perhaps you've just covered everything so thoroughly Sally maybe I don't know well if you do have any other questions I'm sure Sally will be more than happy to answer emails after the fact and you know we can touch with us and we can pass along your questions to her but oh we're just a couple more minutes here anybody's typing that's right and this takes a while there's a little bit of lag time when we're doing this via online and waiting for people to type things in it does not look like we're getting any more questions so I guess I will just say thank you Sally it was a great presentation we're glad you were able to do this for us well thank you very much and again feel free to contact me if you have any questions and thank you Emily I really enjoyed getting to present in a webinar I hadn't done that before so it's kind of a new experience excellent well you did very well now thank you all for attending Encompass Live and we'll hopefully see you next week