Okay, hello everyone. Mike seems to be working and you hear me well, right? Okay, did you guys have a good lunch? So yes, who came here to take a nap? Anybody brave enough to raise a hand? No, no one. Well anyway, then we'll get started with presentation and you know what? I want you to make me one promise. Can you do that?  Okay? You promised to remember that. Well, and I will start with their big picture for context of this presentation, which is about running databases on Kubernetes. Now, if you think about the big hyperscale cloud providers, how do they want us to run databases? Well, typically that is not on the Kubernetes, right? They would like to use their very much proprietary database as a service solution, right? Being that something like DynamoDB, which is proprietary or maybe something like Amazon Aurora, right? Which is based on open source, but with a lot of bells and whistles. So that is proprietary too, right? And what comes to that, of course, is we are getting the great usability for that software. It's very easy. It's very easy to deploy and manage some database in many cases, right? But of course that comes off with a great cost. And I don't just mean what these are more expensive in terms of dollars, right? But you have to lose some of your freedoms, right? You are now locked in that particular cloud. Now, what is interesting for me, somebody who has been in the open source space now for more than 20 years, that reminds me the times when I was starting with open source development, right? Sometime maybe in early 2000s, right? We had some Windows developers with ASP.NET or whatever Windows stuff, what has that time, right? And they would tell us how amazing development tools they have, right? You know, like compared to us, the open source guys would be using VI, or maybe some smarter ones would be using Emacs, right? Like, well, but it was not particularly that kind of experience, but guess what? Right now, if you are using the open source programming languages frameworks and so on and so forth, which are, well, probably most frameworks out there in those days, you have a fantastic development tools, right? And I think we are in this kind of similar situation right now when it comes to the cloud, where you can be looking at this kind of very well integrated solution from Amazon and other clouds, right? Where the open source solutions have yet a lot to catch up. Another example also in my career is Linux versus Solaris. Remember about the same time, maybe kind of late 90s, I was starting working with Linux and then there are a bunch of my friends who are working with real operating systems, right? HPX, Solaris, AIX, right? And Linux, of course, was a joke, right? It was 32 bits, right? It didn't scale with multiple CPUs. Well, if some of you remember, it couldn't even create a file more than two gigabytes in size. Right, remember those times? Oh my gosh, that was a joke. Well, but guess what? Now, it took, of course, some time, but anybody still running Solaris here? No, well, oh, I'm sorry. Oh, I see, I see. I never would have said, but forgive me, I'm working at the museum, right? I thought that's what you're going to say. Well, anyway, the fact is what Linux became, you know, absolutely ubiquitous, overtaken across many dimensions, the property operating systems, which, you know, pretty much died off, right, on the infrastructure side, right? And I think that is something what we are also going to see happening more and more on the cloud infrastructure size as well, because, well, guess what, right? Lock in sacks. Now, in my presentation, I focus a lot on Kubernetes, right? And I wanted to maybe share my observation, which was very interesting for me attending this conference, right, is how interesting the Kubernetes and OpenStack intervene, right? I knew for years that some people are using the Kubernetes, oh, using OpenStack as the deployment for Kubernetes, right? Like if you have your own cloud, which may be open source base, and if you are focusing on Kubernetes applications, containerized applications, you can use open source as a base, right? But it was interesting to see what there are also solutions which allows you to get the OpenStack deployment on a Kubernetes. And I quite didn't quite understand it if you deploy the OpenStack on a Kubernetes, can you then deploy Kubernetes inside that OpenStack environment, right? And how many times you can do that? I think that would be interesting thing to experiment with. But anyway, wherever choice in particular, you are making in this case, whether it's OpenStack or Kubernetes using as a foundation of your cloud, I think what is fantastic in this case is what that really allows us to look at the cloud in terms of, as a commodity, right? Really, as Amazon used to talk about that. For many organizations, indeed, it is not very practical to build and operate your own data centers, right? In effect, many of those cloud vendors provide us with commodity infrastructure where you can get VMs like or bare metal through API, for us to use, that is fantastic, right? But I think it is a smarter choice, better choice to use their majority of value which comes with OpenSource software. Again, wherever your choice of that infrastructure is. And that is really that time which compares to electricity as those guys talk about here, right? Because if you think about electricity, it is indeed commodity. You can get it from any vendor, you can buy your own generator and your what, your TV, your fridge still works. Compare that to Amazon experience, right? Or GCP, Azure, you name it, where you can say, well, you know what?  Well, doesn't make much sense, right, in this case. Well, now let's talk about their Kubernetes and why. I believe that is very helpful, wonderful in getting a lot of traction. The thing of Kubernetes is what that is easily available everywhere. You can see, of course, Kubernetes on the edge, right? You can deploy it on your own. A laptop, it's also available in a managed from from all the majority of the clouds. It was interesting to see, for example, the Amazon which initially had their own kind of container engine, right? Well, that's kind of all but died off with majority of use coming from managed Kubernetes service out there. Now, Kubernetes and databases, in certain case, you may think would not quite mix because Kubernetes was designed initially for stateless applications. And that is indeed true, right? And because of that, that reputation what Kubernetes cannot do state, I think, followed that for a number of years. But as I will show you some stats, I think the situation is significantly changing right now and we can see a lot of people running data intensive applications on Kubernetes quite successfully. To the point, what we even have the special community for folks who are running data intensive applications on Kubernetes, right? DoK, community for data on Kubernetes. Now, and I wanted to share some of the stats from that community, which I think is quite interesting. Like here are the stats from their community members, right in this case, which you can see a very significant number of them is running their data intensive workloads on Kubernetes, but what is more important, quite happy about that, right? We don't see a lot of people, oh, no, sorry, and expect that to increase their use. But of course, when you are pooling your own community, right, it's kind of not very representative, right? If you ask wherever, right? How many vegetarians are vegetarians, right? Like how many vegetarians don't eat meat? Well, the response would be pretty obvious, right? But what is interesting in this case is what most of the folks among those systems are quite satisfied how those things are working out for them in Kubernetes. Here is another survey which I find interesting. This one comes from a CNCF, that is a foundation behind the Kubernetes, right? So they don't have that specific bias for data intensive applications. And what they can see here is what their databases and the message queues, right? Which are also data intensive applications. There are some of the fastest growing applications which have been deployed on Kubernetes, right? So that is quite cool. Here is a specific data intensive applications which people see deployed on the Kubernetes. And you can see where database analytics, you know, AI, machine learning stuff, right? There's a kind of, you see like a big foundational data applications like avatar free, right? Of course, followed by some other like persistent storage and others. Now, how do you run the database in Kubernetes? And I think what has been the foundational change which came about over the last few years? And these are concept of the operator in Kubernetes, right? What is the operator if you don't know, right? That is the piece of software which can act in a similar concept as a, let's say human operator would do managing that system, right? Just an automated way. Why this is important for databases? Well, because databases typically are quite complicated, right? If you want, for example, to do something of databases, right? Saying, hey, you know, just rolling restart, killing pods one by one and restarting them, that may not be the best way to keep your database available, right? Or you may have a special process which is needed to upgrade the database to the new version as well as troubleshoot if something gets wrong with the update. Because when we have a database, we can just say, oh, you know what? If it didn't work out, we can just, you know, rebuild it from scratch.  Data is what the database is all about, right? What I think is wonderful about the Kubernetes operators is what they focus both on a day one and day two automation. One thing, of course, if operators, you can deploy your database clusters, right? Or even kind of like a shorted clusters on, you know, many tens, maybe kind of hundreds of instances very easily, right? It really is much, much faster compared to this kind of legacy old ways, you know, installing things from packages, right? But what I think is much more wonderful and important is the day two automation, right? You can find, I think, many, in the early days of Kubernetes, there have been many people using, let's say, Helm for database automations. And oh, look at that. I got a database deployed. It's saying, well, so what? Maybe if you're using that for CI CD, that is good enough, right? Because CI CD database, we can always recreate them from scratch, right? Or in many cases, you can. Now, production database, they spend probably 99.9% of their life in day two, right? You expect to deploy a production database cluster, and then that's going to live out there for years, even for decades, right? It's better to be, you know, not going down, right? And in many modern applications, we operate, you know, with a 24 by seven internet, right? We don't really like maintenance windows that much, right? And with that, I think it's very important for your day two processes is solid. And that means it better if they're automated, because, well, hopefully, if a code is right, then machines make less mistakes than people. Now, I mentioned what a lot of things of operators are quite easy. And I wrote this little blog post which shows how easy to do certain things, right? With a cluster, with the help of a mini cube, right? If you have been using, you know, MySQL or any kind of other database, you can get a good feel and maybe become the, you know, Kubernetes convert. Another interesting thing with Kubernetes is if you look at a lot of modern database as a service solutions, they tend to be based on Kubernetes behind, right? And because that makes a lot of things easy in building a database as a service, right? And what that means for us is what actually that is very well tested in practice, right? I don't have access to the internal numbers, but we are speaking probably about millions of instances, which are running right now of a database in Kubernetes, right?  So if you know how to do it, then you can probably be quite successful with that. Okay, with that, very long intro, right? But hopefully helpful for some folks. So let's talk about some of the best practices, right, what we can see. Well, not pretty basics, but you know what? In many cases you get, you have this, you know, 80, 20 rule of the price, like any following the best practices is the most important ones, right? It's like you often hear about security, right? Why people get, you know, hacked over and over again? Well, because they have passwords on the postal notes, right? Basic things, but happen so, so many so frequently. So number one, as we discussed, the operators are wonderful, right? If you're deploying database on Kubernetes, you want to deploy that by using the operator which can manage that for you, not just something which simplifies installation and say, hey, you know what, you are on your own. Unless of course, you know, just, you don't really care about database space and just throw in the way and reinstall it maybe for testing that works for you. Well, the second one is you want to make sure you have a high availability setup for your database. Because the reality is in how Kubernetes works and in general, you know, stability of that environment, you do not want to be relying just on one database never going out, right? Like, I mean, there should not be pets in Kubernetes and that applies to the databases as well. Number three, you want to keep persistent data persistent. Obviously, right? But the thing is in a Kubernetes, right? As an also like in Docker concept, before that was a very, very common issue when people just, you know, deploy the container without some external volume and have that kind of wonderful database which works well until that port is destroyed with or Docker container destroyed right off all the data, right? Make sure you use, you know, local disks can be, you know, wonderful, especially if a database handles replication on its own, right? Or some fast remote storage. The next rule is you want to keep a data purport small. Right now, if you have your PostgreSQL database which is a 50 terabytes in size, right? And it's, you know, one massive instance. Well, maybe you don't want to move that to Kubernetes just yet, right? Because having a port with a 50 terabytes of data and, you know, like many, many terabytes of run and so on so that is not a very good pattern for Kubernetes, right? You want to move the data out there which fits well. And let's face it, while there is a significant progress made over the last years, right? Not every database for every use case is best fit for the Kubernetes use case. Well, the next one is to use appropriate node sizes for Kubernetes. One thing I have seen with Kubernetes deployment, people use like relatively small node size VMs because they're saying, hey, you know what? We are deploying relatively small web apps, right? So we don't need kind of like a big chance. But you know what? In a database, you may want them to be larger. Why I don't recommend deploying five terabytes, well, you know, maybe deploying terabyte database and having, you know, like half a terabyte of memory, right, 256 gigs, like 32 cores, right, or something. That is quite reasonable and that's what your database instance one wants to consume, right? But it obviously needs to have their node time to support that. The next one in production, you want to configure resource requests and limits. And I think this is important one like for, and many people kind of moving from VMs to containers don't really understand that, right? Because when you deploy VM, typically you have this amount of memory, right? This amount of CPU cores and it's kind of quite fixed, right, or you kind of get VM in a cloud. If you have the container deployed, right, it will use up to all resource available on the node. And that can be, you know, problematic, right, between different applications, different database nodes, competing for resources, right? In development, that may be fine. In production, you often want predictability so you want to make sure saying, hey, my database container is fixed at this amount of resources so I get like a uniform performance. And if somebody else running their workloads on the same Kubernetes cluster, hopefully I have a minimum impact to my database performance. The next one is use proper anti-affinity, right? That is another interesting thing, right? Because if you don't, you may end up to have all, let's say, cluster of a free database node all placed on VMs on the same physical server. Not a good idea, right? Or maybe if you have an environment with multiple, you know, racks, you may set affinity with a different racks, right? So if there is some, I don't know, let's say, whole rack fails because of power, right, or something, then you have availability set up, right? And I think that is an important thing for the databases. Next thing is tuning your database. Kubernetes may be magical, but it's not going to tune the database for you. All the good database practices are still applied, right, in this case. And that applies to the database configuration, making sure you follow a good schema design practices, tuning your queries, and so on and so forth, right? To get that. Now, here I will maybe mention a little plug of Percorna tool, which is an open source tool called Percorna Motron Management, which helps among other things to understand what are the most important queries and how, you know, what is their performance and how to fix them. Works with Kubernetes or database everywhere and open source dimension, so you can use that to get your database. Next one is scaling, right? Of course, as your workload grows, you may not be wanting to rely on a performance of a single note, so how do we want to scale? And that really depends on databases. Some databases say, hey, you know what? We can split them to get like a read-write, read-write, split-write or scale reads. In other databases, they support sharding and some sort of like really, or active-active clustering. You want to understand that because that also defines how large databases you can put on Kubernetes, right, and how much really traffic they can support. Next one is control eviction port priorities, right? Well, if any of the databases, even kind of in the best case it still, takes some time to recreate that port, right? Database often needs to at the very least kind of warm up to warm up to get the data in the cache to achieve optional performance and so on and so forth, right? So you want Kubernetes to go easy on killing the database pods, right, and rescheduling of something, right? Of course, it needs to happen and the operator should take care of that if we're limiting the performance impact, but at the same time you want to minimize it. And now one is making sure you don't expose your database outside of a Kubernetes cluster unless you have to and if you expose it to other applications running in your network outside of that cluster, make sure it's at least it's not exposed in the public because guess what? That is a very common issue of the data losses when databases get accidentally exposed to the internet. The next one is, of course, enable encryption, right, a good idea to make sure you encrypt the data both at rest and in transit. TLS is quite inexpensive these days if you set up a trite, right? So it's better to have it going, right, even if it's inside the network of your control. Also, for having the access details passed between application, you can use Kubernetes secrets which are the fantastic solution, right, which can help to reduce the credentials exposure and there are a lot of operators which integrate with, well, typically good operators are going to integrate with Kubernetes secrets and provide that kind of map into the database. Backups, of course, don't forget your backups because especially with Kubernetes, have a kind of higher risk to lose your data because of some sort of operator mistakes. So make sure you have them and remember, even if you have like five node cluster in multiple geographical locations, it's not replaced into backups, right, because somebody may still just, you know, log in and drop a table intentionally and intentionally, right, or trash your data in a way that you need to restore on backups. So the last one I would mention is considering new generation databases. There are some databases which are designed to run on that cloud native infrastructure and run exactly on Kubernetes. They typically are designed with a shard in scaling across many nodes, horizontal scalability in mind, right, and especially for large scale environments where it can be fantastic, right. I think what is interesting here is there are a bunch of solutions which exist right now which are open source, right. They are not as popular yet as Postgres or MySQL that they are growing rapidly. Okay, now let's cover in a few words what is going on besides the Kubernetes operators, right. So as we spoke, Kubernetes operators are wonderful in terms of reducing toil, similar to database as a service, but for many people UX can be different, right. You say somebody saying, well, you know what, I want to deploy the database and manage that with a couple of clicks. Well, Kubernetes operators require you to do things a little bit differently, right. And that is where we are working on open source replacement, right, the functionality for database as a service in PMM, right. I think what besides us, they're probably going to do more work, get into that, right, as well, often happens if open source, there is often, you know, many people working on some high value solutions. So at this point that is like a pre-use functionality, right, it's not GA yet, but well, you know, check it out, provide the feedback or maybe even some code and you can even check out this, right, where you can, you know, get the things or all the things deployed to play with without needing to mess with your Kubernetes operator installation and so on and so forth. Well, with that, that's all I had. And if you have any questions, I would be happy to answer them, but I think we'll need to start allowing the next speaker to set up. Is the next speaker here? No yet, well, he's lost, right. So you can start asking questions. Yes. What's the state of Galera? Well, what is the state of Galera on Kubernetes, right? So we at Percona have a Percona XRB cluster, which is Galera-based, right? That is what we use for replication because Galera is indeed very designed very well to work on Kubernetes. Yeah, any other questions? Okay, well, if not, then thank you, I appreciate it.


We're asking adults to join us. Our next September 20th climate strike. I don't really know what that is. Who is striking? Why are you striking?  For me, this is really personal because I live in a minority community and also being disabled, we're the most vulnerable when it comes to environmental disasters. Why at this time? Striking is really our last resort. And we're using it because this is a climate catastrophe. Catastrophe. Irreversible. It literally cannot be reversed. You may not be around to see the effects of climate change, but I will and your grandchildren will. How could we support young people? Please come with us on September 20th to play your job or school, whatever it is. And you can focus on climate change. How does this work? Yes, the website is globalclimatestrike.net and there you can receive all of our information as to any questions you may have.  A lot of people tell me what gives you hope and to be honest, what gives me hope is the action that we're taking. Yes, this is our leader.


In this video, I want to graph a rational function r of x equals 3x squared minus 3x over x squared plus x minus 12. And I want to do that without any graphing technology whatsoever. I just want to graph it using information about the intercepts of the function and its asymptotes, and of course using multiplicities on how it behaves near those asymptotes. So taking our function, the first thing I want to do is factor the numerator factor denominator. To factor the numerator, we have 3x squared minus 3x. There's a GCD, a common divisor, a graphing divisor of 3x. Factor that out, and that would leave behind x minus 1, and that gives the factorization of the top 3x times x minus 1. In the denominator, I have this quadratic trinomial x squared plus x minus 12. Since the leading coefficient is 1, I'm going to look for factors of negative 12 that have to be 1. You can take 4 and negative 3, and so the reverse soil would be x plus 4 times x minus 3. And so then analyzing this, what makes the denominator go to 0? Well, if we set the denominator equals 0, you get x plus 4, that could equal 0, right? Which would give negative 4 as a value. You could also have x minus 3 equals 0, which means x would equal 3. So these are going to be the forbidden values from the domain 3 and negative 4. Plugging those in would make the function not defined. It's not defined at those values. Now I want to mention that this function right here is in lowest terms. It's in lowest terms. Therefore, in lowest terms, if something makes the denominator go to 0, that means it gives us a vertical asymptote. So the vertical asymptotes of this function are going to be x equals 3 and x equals negative 4. Each of these factors shows up with a multiplicity of 1 in the denominator. So this tells us that since these things have odd multiplicity, we're going to cross infinity at these vertical asymptotes. Alright, let's come and look at the x-intercepts. The x-intercepts are the things that are going to make the numerator go to 0. So if you have 3x times x minus 1 equal to 0, by the zero product property, we get x equals 0 or x equals 1. So we get these x-intercepts right there. Now the same thing is true about their multiplicities, right? x shows up once, x minus 1 shows up once. So both of these x-intercepts have an odd multiplicity, which tells us we're going to cross the x-axis at that value. Now to find the y-intercept, we just have to look at r of 0. That's going to give us 0 on top times 4 times negative 3, which means our y-intercept is going to be 0 as well. So this function will pass through the origin. Okay? The last thing I want to mention is about the in-behavior of the graph. We want to see what happens as x approaches plus or minus infinity. Well, when it comes to the in-behavior, I actually prefer that we look at not the factored form but the multiplied out form, this one right here. Because in that situation, only the leading terms matter on top. So as x approaches plus or minus infinity, we see that r of x will be approximately the same thing as the ratio of its leading terms. 3x squared over x squared, which this implies just to be 3. This suggests to us that we have a horizontal asymptote at y equals 3. So y will approach 3 as x approaches plus or minus infinity. So we do have this horizontal asymptote in play. Now whatever you and so let's start graphing this information. Let's start graphing this thing right here. So I'm going to indicate for us the x-axis and the y-axis. Let me move that over a little bit, the y-axis right here. And so what information did we find? We found out that it goes through the origin, 0, 0. That was the y-intercept and an x-intercept. It also goes through x equals 1 to give myself a little bit more space. I'm going to make this be x equals 1. This is 2. This is 3. So this is negative 1. I think I'm going to keep the y scale still the same way. Let's still make it be 1 to 1 there. So we'll make this be 1, 2, 3. The horizontal asymptote was 3. So maybe I'm actually going to change my mind a little bit. Let's just squish these things together. I think I can live with that. So this will be our x-intercept, 0. And this will be our x-intercept, 1. Again, I can live with that. So what we discover also in addition to the intercepts, we had the asymptotes. There was a vertical asymptote we found at negative 4. So 1, 2, 3, negative 4 right here. It's always a good idea to label your picture here, especially when you're bad at drawing like me. We're going to get x equals negative 4. We had another vertical asymptote at x equals 3. And that's why I changed my scale. This picture would just be too big if I spread the scale too much. I just have to accept my intercepts are going to be a little bit close to each other. So we're going to get x equals 3 in this situation right here. We also have this horizontal asymptote at y equals 3. So I'm going to put that right here on the graph. So we end up with y equals 3 as this horizontal asymptote. So this is information we have. We can start going from here, but there's one other bit of information we don't know yet that I want to know. So the thing I care about next is, does my graph intersect its horizontal asymptote? Because our function can't cross x or vertical asymptotes, and that's because the vertical asymptotes live outside the domain of the function. But there's nothing that forbids a function from crossing its horizontal asymptote or bleak asymptote if it has one. And so to determine whether we cross our horizontal asymptote or not, we have to solve the equation r of x equals 3. And so if we do that, we would get something like the following right here, r of x equals 3. Let's solve this equation. I'm going to clear the denominators. So you times both sides by x squared plus x minus 12.  Distribute the 3. You end up with 3x squared plus 3x minus 36, which there's a 3x squared of both sides. If you subtract 3x squared, it cancels off. So we get a negative 3x is equal to 3x minus 36. I'm going to add 3x to both sides. This gives us that 0 equals 6x minus 36. If you move the 36 to both sides, if you add 36 to both sides right here, you're going to end up with 6x equals 36. So divide both sides by 6. We end up with x equals 6. So what this tells us is that our function does, in fact, cross its horizontal acetote. It happens at x equals 6. I'm going to add this to my function graph right here. So we get 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. At 6, our function will cross its horizontal acetote right there. Now, it will cross our horizontal acetote, but this is the only place where we will cross our horizontal acetote. So starting at the y-intercept, what can happen? So I'm going to take my function. I'm going to go to consider what happens at the y-intercept. A couple of things could happen. Well, we know that our function, because this is a y-intercept, it's going to go up above and below. It's going to do one or the other. Now, because we have odd multiplicity, we have to cross at this moment. We'll come back to that in a moment, I should say. It's got to go up or below. Well, if you go up, it's going to have to go down through the x-intercept and cross to the other side. That's an option. Or if it went down, you'll have to come and cross the x-intercept like that. Because again, our x-intercept at 1, it was a crossing. So we either get this green picture or we got the yellow picture. Well, what happens with these? If you're in the green picture, you're going to have to go towards your vertical acetote, which means you either turn down, which would give us an x-intercept, which we don't have. Or you'd have to go up, right? And you have to cross the horizontal acetote, which we're only allowed to do that at 6. So it turns out with this green possibility, you get into a conflict. There's no way of fitting the picture together. And so actually it turns out this green picture has to be removed from consideration. So what this tells us is that our function at the y-intercept, actually it comes up and then comes back down. That's what had to happen. And now with our picture right here, we either, as we get close to the vertical acetote, we either turn up towards infinity, or we go down towards negative infinity. But we can't go up towards infinity, same problem. So the next intercept we don't have, and we need to cross into the horizontal acetote, which we don't have. So it turns out what must be the case is that we're going to continue on towards negative infinity right here on our picture. That's what's going to have to happen. Just by the process of elimination, just pretend like graphing this rational function is like playing Sudoku or some other logic puzzle. We follow the rules, and we make the steps based upon the only thing that doesn't lead to contradiction. Now as we approach this vertical acetote, because we're touching infinity, we have to come back from to the side. So our spaceship wraps around to the other side, like so, and then we have to go towards this, we have to go towards this number right here. Okay? In which case then our function, sweet, it's going to touch, it's going to cross our horizontal acetote. So it comes back on to the side and then wraps around right here, like so. And so this is what our picture is going to be doing. At some point it has to turn around and come back towards this horizontal acetote that's in play. So this gives us the right side of the picture. What about the left side? Well, with our intercept here, the intercept is either got to go down or it's got to go up. But wait a second, we already know the multiplicity says it's got to cross. So it's got to come back over here. So then we're going to be below the x-axis. We have to approach either our vertical acetote by going towards negative infinity or we got to go up towards positive infinity. Same problems as before. We can't cross the x-axis. We can't cross the acetote. So the only picture that's applicable is the one you see right here. At x equals negative four, we're going to cross infinity and come from the other side. This time though, we won't cross the horizontal acetote. We have to stay above it. And so we get this picture right here. Well, let's see how this compared to our computer generated image, which you can see. I guess it's, we can see it right there. Can we see both of these at the same time? There you go. And so we see the behavior we want. We see sort of like this bowl shape, concave down shape going on near the x-intercepts right there. There's some maximum that's between one and zero, but it's really small. Over here, we're going to cross our acetote. We're below it, but it's going to bend back towards this. My bump is sort of too pronounced, but that's okay. At some point it turns around here. And then over here, we have exactly what we expected to do. So in fact, we did draft a pretty good rational function without using any technology whatsoever, just by looking at the intercepts and the asymptotes of the function.


People are criticizing that Bitcoin needs a secular to become useful for smaller payments. What do you think of that? The bottom line is this. There are fundamental design trade-offs that exist in blockchains. You can pretend to ignore these fundamental design trade-offs or you can pretend that you've solved them in some way. But the bottom line is that in order to accommodate many, many, many, small payments, you have to decide who's going to validate the transactions. The Bitcoin answer is everybody validates every transaction in order to maintain decentralization, security, robustness, censorship, resistance, neutrality, and openness in the network. If you give up that property, then a lot of the other properties kind of poof evaporate. So the solution of Lightning Network and using a second layer is to ensure that we can maintain these fundamental properties that arise from decentralization. If you process a lot of blocks, a lot of transactions, very, very fast on your blockchain, there is a trade-off. Either not everyone is validating or the validation is not of equivalent robustness as the Bitcoin network. And of course, it's very easy to say, oh, look, we can do transactions in a second and we can do thousands of transactions per second. As long as your blockchain isn't actually doing thousands of transactions per second. But if you are actually getting to the point where you're doing thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of transactions per day, then that burden creates a cost to the validators. And that cost is in the form of bandwidth, which is the most expensive and difficult to get, as well as disk space and CPU and all of the other computing capabilities. If that cost, given no compensation, is shared by all of the validators on the network and you want everyone to be a validator on the network, this is going to very quickly lead to centralization. People who cannot afford to run big, beefy nodes are going to stop validating transactions and your network is going to get centralized. The more centralized it is, the easier it is to shut down, sensor, disrupt, et cetera. So this is the fundamental trade-off. So those who criticize Bitcoin needs to have a second layer are playing mostly in the small leagues. And as a result, are not yet dealing with scaling problems. In order to have scaling problems, you first have to have scale. It's very easy to not have scaling problems at small scale. If you want to support it, join me on Patreon.


Good morning, and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live, the weekly online event hosted by the Nebraska Library Commission. I am your guest host today, Michael Sowers, the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Commission. Krista is taking the day off and asked me to fill in. I don't have a lot to do today. I'm just going to kind of get things started. Like everybody know, we are recording. And so if you want to watch this show afterwards, you are welcome to do that. We will also take your questions via the Q&A interface. Or you can say you have a microphone and we'll unmute you and you're welcome to ask your question that way. We'll try to answer your question. You ask it, we answer. In this weekly show, we have lots of different topics varying. Sometimes we have commission staff. We have guest speakers coming on. And this week we have Richard Miller here from the commission to talk about library accreditation in the state of Nebraska. So Richard, I'm just going to go ahead and hand it over to you and tell us all about it. Great, thank you Michael. Glad to be with you this morning. I'm just back from Las Vegas and 100 plus degree temperatures for 27 days straight there. I'm glad to be back in Nebraska. Thank you very much. Where it's now like 63. Yeah, 63. It's a little bit cool this morning actually. Well today, as Michael said, we're going to go through information about the accreditation process. We'll also hit on the number of other topics because they're all related to library accreditation. And so you'll see the Nebraska Library Commission website here. We're going to be going to several sections of that website so that you yourself can go to those sections when it is time to do your accreditation. Very good. Thank you, Michael. If you have not been to the commission website yet, I would surprise me if you haven't, but if you haven't been there yet, the way it's set up is that there are topics along the left-hand side and you'll notice that when you go to that topic like about us, for example, there's what they call a flyout menu. Then if you're careful and go to the right, you can pick one of those topics under the flyout menu. Those are each live links. Well, we're going to be spending most of our time today on the accreditation certification flyout menu. That's the one that you would like to go to if you'd like to look at any of the stuff that we're going to be talking about today. Let me review briefly what we will be discussing. We'll be discussing board certification, librarian certification, and library accreditation. And the great amount of our time is going to be on library accreditation, but you need to know about board certification and library accreditation as well. We'll also be talking about strategic planning since strategic plans are required for the library accreditation process. So those are the four main topics. We'll review those. We'll go into a little bit of detail. And Wayne Public Library, Lauren Lofgren, the director of Wayne Public Library has again allowed me to use a live version of the library accreditation application form because they really have to look at a live one to see how it works. So we've got that loaded up on here and we'll be going to that shortly. We'll be talking about the 12 minimum requirements before you can actually apply for accreditation. We'll be talking about the five sections of the guidelines and then we'll demonstrate the form itself. So let's get started here. Let's talk just briefly about, we'll just take them straight down the list here, board certification. If you go to board certification about, you will find out of course that boards, that is library boards have to be certified in order for the library to be accredited. That's one of the links there. For those of you who've been in the field for a while, you know that library boards in Nebraska have to earn at least 20 hours of CE or CE credits during a three-year period. This page, which is put together by Laura Johnson, who is our CE coordinator, does have helpful information about the types of things that boards can receive credit for. Now library boards, unlike librarians, can take all of their hours that are required through videos, offline, whatever they wish to do. So as I say, and I'm sure Laura says this as well, library board members, since you have at least five board members and some have seven and some have even more, but since you have that many board members, for you folks to get 20 hours within a three-year period is really easy. So there's really no excuse not to have that. So that's that. All right, let's go back. We'll look at librarian certification. As you know, librarians in order to be certified have to earn 45 CE hours or CE credits within a three-year period. Now the one thing that, and I guess I should have said this when I was talking about boards, if for example you do a half hour continuing education experience during a board meeting and you've got five board members there, you earn two and a half hours because each board member earns those. In terms of public librarian certification, that has to be earned by the librarian himself or herself. So that's a bit more daunting, but again, in 45 hours over three years, it means you'd have to come up with 15 hours during the course of that time period. So we have three years in order to attain that. If you need to, for both board certification and librarian certification, if you have some difficulties you can contact Laura Johnson since she's in charge of both of these things and you can talk to her about earning those hours. Now there are basically five levels of certification which we'll see when we get to the accreditation application itself. But there really are eight levels because Laura points out here that we have everywhere from level five down through level one, or level one up through level five, however you want to say it, but we also have levels that have L's behind them like here's level two L, these are Roman numerals so you know that. So level one requires a high school diploma or GED plus the basic skills courses. Level two is high school or GED plus 60 semester hours plus basic skills. Level two L, 60 semester hours with an AA degree, and you'll notice that basic skills has dropped off there because the AA degree in library science or professional certificate in library science means that you do not have to take the basic skills. Level three is a bachelor's plus basic skills. Level three L is a bachelor's and if you have a bachelor's or an AA in library science you'll notice the basic skills has dropped off that one. Level four is a graduate degree but not a graduate degree in library science so you do have to take the basic skills. Level four L is graduate degree from an accredited college or university with a bachelor's AA degree or professional certificate in library science and there's the L again. And level five is a master's degree in library science from an ALA accredited school. So those are the eight levels, there are actually five levels but some with library science involved in that for certification. The reason I spent some time on that is that the accreditation application itself mentions the certification and the levels that are required depending upon your service population that your library is responsible for but it is not spelled out there so I did want to take some time to do that. Okay, let's go to the library certification section. A couple things here. I'm sorry, I said library certification didn't I? Yes you did. Michael was going to tell me that. I could see it on his face. Let's go to library accreditation. The way you remember whether to use the term certification or accreditation and don't screw it up the way I just did is that remember only people are certifiable and you can take that any way you'd like to. It's institutions that are accredited. Here we go with library accreditation. There's an information sheet here about the accreditation process itself. As those of you know who are up for accreditation this year, you did receive an email from us specific to your library. We actually sent it out before July 1st this year, that's a first. And by October 1st you must have responded in terms of filling out the accreditation application, sending in your strategic plan, and so forth. So you've got over a full three months this time. And please call me if you have any questions. The library accreditation, we worked with a group for almost three years, a group of librarians from around the state who developed the new accreditation guidelines and we all agreed working with them that there are some minimum qualifications that a library should be able to fulfill before it can ever even apply for accreditation. We'll be talking about that a bit later. Also, as I mentioned earlier, accreditation does require an up-to-date strategic plan and we'll be spending some time on that as well. This page on Nebraska Public Library accreditation has links to all of this information and we'll be going to some of those links. The accreditation application itself is divided into five categories, which we'll be talking about, but they're listed there, governance slash planning, resources, services, cooperation slash collaboration, and communications. Also, in order to be accredited, the library must have sent in its annual public libraries survey, and there's a link to that, and also the supplemental survey, and that's a change on the form this year. In past years it said you have to have sent in the public libraries survey, but it did not mention the supplemental survey. There's a supplemental survey that goes out to every public library that has submitted its public libraries survey, and these are the things that are covered in that supplemental survey. Staff, their names, addresses, email, phone, salary, education level, board membership, their names, addresses, and contact information. We really would like to have board email addresses because when we do emails to board members, it's really appalling the number of board members that we do not have email addresses listed for. Contact names for friends or foundations that you may have, your open hours, and be sure to include summer hours if they're different from your regular open hours, and check your photo on our website. If we have a photo of your library from 2001, we'd certainly like something more up to date than that, and we do have a number of 2001 photos. So that supplemental survey, as well as the annual public library survey, both of which are annual, of course, must be sent in as part of this whole thing. One thing you'll notice here is that there are nine guidelines in the accreditation application. Most of them are in section two, which has to do with resources, in which your library is compared with peer libraries, and I'll talk to you about peer libraries in just a second. These guidelines, for those of you who have been through the old accreditation process, you may even remember that we had some arbitrarily designed population categories. If your library was under 500, if your library served from 501 to 1,000, et cetera. Well, the group that we worked with on the new accreditation guidelines said that's really not fair, those boxes are arbitrary, we should be comparing ourselves with libraries of similar size. So that's what we've done on these accreditation guidelines. Your library is compared with public libraries, which serve populations from 15% higher to 15% lower than your library, and you're right smack dab in the middle, you're right at the median there. So that should be a fairer measure. Now, you'll notice that for some of these libraries, and you'll see this when we go to Wayne Public Library's accreditation application, there are a number of Nebraska public libraries on there, but most of their peers are from Iowa, because there were not enough public libraries in the population size, 15% above through 15% below, to provide enough comparison. So we did pull from Iowa libraries for some of our libraries, and there are a few libraries that we pulled from South Dakota libraries as well. But most of our libraries are compared just with other public libraries in Nebraska. So those are your peer libraries. You can preview an application here. If you click on that, it'll take you to an application, but that's not a live application. And we're going to go, as I said earlier, to a live application. This does not allow you to put things in and watch the number of points change and so forth. But if you're not a Nebraska library and therefore do not have username and passwords to get into your own public library application, which has your name at the top here instead of the word preview, then you can look at this to get a pretty darn good idea of the application form itself. But we're not going to be doing that, so let's go back. Is it a good thing to print maybe two for reference? Yes, you can certainly print this for reference. Good idea, Michael. So let's go look a little bit at strategic planning. And I want to go up here to this strategic planning because of the importance of strategic planning to the accreditation process. Empty your library and your community, actually. Now, strategic planning is meant to, and let's talk about the word strategic for just a minute here.  That's not a strategic plan. A strategic plan is one that you use and you develop strategy within that plan. That's why it's called strategic, of course, and use it on a regular basis. A strategic plan is based on the needs of your community, not based on the needs of your library. That's one thing that people often don't get the connection of. And what you'll see when you do use strategic plan is that if you look at the resources we have on strategic planning, you'll notice that we're asking you, first of all, to figure out what the needs of the community are, apart from the library completely. Almost every community that does an analysis of the community will find out that the top 10 things that people are worried about always include stray dogs, bad streets, the downtown looks terrible, people don't keep their property fixed up, almost every town I've ever dealt with in doing strategic planning. Those are among the top 10 for sure. But if you're doing a strategic plan, there are several ways of doing it. If you already have a strategic plan and if it includes these seven elements, whoops, these seven elements that are listed here, then you don't have to come up with another strategic plan unless it's really out of date.  So these are the elements that need to be in a strategic plan. You have to have a mission statement for the library. You have to have done a community profile, not a library profile, a community profile. How many people do you have of a certain type? What trends are going on in the community? All kinds of things. You have to have an assessment of community needs. You have to have an analysis of the library's strengths and weaknesses, and then an analysis of the opportunities and threats outside the library. And the reason we divided it this way, and I think Laura Johnson came up with this, is that if you do a SWOT analysis, which this is, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and if you do them all together, people start mixing up strengths with opportunities and weaknesses with threats. That's just the way it happens. Whereas if you keep it internal versus external, it really helps clarify things. So do it that way. Do this one analysis that way. Then you have to do an analysis of what it means that you have found in your community and the strengths and weaknesses of your library and the opportunities and threats outside the library. Then you have to come up with specific goals that have measurable goals or measurable objectives with an evaluation and then a plan for evaluation. Now, if you have all those elements, if you're not sure, you can send your strategic plan to either your regional system administrator who would be happy to review it or I'd be happy to review it ahead of time if you're not sure of it. And here's an opportunity right now to get going on it because you have about three months and you have not done anything on that so far. There's also information down below that we put together. The first year we use these new plans, there's an introduction that I did. You probably don't want to watch that at this point because it's dated and we've made some changes. But we do have worksheets. We do have explanatory videos that were done by Laura Johnson and by the system administrators. We have how-to guides over here. These are all live links that you can go to that will help you with these processes. Each of these videos is about 20 or 30 minutes long or so, some shorter than others. They can be helpful.  These are all live links. Let's just look at community profile for fun. These sheets can be used if you go to look at census data on American Fact Finder. And if you're going to use census data, which I would suggest that you do, going to American Fact Finder, which is produced by the U.S. Census Bureau and really is quite friendly, especially compared with census data in the past, it's really easy to use. You can get a pretty good breakdown of the community, the number, the percentage of the total population. There are various things here which we're not going to go into because we're not doing a strategic planning session today. If you want to go to training on strategic planning, the Panhandle is planning a strategic planning session. I'm going to be involved in that at Eric Green. He's going to be involved in that. It's in alliance. I think it's August 3rd, but look at the Panhandle Library System website and the newsletter to figure it out. In each of the other systems, the system administrator so far has actually made contact one-on-one with the public libraries that are up for accreditation or re-accreditation this year. And I don't think they're going to be doing workshops, but that may change in the future. We'll see. So, that's... There's Michael back there. Thank you, Michael. Let's go back to this. So, the help sheets are all here. And the reason I call your attention to the worksheets here is because if you don't have a strategic plan already that includes these seven elements that I drew your attention to, then you can start from scratch. You can use these six worksheets. And the last sheet here is a strategic plan summary. So, you can take those worksheets up above, and this is just an outline of what the strategic plan would look like. It's obviously not going to fit on less than one sheet, but these are the sections of the strategic plan that you can use. Tell us who your planning team members are. Tell us the dates, the beginning and end dates. Summary of important demographics. This is what you get from your analysis of the community and getting into census data. And certainly, if anybody else in your community has already done community or economic development, get a hold of that. That can be actually part of this and a very important part of the whole thing. They've done a lot of your work for you already. Summary of community needs and desires in priority order. You're going to see in the worksheets that what we recommend that you do is that you either have community meetings or focus groups or if you have to, surveys or some way of getting input from needs and desires of the community. And then do a tally sheet. Put them in priority order. Many dogs are number one. That's number one. If all the kids are leaving town and they're not coming back because there are no jobs here, whatever order it's in. And then start addressing those. And we'll talk about addressing those in just a minute. Summary of the library profile, including that SWOT analysis that we talked about. And it shouldn't say library profile because it should say library profile for strengths and weaknesses but for opportunities and threats, outside the library. Maybe I can change that before you use it. List of goals and objectives for the planning period in priority order and these should be measurable goals and objectives. When you get to the information that's on our website, look for the term smart goals because there's information there about how to make them measurable and smart. And then a summary of the projected evaluation criteria for the project itself. This is just an outline that you might use. It's there for your information if you'd like to use it. All right. Let's get on a strategic planning. I think that's enough on that. Let's go to the 12 minimum qualifications and then we'll actually get into a website. I will show you this first and then we're going into the live website which we already have loaded up here. When you want to apply for accreditation, you have to first go to this page. You have to be able to truthfully check all 12 of these. These are your library legally established under state statute. That means either chapter 51 or chapter 16 or 17. If you don't know what that means, you can contact me and figure it out. Do you comply with all library laws, regulations, and any local or Nebraska or federal laws that affect library operations? For example, if the feds decided to change the minimum wage up from where it is and has been forever and you don't comply, you can't check that. Do you possess a governing administrative or an advisory library board that operates under written by laws and that operates under Nebraska's open meeting law? That should be posted of course in your meeting space. Is your board certified? Is your director certified at the proper level? At the required level? Do you receive local funding from a city, village, town, and community? If it's just volunteer, then you cannot check that one and therefore you cannot go on to try to become accredited. Did you submit your most recent annual public libraries survey using Bibliostat? And here's where we added on and the supplemental survey. Most people or most libraries that send in the annual survey do send in the supplemental survey, but now it is required. Staffing the library during all open hours. Now there can be exceptions for this. If let's say the librarian is going to a workshop, for example, you might fill in kind of temporarily, but volunteers, people who are not paid by the library should not be staffing the library during open hours. Does your director have an email address which is used and checked regularly? Regularly. We were going to define that and decided not to do that, but regularly used and checked. Do you make your basic services available without charge to all residents to supply the income? Do you provide access to Internet for anybody who comes into the library, whether you're, whether they're a local taxpayer or not, and do you make your annual report to the governing body of local government and to the public every year, and it's supposed to be the second Monday in February of every year according to state statute. If you've checked all of these and you say, yes, then it links you to say, then you can click this and say, yes, I want to apply for accreditation. When you get to that point, you have to put in your user ID and password. That is the same user ID and password that you use for turning in your annual libraries survey. So let's get out of here and go to here because we are going to go to Wayne Public Library's application form, complete with false information that I have put in. So don't believe anything you read on here, except the nine guidelines that have either a green check or a red X, because those come right out of BiblioStack Collect. Let me explain that just a little bit before we go to their form itself. First of all, there are 41 public libraries that are up for re-accreditation this year. There are 25 or 35, I forgot the number, libraries that have sent in their statistics even though they're not currently accredited and because they sent in their annual statistics and if they send in their supplemental survey, they are eligible to apply for accreditation even if they're not currently accredited. So let's go to Wayne Public Library's. Now, when you put in your own username and password, it takes you to your own unique form. This is nobody else's form. That's why I didn't want to show you Wayne Public Library's username and password. I fiddled with this enough, we don't want other people fiddling with it too. There are a couple of elements in this form I want to show you. First of all, there's a floating totals point in the upper right-hand corner. As you go through here, that travels with you. You can take a check in here that affects the total number of points as you'll see when we go through here. So that's a handy-dandy little thing to let you know how many points you've accumulated. If you've accumulated the number of points you want to accumulate, you can quit at that point. Under the old guidelines, you had to attain the essential level completely before you could move on to the enhanced level and those first two levels before you could move on to the excellent level. We have three levels, but they are bronze, silver, and gold. The number of points you have to accumulate for those are right here. There are 275 points total. If you get to 175, you are credited at the bronze level, 200 silver, and 250 at the gold level. May I ask a question? Certainly you may. You said if you get the number of points you want, they've got 235, so they're at the silver level. And you said they can quit. Is there a benefit to keep going to see if you hit gold? Absolutely. Would you want to do that? Certainly. He's a good sideman here. I like this. Now, there are instructions on this first sheet here. I'm going to show you a couple of these things. In the nine guidelines that are filled in from the Bibliostat information that you sent in, they already have been compared with your peer libraries. So if you met the guideline when compared with your peers, there's a green check. If you did not meet that guideline when compared with your peers, there's a red X. There's also information in here from the supplemental survey. For example, do you have a friends group? If you do, there's a green check mark. If you don't, there'd be a red check. So that comes from those two surveys that you sent in. So we need both of those surveys sent in in order to lead toward accreditation. I talked about the peer libraries. When you're first starting out, if you want to view your peer libraries, just click on this live link and you'll see, as I mentioned before, that there are a whole lot of Iowa libraries that are compared with Wayne Public Library, all of them larger in terms of service population. But below that, there are a few Nebraska libraries. Valentine and Shadron and Schuyler and Platsmith, which are in the amount of service population that Wayne Public Library has. So in terms of the numbers, it should be right in the middle. There won't always be an exact number above and below. Our goal, or John Felton's goal, was to have at least five libraries above and five libraries below, so there could be some comparison. So let me... Is this the one that's open? Can I shut that? Yes. Okay. So let's go back here. There's another feature on here. If you look at there, there are yellow... there's a yellow circle in here with a black question mark in it. That takes you to a help page. If you want to see the entire help page, you can click on this one. And maybe it doesn't work there. Let's go down here and click on it. Okay, let's click on this one. And that'll take you to a help page, which you can blow up and read the whole thing if you wish to. It goes through everything that needs to be here that will help answer your questions. This is the help page. It's also the Richard Miller sanity page. Because for those of you who work with me on the old guidelines, you may remember that I probably sent out, I don't know, a couple hundred emails every year saying, oh, well, let me explain that term to you. Oh, or here's an example of... well, I think Laura Johnson came up with this page also. But this has a whole lot of really good information that it will explain. And depending on where the question mark is in here, it will take you to that specific section that will pop up for you to read, so you don't have to scroll through the whole thing to find it. That's really useful. If you have a question about anything on the accreditation guidelines, please go to that first before you give me a call or send me an email, because I bet your question is going to be answered. All right, I think that's enough up here. This last statement does point out that when you get to the end of this form, you can either save it and resume it later, and it will save everything that you put in here, which is a nice development, since last year it didn't always work. I mean, it didn't always work on the old form. But you can also just exit this form, and it will not save it at all. So it depends on what you want to do. Now, even if your library is not up for accreditation this year, since the data that you sent in for the 2012-2013 are already in here, even if your library is not up for accreditation until 2015 or 2016, go in and take a look at it, because I'm going to show you how this application is really a good planning tool as well. Let's start going into the form itself. Governance. There are a couple of things about this form that you need to know. I need to get that box out of the way. You are to make a check mark if it's available, if the box is empty. Make a check mark in here if you meet the guideline. Now, in almost every one of these, it says, list the goal or the goals in your strategic plan. Hey, do you get the idea why the strategic plan is important? You've got to fill in the pieces here. So list the section or sections of your strategic plan that apply to this particular goal. Notice the conditional word, if, right there. It says, list the permanent goal or goals in your library's strategic plan if the plan touches upon that subject. The wording here before seemed to indicate that every one of these guidelines had to have something in your strategic plan, which is really kind of nuts. So it's if the plan touches upon that subject. I used to have the word where in there, and Becky Baker from Seward Public Library may be changing it to if, because that's a better word. So only if it is related to that. This is automatic. After you check those 12 boxes and the minimum qualifications, this automatically turned to a green check here, a number one. So that's out of the way. Do you have a strategic plan? If you do, you check that. If you don't have a strategic plan, you might as well not go on with the rest of the form because you need a strategic plan. Your strategic plan, you need to send a URL to me, a link somewhere on your website so that I can get to it, or you can attach it to an email and send it to my email address. Either way, I need that plan. I don't want it in paper. Thank you very much. He's got enough paper. Yeah. Michael can tell you from looking at my office I have more than enough paper. All right. Now I told you the strategic plan has to be up to date. That means it can't be any older than three years old. Otherwise it's not strategic by our definition. So I told you that I made stuff up on the Wayne Public Library's form. I have indicated here that every May they review their strategic plan. They've done it in 2011, 12, and 13. So they're in pretty good shape. This date is filled in by you. You put down month, month, year, year. All you put down is the last two digits of the year and it does fill it out in four digits. I don't quite know why it does that, but it does it anyway. So you just put in 05, 13, or 05, 12, and it'll pop it up into this. Now this is a section of the application that you can chunk up a whole lot of points. You can get as many as 19 points on this because you get a point for every up-to-date policy that your board has approved for your library. The policies are listed here. You will notice, follow the bouncing box over here, that if it turns out that Wayne Public Library does have an exhibits, displays, and bulletin boards policy, I can check that, and it should change the points by one. Bingo, automatic. This is such a cool form. It's developed by Vern Bios, who's our IT guy, and I love it. It's fun to work with. Let's suppose they have a marketing policy. Check that, get another point. Now it turns out that their gifts, memorials, and donations policy is not three years, is older than three years, so they can't claim that. So they take that off, points go back down again. Michael? Now when you say older than three years, it's not that they haven't updated in three years. They haven't re-approved it in three years. Either, well, they should not just re-approve it. They should review it, too. Well, review it. And you don't have to change the language. Yes, if the language is still appropriate, but it means that the board really does review it and look at it and not just say, oops, this is three years old. Let's change the date on this. That's not review yet. Now here, you'll notice that it goes 1.03.16. So there are 16 policies listed here. But if you have other policies that did not fit into those 16 categories and can make a case, you can list it here. So I put down, remember this is fiction on this form, I put down that they have, since the Wayne Public Library is located in a dual-use building with the Public Library and one part of the building, a lobby, and then the senior center in the other part, oh, they happen to have policies dealing with cooperative activities with the senior center, which is very logical. So I put down that they have a policy there, and they can claim that. Do you have a tech plan? If you do, what part of the goals is that addressed in? Now, you want to figure out what I mean by tech plan. You can go here, and it takes you right to has reviewed the tech plan annually. So there's a definition of what it means by reviewed, and there's information for assistance on tech planning if you need some help with that.  In case you need some help on a technology plan, she'll be able to help you with that. All right. I'm not going to go through every one of these guidelines, but I do want to point out when there are certain things that I think would be useful for you. We've talked about the help page. We've talked about filling in the appropriate section of your strategic plan. On this technology plan, just as with the tech plan above, you need to list when it was reviewed. And it looks like Wayne Public Library, since we know that Lauren is a very organized person. Every March, she works with their board and they review their tech plan. Now, I don't know if that's true. It wouldn't surprise me, but I don't know if that's true. Friends Groups Foundation, those come right out of the supplemental survey that you send in. If there's a section of the goals that addresses it, put it there. You'll notice later on in this forum, I gave up listing these things. I was tired of making stuff up, but I was trying to be consistent in my lies, but it wasn't working after a while. Did I say part four? What did I say there? Part two has to do with resources. Again, check the boxes if you meet it. List a part of the plan if it is addressed in your plan. Now, this part two of the accreditation guidelines is the largest part in terms of the number of points you can either earn or lose. You'll notice that a lot of these are from the statistics that you sent in via bibliostat. And here is where we list the average of your peers and the median of your peers. Now, even under the old guidelines, we added this some years ago to include not just the average, but also the median, because these figures are different, usually very different, and the median is often lower than the average. Not always, but it is. And Michael will correct me if I'm wrong, but the median means that your library is right smack in the middle of the funding that's available, so that if you listed an entire list of your peer libraries, your library would have local income of $289,559, and that's right smack. No, no, no. They're doing much better. But the median, the X library would be right smack in the middle of that list of all the libraries listed. They're doing much better than the median. The average simply means that you take all of the local incomes and divide it by the number of libraries. So that's not really a true figure of a true measurement of the whole thing, because you could have what are called outliers. You could have some library that has $500,000 for some reason, and some library that has $2,000, and that screws up the averages. So you have the opportunity of either meeting the average figure or the median figure, and as Michael points out, Wayne Public Library goes considerably over that. So they're in good shape there, and automatically there would be a green check mark there based on the stats. Now we go to facilities. In this case, this is the number of hours open annually, and in this case, the peer average was $2693, the peer median was $2548, and again, Wayne Public Library exceeds that by quite a bit. Schedule of open hours. Now remember that all of these guidelines that you're able to check yourself, as opposed to things that were automatically filled in from the stats that you submitted, these are self-reported, and it's the honor system here. So if you say that you schedule open hours that reflect an attempt to meet the needs of the community, then we're going to believe you. We're not coming around, we don't have library police coming around and checking to see if you're absolutely told the truth, but you also have to record the last date on which you had some contact with your community somehow asking them their preferred open hours. So in this case, in April 2013, I made up as fiction, they asked their community open hours, or they listed their open hours saying, hey, do you like this, do you think it should change, whatever. All right, let's scoot on down to staff. Here, this is the amount of money that is spent by the library, by your library, by the Wayne Public Library, on staff. In this case, the average and median, and you'll notice the median is, oh, I'm sorry, my glasses are fogging up here. You'll notice they're well above both the median and the average in this case. Professional education level. All right, we talked about certification level before that is required. In this case, according to these statistics, given the population that is served, the LSA population, the library director needs to be at least at a level three. She happens to have a master's degree in library science, so she's at a level five, and so that meets or exceeds the guidelines. And there's a chart there. We don't have a level four. We just jump from three to five. Three or four, you fit in there, that's fine, but 10,000 plus is a master's degree in library science. All right, number of additional, notice the word additional. Number of additional library staff that must be certified based on the LSA population. Director plus X, director plus X. So if you're in a library that's above 5,000 and below 2499, you have to have a library director plus one additional staff. Now, we had some discussion about this and the group that we worked with felt that it shouldn't just be the director. We do know, however, that in libraries that have 500, 1,000, whatever, that's often the only staff member. Well, in that case, that's fine, but if you have some additional staff, you need to have those members attempting to be certified. They don't have to have attained certification because people have three years to attain certification, but they have to be working on it. And if you figure out that you take three years, you have three years to earn 45 hours. If they earn 15 hours a year, they're going to be in good shape. So just to clarify, if you have additional staff, at least one, two, three, or four need to be certified, but if you only have one staff person, you don't have to hire someone else to meet this. Absolutely right. Number of FTE that you have. They're the figures for the meeting and the average. Again, Wayne Public Library does exceed that. Financial resources that are committed to and expended by the library for in-service training, basically for continuing education. They meet that based on the data. They set aside $3,659 in 2012-13 for continuing education for their staff. So they meet that. That's automatic. Okay, I'm going to start moving a little bit faster because I want to talk, I think I'll go through the whole thing and then come back to this part two. Technology. They have an integrated library system. Their catalog is on the web 24-7. And this we pick up from the statistics or the supplemental survey, in this case from the library survey. They say they have broadband internet access adequate to meet their growing user needs. That is self-proclaimed, but they do say that they have it in their plan as fabricated by Richard Miller. They do have it in their plan. Under collection.  I want to draw to your attention on this because there are a couple here that they are missing according to or they weren't able to attain according to the statistics they sent in. Their weeding of 3% per year averaged over a three-year period. They met that. Their rate was 5.8%. You know that it's 3% not per year, but 3% per year averaged over a three-year period. So that takes into account the fact that perhaps one year you heavily weeded in preparation for a move or a renovation project or who knows.  And the following year you weeded nothing and the following year you weeded nothing. So you'd still have 3% average per year. I don't recommend that you do it quite that way, but that does take into account varieties of situations like that. I said here that the staff does not use online websites to provide information to library users. However, I should have checked this because you'll notice I said it's in section one part A of their plan. So I must have made a mistake. So I'll check that and I should get the points added to that score. Taking me up to what, Michael? You want me to do math 2-4-2? Yes, 2-4-2. There we go. Okay. All right. He passed the math test. All right. Now, notice here in this next one, annual expenditure on materials as a percentage of your total operating expenditures has to be greater or equal to the median or average of the peer group. Well, in this case, those figures are 13.85 and 14.09, and they're spending 11.1%. So they're not up to snuff on that one. And that could be either good or bad. It doesn't say it's good or bad, and we'll come back to this when we talk about planning, but they don't meet that particular peer measurement. Annual circulation of items per capita, look at that. They're at 10.76, well above their peer average and peer median, even though they're below what they spend on materials. So you need to look at some of these together. You can't just take one and say, oh, that's bad. That's bad. That's good. That's good. Their turnover rate, and this is another measure. Turnover rate, if you want to look at the definition, basically is if you have your entire collection, let's say you've got 20,000 volumes, and you divide the amount of circulation that you have by that 20,000 volumes, you figure out how many times each one mythical book on the shelf circulated. And here are their peer averages and peer median, and they're above the peer average and peer median, which means their collection is turning over quite nicely. Thank you, even though they spend less on the collection, which might mean a couple different things. It might mean they're doing really good selection of materials. It might mean they have a very efficient use of the collection. It might mean a number of different things. You have to do some interpretation. And then when you look at the collection size per capita, again, it's below their peer average and peer median, but hey, their turnover rate's good and hey, their circulation is above that, too. So these are the kinds of things you can look at. I don't think I'll come back and talk about planning. You can do any of this stuff yourself if you look at this and make some interpretation. You could, for example, let's suppose you want to argue with your local funders that, you know what, our annual expenditure on materials is well below our peers. We really need to spend more money on materials. Couldn't we increase our budget by a certain amount to come up to that? So you can use this for planning. You can use it for advocacy. You can use it for whatever you want to use it for. It's how you interpret it. All right? Michael? So if you wanted to use that for planning, is there a way to find out what those numbers are from your peers so you can figure out how much more you need to get you up? Yes. Okay. You can do it a couple different ways. If you've got a lot of Nebraska peer libraries, in this case you don't, but if you've got a lot of Nebraska peer libraries, you can look at theirs and go to actually our website which has our annual statistics on it and look at that. However, the difficulty with, in this particular case, is that Wayne has so many from Iowa that you could, what I would recommend for Wayne to do if they want to do that is to actually look at the Institute of Museum and Library Services data, the IMLS data that's on there, but the disadvantage is that that's a year behind this. For the data that we have on our website, it's from 2012-2013, but the national data is 2011-2012 because they're always a year behind. However, these data don't change that much year to year, so it still could be useful. The other thing we could do is that if we needed to, if Wayne Public Library asked us to do this, we could probably have our data coordinator get in touch with their data coordinator at Iowa Library Commission. I think it's... We can find it. We can find it. We have the number somewhere else the form wouldn't work. Yes, we pulled the numbers in somewhere. That is true. So probably our IT person can do this. By the way, we're sad to report that John Felton, who is our data wrangler, is gone. He's retired for a second time. He retired once from Lincoln City Libraries. Now he's retired from here also. So we're really going to miss him because he was our... He did good stuff for us after watching the timer. All right, let's go to Part 3, Services. Again, some of these are pulled from your statistics, so we'll look at those. Here is Outreach Programs, that's self-proclaimed. What did I write down here? Oh, here's where I stopped making stuff up. Yeah, that's what I wrote down here. Okay, as I was going through it, you'll notice that none of these other goals have anything written by them simply because I got tired of writing fiction, and I figured you probably got the idea from looking at Parts 1 and 2. So that doesn't mean you shouldn't fill something in. That just means I got tired of making stuff up. So in this case, let's look at the comparable data from other peer institutions. Attendance per capita. This is based on, of course, the number of people you have coming through the doors for your programs, the number of people that, let me get this right, your service population. So in this case, again, Wayne Public Library has a healthy program, Attendance Per Capita, this isn't programmed, I'm sorry, that's down below. This is just people coming through the door and using your library. So there is 0.81, what? Attendance Per Capita for programs. Oh, thank you. Thank you, Michael, I only help write these things. So I'll program to the next one. Thank you, this is for programs. Thank you very much. And then access to licensed databases made available, do they use that? That we already know because that's reported in the information that you sent in your survey. Then if you have databases that go beyond those that 20 that we make available through the Nebraska Library Commission, you can check that and you have to list them here. I made up that they have tutor.com and Ancestry Library Edition. Wait a minute, is that one thing or two? That's two. They probably should say something else. Anyway, okay. Well, I was making it up, so I wasn't sure. Anyway, and do they have wireless internet access? Yes, that's based on the service of that's built in there. Cooperation collaboration, this has to do with the relationship that your library has with entities outside the library itself. So let me get down here to just this one, because I'm not going to go to all of them, but I well, I did think of something here. Okay, well in 4.04 does the library cooperate with other local entities? I put down the Wayne Senior Center and the local FFA. I know it cooperates with the Wayne Senior Center just simply because I know what they do at that library. I don't know about the FFA, but it wouldn't surprise me. And then under 4.05 this says your library board members and staff participate in activities outside the library, basically, like national advocacy efforts, like NLA's annual advocacy day, and you get one point for every person actively participating. So you can check here, but you don't get points until you actually list a name in here. So I put down board member X, Y, and Z and you'll notice that I take off board member Z because you decided not to go. The points will go down by one. They should. It didn't work. Thank you, Michael. He knows how this form works better than I do. Okay. All right, let's go to communication, the last part. This has to do with both print and online communication. In this case I didn't list goals, but I did make up some stuff here under 5.02 that Wayne Public Library does send out information and have interaction on its website, so I say they use Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. You put down whatever you're going to put down there. Now, at the very bottom here, this yellow box is put here to double check to make sure we have the name of the library, the name of the library director, and the director's email. Correct. And you can correct it here if not. Now, in this case, they have accumulated 241 points, which as Michael pointed out earlier is still at the silver level because you need it for gold. If they are at 241, they should very well go back and see if they can find some other points. That's why this floating box here in the box at the bottom is really helpful because you might be able to figure out some other points that you can honestly claim to see if you can get up to gold. If you are up for accreditation, then you can submit your application. However, if you want to save and resume later, you can come back later as I pointed out so you would hit that button. If I want to just get out of here, I can X out of this box and it will say, do you really want to leave this page? That message will come up for you also. If you say, yes, I really want to leave this page, the subtext there is, you are going to lose anything you put on the form. So it doesn't make sense not to say save and resume for later on. All right. Michael, any questions coming through yet? All right. Let me see if there is anything else I want to talk about. I think that will do it. Yes, thank you. Michael pointed out here that there are benefits of having a higher level of accreditation besides bragging rights and in fact, there was one public library last year that got to the gold level and the library director went nuts. He sent me an email with about, I think it was 15 exclamation points on it and was going to get the word out to the community as fast as he could. So it's very interesting. In terms of state aid to public libraries, if a public library is accredited it receives state aid at a certain level. If it is accredited at the silver or gold level it receives some additional state aid. Now the additional state aid, the state aid that we give is not that much money. So the bragging rights are probably as important as the additional money, but it does mean some additional money for your library. It also shows that you're really doing a good job. I think it's great. I think it's wonderful to use with local funders. I think it's wonderful to use again to say, you know what? We're at 241 points this time. Can we work for the next three years and get enough in here to earn the next level up because it'll give us money back on state aid. It's just a wonderful idea to do that. Remember that if your library is currently accredited and it's up for re-accreditation this year, you need to use this form and get cracking on this plus your strategic plan. If you did send in your annual survey plus the supplemental survey and your library is currently unaccredited you can try for accreditation this year and you're going to have to wait three years if you didn't make it last year. You can try again this year or next year or whatever it is. So I think that's about it unless there are questions which there apparently are not. No, we just got a question from Janet. All right. With respect to policies if you're weeding, gift, intellectual freedom and challenge materials are included in your collection development policy can you count each or only collection development? If they are separate policies feel free to list them under other policies down below up to three and then that's all you can claim beyond that. You can split those out because we've had libraries in the past say you know what we have our internet use under something else or whatever kind of situation. So yes feel free to split them out if they are split out. That's fun. And Janet I will get cracking on your strategic plan. I saw your email this morning thank you. He was busy practicing for this morning. He was in Las Vegas baking. And now you're having a wonderful fall day in Lincoln Nebraska. Yes I am. And she says thank you. Any other questions we'll kind of vamp here for a moment in case anybody's typing. I will tell you one thing. One of the questions that came up was that can we have an example strategic plan up there. We will put Shelby Public Library strategic plan up in all our training. It's really quite a good strategic plan. So we'll put a link up there. And I think that's all I need to tell you. And maybe one last question is what is the deadline again for anybody who is up for accreditation this year? October 1, 2014 no later. Before conference. So you can kind of cross that off your list and then go to conference. On October 2 I'm going to the Bahamas. I'll take no applications after that. Actually on October 2 the form will no longer be working. Okay. That's a threat. That's a threat. Hey carrot in the stick. Alright. So thank you Richard. I don't see any other questions coming in. You're welcome. I'm going to go ahead and take the keyboard back here for a moment. Thank you everybody for attending. And I didn't bring up this page before. So bear with me here as I head over to that. So thank you for attending this week's episode of Encompass Live. We are on our website there or as I just did just Google Encompass Live will be the first thing that comes up. You're going to be hearing a lot from me lately because next week Lauren Johnson and I are doing a session on copyright. Is it copyrighted? Can I use it? This is going to be an interactive session. I'm a little off the camera there. This is going to be an interactive session. We want it to really be discussion and that probably not your typical what you would expect out of a copyright session too. We're going to try to have a little fun with it as we do that. So join us next week for that. Also, if you are a Facebook user Encompass Live is on Facebook and you can go ahead and follow us there and it's a great way to find out what's coming up and keep an eye on what we're doing there and we're always looking for speakers in that. Next week, Krista should be back as our host but you'll get to hear me again and Lauren Johnson. So thank you all for attending Encompass Live this week and we'll check in with you next week. Thanks a lot. Bye. We'll be right out.


It is in part my intuitive preference for research that addresses the big picture that paints with bold strokes on a wide canvas, which is what I have done in catch up. It is not the first time I have done that. I did similar work on China and India, or what you now call the bricks, but it is more adventurous than I had attempted before. Now, I think there are two things I should mention which have been kind of important factors underlying my intellectual journey in which the stopovers and detours have been almost as important as the destination. I have spent much of my professional life in the classroom as an academic in the ivory tower perhaps, but I have also engaged with the hurly-burly of the public domain and the real world. At different points in my life, the first time around in the Indian administrative service working at the district level in a province, largely on rural development on local government, which made me recognize the poverty, the inequality, the deprivation, the exploitation. For someone who began his professional life entirely with economic theory, first social choice and welfare economics, and then trade theory, orthodox trade theory in the context of international economics, it was a learning experience. It changed my perspective in terms of resisting the authority of conventional wisdom, in terms of asking heterodox questions, in terms of pursuing questions that were not always asked by orthodox economics, and as my kind of disillusionment with the capacity of economic theory to explain the real world grew, I found that the economics I did changed. So in macroeconomics, I worked at the intersection of theory and policy. In international economics, I worked at the intersection of theory and institutions, but looking at global issues, whether transnational corporations or the multilateral trading system, and this was reinforced by my second innings as it were in government, when I was chief economic adviser to the government of India and permanent secretary in the Ministry of Finance from 1989 to 1991, that was a period of crisis reform and change. For someone who did macroeconomics for a lifetime, those three years I have always said were an experience of three lifetimes, and I learned from that process and in many ways my work at the intersection of theory and policy, and my work at the intersection of disciplines in the social sciences, economics and politics, economics and history, economics and law, or even economics and philosophy are attributable to my life in these two different worlds. Most of my friends in academia have never understood why I occasionally go away to this mad world of the public domain, just as my friends in the public domain have never understood why I returned to the classroom, which has always been my natural home. But I have left these two worlds every time, one for the other, richer for the experience, because there are feedbacks, effects, and there's cumulative causation. I have learned from my experience in the world of policy and practice that has fed back into my research, just as I have used my understanding of economics as a discipline or social sciences as a set of disciplines in my world of policy formulation. And in many ways that might make me somewhat different from most economists in the usual academic mode. It is not for me to say, it is for others to judge whether this makes for more interesting analyses of development, but my concerns with the macroeconomics of development, when what is in fashion is the microeconomics of development, my concerns about economics, but engaging with other disciplines in the social sciences. My propensity to ask different questions, even where I cannot provide all the answers, has really come from this experience of two rather different worlds.