So under the regulated world, each of the three parts of the electricity supply chain, generation, transmission, and distribution, those were all owned and operated by the same company.  And to none, economists would just call it a public utility, or an electric utility. So like, alligating power prior to deregulation was an example of a public utility. So this public utility operated under what called a regulated monopoly, or a regulated franchise model. And the way that this worked was that the utility was granted by the state geographic territory over which it had a monopoly to produce electricity, to transmit electricity, and to sell electricity. So not only was this utility a vertically integrated firm, it was a vertically integrated monopoly. So for seven or eight, well, seven decades, the utility could not have any competition for any part of its business. And in exchange for that, in exchange for being given this state sanctioned monopoly, the utilities agreed to have their prices and their profits regulated by a state level entity called a public utility commission. And so the public utility commission effectively set the price that the utility could charge for electricity. It also, I mean, it set the price that the utility could charge to different types of customers. So Penn State had a different price than Set Bloomsack. And the public utility commission was ultimately the entity that set those prices. The public utility commission also decided what investments the utility would be allowed to make, or not really make, but what investments the utilities could force their customers to pay for. And so the utilities, basically, they had this monopoly. And they were very highly regulated, and their operations were very highly regulated. And I mean, basically, they had one job, well, sort of two jobs. The first job was that they had to supply whatever electricity was given. So they couldn't tell people, I will not supply you electricity. And the other thing was that they basically had to operate the system reliably. And so they had to operate the system in a way that you wouldn't have a lot of blackness. So their responsibility was basically serve all of the customers and don't break the system. That's all the utility? Yeah. OK, so you can sort of see how this system sort of had its ups and downs. It created a very stable economic plight for the utility business. And it was able to borrow money and attract investment at very attractive rates of return. Because if the utility has a guaranteed profit margin of 10%, it was basically no risk to that. If you're a potential investor who's going to lend the utility money, all of a sudden this looks like mana from heaven. And so it created a very stable economic climate for the utilities. And it allowed basically a fairly rapid electrification of the US.


One of the most common questions I get asked is, you know, how do I start day trading? So what me and my mentor about it for our viewers on YouTube is create a free mentorship course that reveals our 12 secrets that every single brand new day trader should know before they get started. But please take note that there is limited seating every single week. So please reserve your spot at myinvestingclub.co. Link is in the description. Last webinar of 2020. Thank you, Jesus, for not not for being the last webinar, but for the end of 2020 because hopefully this is doing, you know, a better year next year. 2020 has been a great year for trading, but it's been pretty wild for everything else. And so I have not prepared much for today. So I want to talk about the phenomenon to kind of pick up where we left off last week or two weeks ago, two weeks ago, yeah, two weeks ago, where we talked about the Santa Claus rally and how things we're going to look in these last two weeks of the month. Is it a real thing? Is there some kind of statistical edge behind that? Is it true? So the next little phenomena that everyone talks about is what you all tell me what tends to be the the the the thing in January that everybody always talks about is is a thing. No, not the Martin Luther K rally, not president. What is the market tendency in January? OK, yes, the January effect, which is called what? What is the January effect? Exactly, tax law selling tax laws selling. So it is a prediction that and it has been, you know, showed many, many times that you get tax loss selling in the beginning of the year. But when does that happen? So in these times like today in the market, OK, so let's do a little bit of market recap here. Talk about where we're at. Sorry, running out of breath already. Thirty seven hundred has been become a pretty key level here in the SPX. And then below that, you've got thirty six fifty and then this thirty six hundred or thirty five eighty eight level in in these times here. So today, you know, it looks pretty rough. Today looks pretty rough, which makes me want to short. To be honest with you, this makes me want to short. And so before I ever short the market, I like to do a bit of research on. Oh, yeah, exactly. Orin, yeah, when you feel like you need to short the market, don't. And when you feel like you need to buy it. Buy it seasonality in the markets is very much a thing. OK, we explain that two weeks ago in the Santa Claus rally webinar where I showed you guys what the percentage returns are for the market on average for the last two weeks of December, OK. Which started here, which started over here. I believe this was the day when everything we started making those calculations. I can't remember exactly. But I think it was this day here and here we are. So here we are. It looked pretty rough on this day right here. But man, what a rally off of those lows. I mean, that's a pretty nasty wick.  And I mean, it's a it's a very bullish candle on the daily chart for that particular day. But the disadvantages are in the things I don't like are these giant freaking gaps, man. And I'll say it again, I'd say it 40 times.  I hate the gaps because it brings in unnecessary volatility for me. You have and I'm just going to I'll just tell you one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. You have nine down months and nine up months. So it is a 50 50 on what happens in the market. During January, the entire month of January, some years like 2019. Oh, ambulance. OK. All right. So during some years like 2019 and 2018, we had huge rallies in this time. If you remember 2018, 2018, the market was just going bonkers. OK. And then shortly after that, if you run this data from 2018, if you run this data and you span it out to February to include the end of January to the middle of February, you're going to get a massive correction in your data. So it's just slightly delayed on the occurrence. Let's say a correction, OK, because if you look at this, here was that period in time. So in January, just the biggest rally in probably a single month in a very long time, historically, very long time. And then a massive correction. OK. Hey, guys, my name is Tosh Bradley. I'm one of the head mentors of my Investing Club. If you have any questions about getting started in trading, getting started in M.I.C. M.I.C. in general, text me at two, one, three, four, five, eight, five, nine, nine, seven. This is not a robot. It is me directly on the other end of my business line. And we'll get you in the club. We also have special promotions going on that I can get to you, depending on your trading needs. Hit me up. Back to the video. There is this episode in Family Guy that it's like one of the first seasons, but it basically compares hookers to, you know, it's like the family Peter and Lois walk into this hotel room and there's a hooker laying on the bed and and Lois is like, oh, my God, Peter, what is that? There's someone in here and Peter is like, wait, just be really still. They only see movement and they like stop. And then the hooker is like, hey, where'd they go? That is what a day trader is like. OK, we have to find something new every day. And if there's not something new on our radar, the market slow, the market sucks, Dick. We hate looking at this. This is so boring. If there's not a new stock every day, it's useless. OK, that is kind of the the crippling factor of small cap trading is if there is nothing moving, OK, there is nothing moving.  You got nothing. You got nothing.  You can't short anything because nothing moves. OK. Big caps is where you can swing trade, trend trade, do all those extra little things. OK, every single day, if I'm picking the same stocks, like if I if I if this were me, this is this would be how I would start things in in kind of picking like a basket. I would start with the main tech stocks. All right, I would not pick shit like Tesla, which is super hard to trade as a new trader, not for not for beginners. OK, not even for intermediates, to be honest with you. Tesla is an advanced stock, not for the faint hearted.  Why? Why would I not trade Tesla? Why would I not do that as a beginner? Because of the range and the volatility, two things that are great reward, OK, but also the greatest risk you need to find something that gives you that consistency. OK, consistency is not striking it rich on longing Tesla back at four hundred and then it runs to seven hundred. OK, that's not consistency. Consistency as a day trader is walking into something and being able to trade it easily.  You'll see people trade SQ, AMD, M.U. All of these super tight spreads with a lot of liquidity. You're going to be trading that kind of stuff. All right. Yeah, so what I did in this trade in XTTF was I was I had a I had an I be account in this time frame. And what I would do is I would wake up every morning, every single morning in this entire move and I'd put a two hundred and fifty share short order in right at the market open with a really low limit order. Because with I be what happens with the shares to short is whenever new shares to short come available, it will fill whoever is in the order bank first.  And so I'd done research on XTTF.  You know, they were the typical OTC pump and dump.  Not something I would do a lot of not not what I wouldn't recommend that a lot of people at this time in my trading, I had the capital to do it. But I would just every day I'd open up and I'd put a two hundred and fifty share short order and I just started scaling it into this big parabolic move. And yeah, so. Do I no longer look at gappers pre-market and you just trade a basket of the same names? I now just do that. Yeah, I now now I just trade the basket of the same stocks that I look at every day. And then and then I have like other ones that I know are very common that I just kind of have as a side watch list. But but in order to find this basket of stocks that I like to trade, I started trading the gappers every day. So I would still if I were a new trader coming into large caps, trying to find get my feet wet, figure out what I want to do, what stocks I wanted to watch, because the stocks that you watch are not going to be the same ones that I watch. And I would look at the gappers every single morning, just like the videos say. And I would just start to remember the the stocks that traded my lines really well. Like I remember I would always trade Lyft and work and Uber. And I wouldn't trade Uber that much, to be honest with you.  It never works for me. So Lyft, work, Roku, Netflix, like I watched those stocks like every day because I just remembered the stocks that worked for me and they had really good liquidity and really good range. And so I just like kind of wrote them down and I just ended up building this little basket of stocks that I watch every day now. Best to post a new video every single day. If you have any questions about MIC or any general trading questions, please text Tosh using the number here. Also, stay up to date by watching some of our most recent videos right over here.


Hello everyone and welcome to the San Jose State University School of Information Career Colloquia session. My name is Jill Cleese and I am the iSchools Career Center Liaison. Thank you for joining me tonight. We have the great pleasure of having two LIS professionals with us who are experts on the most sought after library and information skills. They are also authors and one of you tonight will be the lucky winner of their latest book, The Librarian's Skillbook, 51 Essential Skills for Information Professionals. The session tonight is one hour and will be recorded. I ask that you hold your questions until the end of the presentation when we open it up for Q and A. At that time, you may talk your questions in the chat box. And during the presentation, please do keep the dialogue in the chat box to a minimum. And I think we are ready to go so I'm going to hand it off to Deb and you can take it away. All right, and thanks Jill. So I'm great, I'm so grateful that you're all here tonight and David and I are really excited to share with you some of the tips that we've learned over the years in our careers. So we're going to start out by telling you a little bit about each one of us. I just, I've had a very interesting career and I probably in the last 16 of the last 20 plus years I have been outside of libraries working in parallel careers where there are a lot of opportunities and a lot of budget money. And I've been working in digital asset management, document management, enterprise content management in places as diverse as global landscape architectural firms and science museums and just about everything in between. So what we're hoping to do tonight is to open your eyes to the possibilities of the careers that are out there both within libraries and maybe even more importantly outside of libraries and I'm going to hand it over to David. Okay, thanks Deb. So I just want to add my hello and welcome to everybody. Thanks for attending. My career I've had also a lot of different jobs. I total up I've got more than 25 jobs in my career working in a wide variety of libraries as well as outside of libraries and marketing, selling and building online databases and retrieval systems. The common thread among all the jobs that I've had though is that they all involve the creation, organization, management or manipulation of information. And as I move from job to job I learned how to acquire new skills that paved the way for each successive position and I also learned how to successfully transfer my skills from one job to another. So what we're going to tell you in the next hour reinforces the importance of acquiring the right skills and using those skills throughout your career. Deb? Okay, so in the next half hour we're going to talk about the importance of skills and how having the right skills is critical for landing that first job out of school and for every job you will seek after that. So even if you're still in school maybe you recently graduated or you've been in the field for a while we've got ideas for all of you. And we're going to tell you about our recently published book that you see the cover of here on the slide, The Librarian Skill Book, 51 Essential Skills for Information Professionals, which will help you assess your current skill set and guide you in developing a plan to acquire the skills you need to land that first job or your next job. So I'm going to tell you a little story about how we came to write this book. Since David and I have been doing a lot of different things in a lot of different places, we were very gainfully employed all during the recession. And many of our colleagues back in 2008, 2009 said, how come you guys have work? And we're struggling, we're being laid off, budgets are being cut, libraries are closing, especially true in the corporate world. And we were able to share with them, well this is what we're doing, we're working in parallel careers where there is a lot of money. There aren't being budget cuts and using transferrable skills that we have. And our colleagues said, you guys need to share how you do this with us. So that is how we cooked up our wildly successful expanding your career potential workshops, which then became webinars. And we've presented them internationally to folks from as far away as Australia. And then we did evaluations at the end of all our webinars. And our students said, you guys need to write a book. And so that was kind of the impetus to do this. And our book has been really successful. And what's been really interesting, one of the reasons that we're here doing this tonight, is because we were very surprised to discover that more than 30% of those who attended the expanding your career potential workshop or webinars were current students or recent graduates of a library or iSchool or a library technology program. So we began to realize that our workshop and our book may actually be more important and beneficial to students and recent grads than maybe even more experienced librarians and information professionals interested in retooling and advancing their careers. So just a quick note about the book. We describe 51 skills and we'll bet that you didn't realize how many skills there are.  We define each skill and we tell you why the skill is so important. And then we give you illustrations or stories from real life on how to apply these skills, kind of a this skill and action type of thing. And then we also give you lots of references for further reading about each skill we define. So I'm going to turn it back over to David. Okay, thanks Deb. So, yes, it's all about skills tonight. And when we talk about skills we think of six, there are six words, six important words or concepts that describe skills. The first is critical, skills are critical for career advancement. And having the right skills is essential for every new job or promotion that you seek. The second is need, which skills do you need? You may be very surprised when we tell you which skills are the most important. The third is evaluate, you will need to evaluate the skills you already have to determine what additional skills you need to acquire. Then we're going to talk about transferability and introduce you to this concept and tell you why it's so important to you in your career. Then next is acquire, we're going to share some ideas and how to acquire new skills or improve those skills that you already have. And then finally, marketing, having the right skills is not enough. You need to know how to mark up the skills you have to any prospective employer so they will clearly understand what you offer them. Deb? So on this next slide, we have a great quote by one of my favorite people, Naomi House. I'm sure you probably all know about, I need a library job, but if you don't, you need to know and go there. So she said this quote, should many librarians think that the reason they aren't getting jobs is that their resumes need formatting, but what they really need are better skill sets. So skills are critical for any type of career advancement. Employers look for skills. This is the most important factor in how they differentiate one candidate from another. The better and more dynamic your skill set, the more likely you will be hired or promoted. So I want to talk a little bit about skills versus experience. So experience is really important, but it's passive, and we tend to want to put experience on our resumes and in our cover letters, but it's really what you've already done. It's in the past, it's really more, well it is important to have experience, but knowing only about your experience, a prospective employer can only surmise what you might be able to do for that employer in the future. In contrast, skills describe what you know how to do, they're proactive. Describing your skills tells a prospective employer exactly what you can do for that employer if they hire you, and there is no doubt or possibility for misinterpretation as can happen with experience. Where experience might be a more of a prerequisite that's listed on most job descriptions, skills are where you can differentiate yourself from other job candidates, so keep that in mind. David. Okay, Deb, thanks so much. So to talk more specifically about the difference between experience and skills, we've listed three examples here. So the first one, let's say a reference librarian, you know, you can say reference librarian is your experience on your job description, but what just, what does that mean? You know what a reference librarian does, and we may know what a reference librarian does, but the hiring manager may not. In my job, current job as a reference librarian, I often do research for my customers, I definitely solve problems for my clients. I teach people how to find information or how to use certain programs on the computer, and the best reference librarians are also excellent listeners and also provide exceptional customer service. So these are examples of the skills that a reference librarian has, and it's just a few.  Second example is a web designer. You're sure web designers create websites, right? But they also may have and use lots of other skills, and some examples might be, they're change implementers, they change things in organizations. They're usually working on a team, being a team player. They do things perhaps with social media, and you know, they're constantly thinking outside the box, so those are examples of skills that a web designer might have, and again, there's many more. The last example I'm going to give you is a job I recently held as a history and librarian and archivist, and yes, I was a librarian, but I also performed digital archiving. I managed a team of people. I managed projects from beginning to end, and was called upon to make important decisions and give presentations, and a list of skills I utilized for that job could go on and on and on. So you can see the experience, while important, is really only one dimensional, while skills are so much more descriptive and specific. The skills make the experience come alive, and provide so much more meaning than the experience itself. Skills allow you to talk about what you can do for each prospective employer, based on the skills you previously acquired in previous jobs.  Spell it out, leave them no doubt, list all the things that you did and what you know how to do based on your skills. And additionally, you should also be tailoring your skills, the skills that you tout for that particular employer, based on the job description. You know, your experience is your experience. These are the jobs that you had, but the skills that you want to emphasize are the ones that are going to be most important to that employer. So again, looking at the job description is a good way to do that. Okay, so which skills are more most important? And here's a quote from Jill Hearst-Wall, who is a professor at Syracuse University School, one of Deb and my favorite, favorite people. Jill helps employers to help students get hired, and so hiring managers assumes someone with an MLIS degree has learned the requisite library skills. What differentiates job candidates are the other skills that managers want. And this may come as a surprise to you. The skills that differentiate you from other qualified candidates for a job are not the skills that you learned in high school. According to Jill, most hiring managers assume that everybody that's graduated from high school or from library school are all taught the same skills in that program. So they already assume that everyone with that degree starts out even with the same skill sets. So to differentiate yourself from all of your fellow students and others with the same degree, hiring managers are looking for what other skills you might possess. And those are the skills that we talked about in the previous slide, things like customer service, problem solving, listening, being a team player, et cetera. And that's why we discussed so many skills in the library and skill book. Deb? Okay, so by now you might be wondering, what skills could I already have that might be useful in performing my next job? Well, the good news is, is that you likely have some or even many marketable skills but you don't already know it. And this is where our book comes in handy because we describe those 51 skills. And not only do we describe and discuss what the hottest skills are that are unique to the library and information professional world, but we also discuss many additional skills like the ones mentioned in the previous slides. They fall into categories like business skills, interpersonal skills and more. And these are universally critical for success and working for any organization or operating your own information business. Our book provides you with a template and methodology to inventory and assess your current skill set, and then determine your strengths as well as where you need to augment or improve your skill set. So next slide please, David. So I want to talk a little bit about transferability of skills. Now transferable skills are ones that we've acquired through jobs, volunteering, hobbies and other life experiences that we can use as we move into new areas of our career. They are invaluable as we experience layoffs, are newly graduated, want to move up or out of our current job, or are re-entering the workforce. These are the skills we've developed in one part of our life that are transferable to another. They empower us to break into a career area where we may not have any direct skills or experience. So for example, if you know about Mark Fields, which is terminology in the library world, right, machine readable cataloging, you understand what metadata is. Or if you use Library of Congress Subject Headings, that's a type of taxonomy. It is extremely important to parlay your existing skills in a new job in any environment. So using those terms, and we're going to talk more about that, it's really important to get away from jargon. So how do you assess your transferable skills? You look at sites like Michelle Mock's real job titles, and the link is right here under our little funny colored people and puzzle piece. She has got a list of over 200 job titles, many of which do not have the L or library or librarian word in them. A lot of great ideas for when you're searching for work or you're searching about areas that you think you might like to go into and you want to see what skills are required as you search for jobs using those terms or those phrases or job titles. What parallel careers are out there? Well, dam, digital asset management and document management are making and organizations assets accessible. So it's doing the same thing we do for more traditional library materials, but you could be doing it for images, for documents, for all sorts of things, drawings, many different things. So the same principles of indexing and using taxonomy are used instead of library terms like cataloging and subject headings. You must not only recognize the value of your existing skills, you must be able to articulate why the skills you have acquired elsewhere are useful in that new job. And our book is filled with examples of the transferability of skills. We give you the fundamentals of how to do this. Your library skills are useful in many other areas. Some of them you probably know about like records management and research, but there's archiving. There's so many other ways that we can go, many different alternative careers that use our transferable skills and education. So I'm going to tell you a quick story about a consulting gig that actually started in 2008. It was with a global landscape architectural firm located here in Northern California. And they were just struggling. They had hundreds of thousands of images. And one of the challenges with digital cameras today is that when a photographer goes out on a photo shoot, no longer do they take maybe 20 or 40 photos, they might take 500 photos. Then they come back to the firm and they ingest them into their system. But there's no metadata except maybe when the photo was taken, the type of camera, the type of image, that sort of thing. So they've got hundreds of thousands of images. And in this firm, they were really having trouble because a lot of their younger staff members were so frustrated at not being able to find drawings or images to put into proposals or environmental impact reports that they were going out on Google. And they weren't using Google images to find images to put into their reports. Most of these images, they did not own the copyright to. And they weren't as good as the images that they owned, that the firm owned. But they just had no way to find those. And they had given up. They'd thrown up their hands and went out to the open web to find them. So I was called in as a consultant to help them get a handle on this. And when I do consulting, I tend to come in at about the 50,000 foot level. And I worked with them to help them to think about what the solutions would be, what the pain points were, where all the obstacles were. And we worked on the project. And at the end of all of this, we looked at some software. We began to settle on the internet was going to be better. But the most important thing I can tell you is I suggested they hire a librarian full-time to come in and work on this project and head it up. And you know what the CEO said to me? He said a librarian could not possibly do this work. Well, I was floored when he said that because he knew I had a library degree but he had forgotten that because I wasn't talking about libraries. I was talking about making their assets accessible and findable and reusable. And that was a positive contribution to their bottom line. This was for a for-profit organization. So it's important for us to remember that we have skill sets that are transferable that can be used in many different industries, for-profit, not for-profit. And there are people who meet us. IT folks are being asked to do this work. And they are not equipped nor educated to do it. When they see me coming now and I go out on consulting jobs, you know what they say? They say we're so glad you're here because we're being asked to do this and we don't know how. So these are using transferable skills. And what's interesting is two years ago, this firm called me back and said, okay, we're ready now, we've got our internet organized, we want to buy software. So then I went back and worked with them to come up with their business requirements to pick a digital asset management software that would work for them. And right now, that librarian and others at the firm are getting all of those assets, well, not all of them. They're getting rid of some of the bad ones, but they're taking the ones they want to keep and they're putting them into the digital asset management system. So now that staff can find these images and use them instead of going out to the web. So David's going to tell a story to a short one about somebody who went into a totally different area. Yeah, thanks, Deb. Yeah, just really briefly, one of the librarians that I work at, and excuse me, one of the librarians who works at a library where I'm working at currently, recently decided to move her career into another direction. She decided that she wants to become the lead investigator at a local law enforcement agency. And I bet you didn't know that you could do that with a library or information degree. And I bet the law enforcement agency didn't know that they needed a librarian for this job, but I think she is actually the perfect candidate. Who else but a librarian knows how to find information and do effective and comprehensive research and solve problems or crimes for that matter. So it's a prime example of skills being transferable from one job to another job that is completely different from the first job. So let's go on to the next. So our book is full about stories like this of transferability of skills. Great. Okay, so here's another surprising quote from Jill Hearst-Wall at Syracuse University. Everything hiring managers want cannot be taught in a graduate program. Students need to learn some of these skills on their own outside of class. Now, again, if we come back to the concept that most hiring managers automatically assume that everyone graduating from my school has already acquired all the subject-specific and technical skills that make all of us librarians or information professionals, then to differentiate yourself from other job candidates, you've got to look at other skills, like the ones we discussed in our book like marketing, project management, communications, et cetera, skills that are not directly taught in high school. And so you do need to look outside to find some of these skills. And you may be wondering at this point, you know, well, how am I going to do that? Where am I going to look? And again, we give you multiple solutions to this area. We give you lots of ideas on how to acquire new skills. So I'm just going to go into one particular skill, or excuse me, one particular method of acquiring new skills. And the example I'm going to give is I think a lot of students and information professionals have a misconception. They feel that, you know, you need to go back to school and get another degree to acquire new skills or bolster the ones you already possess. But the six ways that we give you to acquire new skills or improve your skill set or all tried and true methods that will give you the missing skills that you need very easily and quickly without spending years and lots of money to go back to school again. So the one example I'm going to talk about is one of my favorites, it's volunteering and internships. When I worked as a history librarian at the Mill Valley Public Library, I often heard students as well as many veteran librarians say something like, well, I want to apply for this job, but they want someone with the following list of skills and I don't have most of those skills. But how can I acquire these skills if no one will give me a job where I can learn those skills? And so they felt stuck. Many people felt that way. And so, you know, what can a stuck librarian do to break out of this vicious cycle? Well, while no one might want to pay you to work at a job where you don't have the skills, there are plenty of organizations who might take you on as an unpaid intern. For many years in Mill Valley, I brought in interns from San Jose State and lots of other places and I taught them how to digitize photographs, oral histories, maps, and many other documents. They also gained practical experience in cataloging and constructing databases. And these are all very valuable, hot skills right now. So they learned a whole host of skills and gave a lot of practical experience that gave them the edge over the competition when it came time to find that first paying job. And these students worked on live tangible projects. So when they approached an employer, they could say, well, I worked on this database or helped design this, you know, this website or whatever, and digitized these types of documents. And yes, they weren't paid, but it doesn't much matter because they could now list the experience and those skills on their resume and really push the skills that they acquired when working in Mill Valley. And I'm sure you know that there are hundreds of internship listings on the San Jose State iSchool website and you should really explore it. Also, I know that some organizations will only take someone who's an intern if they're enrolled in 294, but I think that they're missing out. I took people who were not enrolled in the class. I thought, why should I limit myself and pass up really good people just because they're not taking that class right now? You know, perhaps that student had already performed an internship and taken 294. Previously, or I got people who graduated already from San Jose State and were still out there looking for a job, and so they took on an internship. I took on all volunteers because it helped me get my databases built for free. I had one semester where I had 14 students and librarians who already would already earn their master's degree working for me as interns. So volunteering gives you an in, volunteering or an internship gives you a free education and experience very quickly to learn new skills that are immediately transferable to many other situations. And it's just one example of the surefire methods that we present in the librarian's skill book. Deb? Okay. I have to remember to press that talk button. Okay. So it's really important to remember that you have to market yourself and describing your skills as part of the marketing that you do. Never, ever assume that a recruiter or HR person will be able to figure out if you have the right skills for the position. You need to tell them. So next slide, please. So don't use library words such as cataloging, taxonomy or mark. Instead, use things like indexing or metadata and always, always make sure that you market your skills to each employer using the employer's vocabulary or vernacular to describe your skills, not library speak that outsiders don't understand. And even if it's in a library, think about the terms that you're going to use to show that you've thought outside the box, that you're not just looking at the library stuff, but the other things that you bring to the table. Remember Jill Hirst-Wall's quote about that employers assume everybody's on the same level when they come out of school? You want to be above that. So you need to focus on skills, which is something that everyone understands. And then you need to market your skills and yourself to land that job. So our book gives you the confidence to be able to approach your prospective employer knowing that you can do the job. And we give you the ammunition you need to be able to communicate why you should be the one who is chosen to do that job. Okay, so just to wrap up here, what we see is the winning formula to land. Your first job or your dream job and every job after that, they're really four steps. First, recognize the skills that you already possess. Second, identify the skills that you need to acquire or hone for your existing skills. Third, acquire the skills you need to outpace the competition. And fourth, package yourself by marketing your skills to your prospective employer and telling that employer how your skills will make you successful in that job. So coming back to those six words that we talked about at the beginning, this is really, you know, really these are the words that you need to remember when it comes to skills. Remember that skills are critical for career advancement. You need to figure out which skills you need. You need to evaluate and inventory the skills you already have, including any skills you acquire outside of high school. Remember that skills that you often, that you have often are transferable from one job to another, even if that job is completely different than the job that or the skills that you acquired, those, excuse me, the job that you acquired those skills in initially, then go out and acquire the skills that you need and finally don't forget to market yourself and those skills to every prospective employer. Skills are everything at hiring time and our book tells you how to apply these principles to land that first job out of school and every job you seek after that. Okay. So we've come to the end here. You can certainly, if you'd like to buy the book, it's available on Amazon, both in print and Kindle. And we hope to have some upcoming workshops on the topics, more expanded workshops where we actually spend a couple of hours really teaching you how to do all the things that we've talked about in much more detail. If you want to go to the next slide, David, we've got, here was where you can contact us and we also, we have a website and I also encourage you, I started a LinkedIn group some time ago called Career Sustainability that I encourage you to go check out. There's about 300 and plus, I know there's almost 350 folks on their information professionals and librarians, lots of great conversations going on. You can post questions, you can answer questions and it's a great place to practice and show your skill set so that others may look for you there. You know, employers do look to see what you're up to. So it's your turn to ask questions. We are going to stick around until there's, you know, at least till half past the hour unless there's no questions. And we are going to give away a book. So for all those who have stuck it out so far, I think Jill, are you going to announce that because you, we had picked a number before the webinar for and then that person who logged on at that number, I believe, is going to get the book and Jill has been tracking that. And then if you want to check in the moderator box, I put a name in there if you want to do the announcing. Okay. Okay, wait a minute. Okay, so it looks like it is Courtney H. who has won the book. Courtney, are you there? You can chat in the box. We can see. I'm here, she says. Good. Okay, so Courtney, if you see that info at librarianskillbook.com, email, go ahead and send us your mailing address and we will get one to you. Okay? Congratulations. Okay. All right. So now we'll have questions. So please fire away. And I, Jill, are we going to do these through the chat box? Yes. So at this time, go ahead and type your questions in the chat box. And myself and Leah, our tech assistant, will kind of help try to moderate it and make sure that Deb and David can get to all your questions. So go for it and go ahead and type them in. Deb and David, there is one question from Jane. Jane Fisher asked if you could talk a bit about the difference between skills and knowledge. That's a hard one for a job seekers to understand. So the difference between skills and knowledge. David, do you want to take a crack at that first? Yeah. I'll talk about it too. Right. I think, I mean, knowledge is, again, you know, experience is important, knowledge is important. But again, skills are really, I mean, it puts it into the active category. It's not passive. It's really telling people what you can do. You know, knowledge is good because it tells people what you know. And definitely, you know, you should include whatever you can tell them about your knowledge with your, along with your experience. But I still think that the skills are just so much more proactive.  I don't know. Debbie, do you have any other insights into that? Okay. Let's see. Can you hear me? I can remember if I muted myself or not. So what I would say is think of knowledge and experience, as David said, passive, but skills are action-oriented. So if you think of a skill, it's transferable across many different industries. So let's say you've worked in something totally unrelated. Maybe you've worked in sales before you came to library school or iSchool. And you were able to provide excellent customer service. And you can tell a story about that and give some quantitative or qualitative information. That's the stuff employers are looking for. What story shows that what you bring to the table? And I have to take a drink of water. Hold on. Sorry about that. So it's really important to be able to express what it is you bring to the table. Because remember, when you're looking for a job, it's not about you. It's about the employer. Yeah, they're going to look at what your skills and experience are. But what they really care about is how you're going to make their life easier. And that's where talking about your skills and what you bring to the table and telling stories is what is going to sell them. Remember your resume and your cover letter? Those are your ticket to an interview. And if you think of them that way, think about what it is that that employer is going to be looking for, not just your knowledge, but your skill set that's going to bring a lot to the table when you come to that organization. And I know it's hard sometimes to ping that because when I came out of consulting work back to the job world, you know, I'm a library director now. And I had to think about, okay, I hadn't given anybody a resume in a long time. And I had to think about how I could parlay all of that parallel career stuff into a skill set that would be attractive to an employer. And that's something you have to do. You look at the words they're looking for, but think about then how your skill set meshes with those, not just your experience. And it's hard to articulate this, but I think just thinking about hard things that you can talk about and don't mean hard isn't difficult, but stuff that sets you apart from the crowd. I don't know, David, I'm not doing a very good job. You're doing a great job. But I thought of one more thing, I guess, that, you know, we come back to the transferability. It's just so important. You know, knowledge can be transferable too. I mean, you could know, you know, you could have a lot of knowledge about your particular subject area and that could be useful, but the skills really can, they can get you into some place where it's totally different. You know, it's the same, it's a skill that you have, but the environment can be totally different. Like that librarian who's going to be in law enforcement. She knows how to do research. I bet she's never done crime research on the reference desk in this library, but she has the skills to be able to know where to look and to understand, you know, and that's something that really is, it is transferable. It's just very transferable.  You know, they have a lot of knowledge of books that may be useful, may not be useful, you know, but they interacted with people. They did customer service. They did sales. They did all these different things at the bookstore. And, you know, in a position, whatever it is, may be very useful. Whatever library they're working in, they may need to be able to use their selling skills to be able to get projects funded and so forth. They may need their customer service skills to deal with the public that they're working with. So that's why I think, you know, skills are just so much more lively and, you know, and transferable than knowledge or experience. But again, don't, I mean, absolutely put your knowledge and experience down, but skills are just, that's what's going to get you to that extra place. So can I, so just to, I'm looking at the book. I've picked up the book here to look. And so for example, under the, let's see, one of our skills, like number, let's see here, 35 is decision making. Well, that's a skill because you can say I've had experience decision making, but that's not what an employer wants to hear. They want to know a story about that skill. How do you demonstrate that skill? And that's the, that's what I'm talking about is that sort of thing. You know, again, storytelling around skills that the employer is looking for that can be transferred from one place to another. It's really important and that most skills can be transferred. So I'll stop babbling, but that's the sort of thing I'm talking about. So I see other questions.  Yeah. So I see Angie has a question. Other than at a library, what are some other places you suggest looking for internship and volunteer experiences for someone interested in archiving? Well, certainly in archives, but, you know, it can be a place where they haven't thought about archiving yet.  I'm a librarian.  They might be very interested in that and they don't have any money to pay you, of course. But when you do something like that, you can walk out of that job saying, yeah, I built an archive. You know, I've created something. So, I mean, it can be any organization that you think of that may not already be doing something like that and, you know, just it's boundless really.  And I know in that kind of situation you may not have somebody, you know, working for somebody who's going to teach you those skills, but you've learned a lot in library skill and high school. And so, you know, take what you have, you know, talk to other archivists and librarians through the different professional groups and, you know, take the ball and run with it. So, I don't know if that, hopefully that helps. Well, I was going to say Angie Taylor also had a good question or answer, which I agree most cities, counties have a historical society who are dying for help. And they would welcome it. I've had a lot of students who have done that. And then the other thing to remember, I don't know where you are, but like next weekend here in San Francisco at the US Mint at Fifth Admission, we are having the San Francisco History Expo. And there will be about 4,000 people coming through there. It's free, but there will also be about 100 community organizations. And if you can find fairs like that, those organizations are definitely looking for help with people to help them in archiving, to volunteer. So, there's another question out there. How did you go about narrowing it down to 51 skills? How did you do your research, the sideways skills to put in the book? Yeah, that was a pretty tough one. You know, we found lots of, I mean, the more we think about it, the more skills we come up with. And, you know, we had, when we were doing our workshops, we only had time to do like 30 some odd skills in the workshop, 33 it was, yeah. And so, we expanded to 51 for the book. We just thought that was a good number. But, you know, there are plenty more out there, and you might see another book coming along at some point with another 51 skills. These are the ones that we thought were most important based on our knowledge, our experience working with different, you know, working in so many organizations, hearing what people are doing, reading job descriptions, you know, over and over again and seeing what employers are looking for.  So, again, definitely, the more you think about it, you know, I think the 51 gives you an idea of what to use as skills, but you don't have to limit it to the 51 that we put in there. If you think of other things now that you've gone, that can be, you know, translated into skills, absolutely put them in. This is a lot more than 51. Definitely wouldn't think of it. Yeah, I was just going to say, so this book, we don't expect anybody to do all 51. What we recommend is you pick three to five that you really want to work on, and then you, you know, we have a, in the book, we have a template that you can create so that you kind of set up a plan, a personal roadmap to get through how you want to do this, and that was the thing that most people said, wow. Like David was saying earlier, I thought I had to go back to school or take other courses to learn this stuff, and you don't need to do that, but you do need to focus in on what are the ones that you really want to target, and then hone those skills, and then what level do you want to be a novice, intermediate expert, you know, where do you want to go with those? And so there's, you know, it was hard for us to narrow it down, but like David said, those are ones we, people seem to focus on, that we saw a lot in job descriptions, and that we knew that if our fellow, our colleagues could see those things, that they would be, and be able to work on those, that they would be able to get jobs too. So, and I see that Jill also said Sparta Jobs has good part-time positions. Okay, and then we have one more question from T, let's see, public work in school. If I'm Bill, okay, so I think T, you asked about, you know, that you focused on public library work in school, here, here again, I'm going to just emphasize that transferable means just that. If you have a skill set that is going to go, it's going to go across all information types. Yes, you may not be able to be a law librarian because you don't know how to search Lexus, Nexus, or Westlaw, but the underlying skills are ones that you can use in any information environment, and that's the message that we're trying to get across. Did I learn digital asset management in library school? No, it didn't even exist when I was in library school, but every time an opportunity came along and I saw something that I thought, well, there's an interesting thing, I would step up and say, I can do that, and I may not have known how to do it, but I found out how to learn. You know, we know as librarians how to do research, right? We can find out where there are resources to learn how to do this stuff, and we have networks that we can tap into who will help us as well. And I'm David, if you want to add anything to that. Yeah, I just want to add something to that. Yeah, I mean, depending on what you did in the public library, there's a lot of things.  Yeah, it's going to be a different kind of a catalog record. It may not be marked catalog, it may be something else, but you understand how to catalog something. You understand how to take an item and classify it and add metadata to it and do all the things that, you know, and it's the same thing, whether you're doing it in an archive or a library. Again, the structure, the type of data might be different that you're organizing, but you have the skill of organizing. And so you can, and cataloging, you can basically, you know, we call it cataloging when it's books, but we call it archiving, you know, or basically digital archiving or digitizing, which is for other types of items. If you worked with the public in the public library, if you were a reference librarian, if you were dealing with customers, well, you're going to have the same things in an archive. So, you know, you're going to have people that you're going to be dealing with, you've got constituents, you've got people that you've got to get on board to support you, you've got the public to be, you know, to be advertising and marketing to and using it. So I think a lot, again, a lot of the skills that you might have in a public library are going to be transferable. It just depends on which skills you focused on what you did in the public library. Okay. Let's say Johnny had a question. There's a question from Holly, too, if you want to speak up a little bit. I see it. Let's see, she said, do you have a stance on what skills to include on your resume versus your cover letter, noting that we're still concerned about length of applications? I would think concise skills on resumes and stories on cover letter. Yeah. You want to use those bullet points on your resume, you know, that's the boom, boom, boom, and you're going to use action words and very strong words there that really highlight what you bring to the table. And then in your cover letter, that's where you're going to expand on a couple of those that are really specific to that job to tell the stories that's going to be your ticket to the interview. I hope that answers. I don't know. David, do you want to add anything else? Yeah. No, that sounds like the right thing to me, you know. So, you know, I don't know. Also, I mean, Deb, you're more of an expert on resumes than I am, but I know what I see advising people is that, you know, is it possibly having a longer resume than what some people recommend that it's not a bad thing if you, you know, if you have, if you can flush things out. The more they can learn about you, the more they know about you, you know, the more chance you have of sticking out above the competition. I don't know. Deb, is that, I characterize that correctly or not? It is true. And so, I think the thing is, you want to remember that you are, I mean, I have this motto of asking for forgiveness rather than permission. You have to use it to your own discretion. But what I have found is when I step up to do something and let something else go that nobody else cares about, and then I make sure that my employer or somebody important in the organization knows about that, that is a story you can tell, not that part, but what you did when you gave up the thing nobody else cared about and what it was that you did that you stepped up to and made a difference in the organization. That is exactly what employers are looking for. And I'll tell you, at the beginning of this month, I went to USC and I spent two days with my colleagues from all over the country for a future of library symposium. And it was very interesting because one of the big takeaways from that was that staff can no longer come to work and put in a work day. They need to be vested in the organization and continually innovate. And I think if you take nothing else away from this that you need to remember that innovation is what employers are looking for today. We can't be satisfied just to take a job, to come into work, put in our time, but employers, and this is how I am as a library director, I'm looking to see what my staff is doing and I'm encouraging them and supporting them to go beyond what they've been doing in the past. Okay, so we have a question and that was one thing I, okay, oh, certifications. Okay, so I'll give you an example. Johnny, I think you asked about certifications. So if you look at my credentials, you'll see not only do I have MLS after my name, but I have ECMP and that's an Enterprise Content Management Practitioner because I got certified in that because I was doing that a lot as a consultant. So for me in that arena of Digital Asset Management, Enterprise Content Management, that was a certification that potential clients did look at. So it just depends on where you're going, what sort of certifications you're looking for. I hope that helps. I think in some cases it's going to be very important to certain employers or certain people that are hiring. In other cases, they may not know what the certification is, so it just depends. You know, but again, it's good to have it if you have certifications. And I don't know, Deb, you have more experience on this than I do again, but, you know, because you belong to a lot of different organizations that do different types of certifications as well, not just the ones that have the L-word in their name, basically. Right, that's right. That's true. So I got that certification, came out of AIIM.org, which is a big Enterprise Content Management organization. It's a parallel career and it's interesting that last year they finally had a librarian who spoke at their annual conference, Guy St. Clair, and he is definitely a knowledge management guru, but he, they are getting now that librarians, they need them because it's mostly an organization made up of IT people who are struggling. They're getting an information professional certification to try and figure out what we already know and we're already doing. So we have a space there that we can step into if we don't, IT people are going to take it up. And I'm not saying we all need to go there, but it's a great place to go. If you want me to try parallel careers. We do have a few more hot moments if there's other questions. Yeah, a couple people are still writing. No, there we go. Okay. And Johnny also mentioned LinkedIn. I think that's very, it's very important to have your credentials up on LinkedIn, you know, both from, it's another place to advertise yourself for people to see what you've done and absolutely that really is the professional, you know, it's the professional social media site. Right. Right. And so the career sustainability group that's on the slide, that's a great place to start. If you already have a profile, if you don't have one, you need to have one. That's your homework for me. Can you tell I teach? You really do need to do that and Jane has put up a great link for tips.  In fact, one of the first things I did when I came to the shop 18 months ago, well before I came, of course, before I came to the interview and applied, I looked up everybody I could that was associated with the place, but once I got here, I challenged all of my librarians to make sure that their LinkedIn profiles were up to date because that is part of being a professional and we are a profession. If we want to be seen as one, we need to walk the walk and we need to talk the talk. I'll get off my soapbox. Is there another question we missed? Well, while we're waiting for people to ask questions, I just want to say how grateful I am. Jane's an old friend and I was ecstatic when she asked David and I to do this. And I see that, Leah, go ahead and put in your question while I talk for a bit here. We have, we're just excited to do this. We know I teach part-time in a paraprofessional program and don't have time, unfortunately, to teach at San Jose, but I'm passionate about what students are doing and I admire all of you for hanging in there and being here. I'm not sure what time it is where you are, but appreciate it. I know David does, too, that you came out to listen to us and I hope that we'll hear from you. I hope you'll all link in with me, by the way. I challenge you to all come find me on LinkedIn and I hope that you'll link in with me and you'll notice that it says that I'm a strategic knowledge professional. It doesn't say I'm a librarian. Why? Because when I give a 30-second pitch, I mean, now I do say I'm a library director, but I couch it in slightly other terms. I tend to say not, when people say what do you do, I don't say I'm a librarian because you know what happens, they yawn and all the stereotypes kick in. But when I say I'm a strategic knowledge professional, they go, wow, what's that? And then I tell them and then at the very end and I say, and by the way, I have a library degree and they go, really, I had no idea librarians did that. So it's kind of a different way to go at it. So I encourage you to do that. Let's see, do you have any place with tips for LinkedIn accounts? Angie, Jane just posted a little bit further up the great tips for your LinkedIn profile. So I would look at that and remember, you can always look at other people's profiles to get ideas. Don't have to start from scratch. Just be honest. Another thing, I just want to add one more thing on Lea's question about IT. I think that, you know, if you talk to IT people, they may have lots of technical knowledge, but most of them don't know what to do with it. They don't apply it. They don't, you know, you kind of, as information professionals, we bridge that gap. And there's just so much more that, you know, if you come at it and say, well, you know, I have a lot of technical knowledge, but I also know how to relate to people, how to use it to solve problems and help people and, you know, the things that librarians do without actually having to use the L word, you know, really, we have a lot of skills that the people that think of themselves as IT people don't even have. So I think it gives us an advantage, basically, to get into that. So absolutely, I think it's a good place to look. Yeah, and David, you hit the nail on the head. Absolutely true. All right, well, I think we're just almost there. We don't want to keep you all because we really appreciate you coming out. And I want to thank Leah and Jane and Jill for making this all possible for us technologically and guiding us. This was our first time with Blackboard, and it was very easy because they shepherded us. So thank you. Yeah, thank you so much. This is Jane speaking. I don't know if you can hear me, but I want to say thank you. And thanks to all the attendees and participants. And the thing that's so interesting to me, I got my library degree way back before the information word was even in the degree, is that what you learn is how to translate and how to make things accessible to all different kinds of users. And that is so transferable. Yes. Thank you, Deb, and to Jill. Thank you, Leah, David, everybody. Good night. Good night, everybody. Well, look forward to connecting on LinkedIn.


How to make the Narcissist suffer forever, how to make the Narcissist experience severe mental suffering, how to make the Narcissist experience extreme anxiety, sorrow or pain. When you have been involved with a Narcissist it is likely that you have been abused often for a very long period of time. No amount of punishment on their victims ever satisfies the Narcissist. The Narcissist will abuse you again and again just from one incident. They hold grudges and resentment. They use manipulation tactics such as denial, projection, blame shifting and gaslighting, all designed to avoid responsibility and to hold you accountable for their actions. Naturally when you have been involved with an abuser like this you may desire to seek revenge, you may desire to hurt them in return for an injury or wrong that you suffered at their hands, you may desire to bring them to justice. The most important thing to the Narcissist is supply. They might act as though they are interested in you in the beginning but you are nothing more than an object that provides them with supply. Their supply is what you are providing them with. It involves emotional regulation, feeding their ego, boosting their self-worth, self-esteem and self-importance. It makes them feel powerful and in control, significant and important, desirable and attractive. It makes them feel as though they exist, as though they are worth something. When they first engage with you, this is the supply that they were looking for. This is what they desired and expected from you. It had nothing to do with you as a person. They were not interested in you, they were interested in the supply that you could give to them. Of course the supply has more value if the Narcissist deems their source to be a powerful or attractive person but even then they see you as nothing more than an object that exists to serve them, an object that provides them with Narcissist supply. That is all that really matters to them. They use you to make themselves feel the way that they want to feel but it never lasts and that is why they need to keep you around. They need to try and secure you as a source of supply so that you are always around to provide them with what they need. When the relationship moves to the devaluation face and the Narcissist begins to find faults, mistakes, flaws or imperfections, whether real or imagined, the supply that you are providing them with is no longer as potent. It no longer has the power, influence or effect that it once did. This is when the Narcissist will begin seeking out fresh sources of supply while they continue to devalue you. They are still getting supply by devaluing you and gaslighting you. It makes them feel powerful and in control, significant and important but the Narcissist also wants to feel desirable and attractive. They need someone to admire them and attend to them. They seek out a secondary source of supply who could then provide them with this positive attention. Once they have found this secondary source, they will begin grooming them. They will begin preparing or training them for the purpose or activity of providing them with supply. Once the secondary source is secured and fully prepared or trained to do this, they will then discard you and advance them to the primary position. The Narcissist has to discard you. They have to be in control of this process and it has to play out in the way that they would like. They have to be able to look at you as the problem, as the one who couldn't do anything right. For them to feel superior and as though they are moving on to something better with a new source. Discarding the Narcissist before they are able to move their secondary source to the primary position will make them suffer forever. They will never forget it. They will never be able to move on. They will always remember that you are the one to discard them. They will always see you as being superior to them.  It will cause them to experience extreme anxiety, sorrow and pain, especially if you discard them before they start to devalue you. If you discard them during the love bombing phase, when they are doing everything they can to secure you, putting out maximum effort to impress you, you are invalidating their false self and the illusion that they are trying to display. They create this false self to cope and defend against how they really feel about themselves. The false self is meant to be everything that they believe they are not. It is meant to be everything that you could ever want them to be. If you discard them during the love bombing phase, when they are doing everything they can to secure you and putting out maximum effort to impress you, this will make them suffer forever. They will never forget about it.  No matter how grandiose or arrogant they are acting in that moment, they will soon deflate and begin to feel small. If you discard the narcissist before they are able to move the secondary source to the primary position, it will cause them severe mental suffering, especially if you discard them before they start to devalue you. Thank you for watching. I hope this video resonated with you. Please like, comment, share and subscribe. Click the bell icon to receive notifications for my future videos. If you would like to donate, my PayPal link is in the video description. For more information, you can email me at NarcisfroverCoaching at gmail.com. Check out the Immersion Dice in the Narcisfrover store where you can purchase your own Narcisfrover t-shirt, tank top or mug. The link is in the video description. Thank you for watching and I'll talk to you soon.


Welcome to Encompass Live. I'm Emily Nimsacant, filling in for your regular host, Christa Burns. Encompass Live is the Nebraska Library Commission's weekly online event. We cover NLC activities and other library-related topics, and they are presented by NLC staff and guests. The free one-hour sessions are offered every Wednesday at 10 a.m. central time and include a mixture of presentations, interviews, book reviews, web tours, mini training sessions, and Q&A sessions. Today we have Susan Nicely here to talk about discount shopping with the Nebraska Library Commission. Thank you, Emily, and hello everyone. As Emily said, my name is Susan Nicely and I'm on the online services librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. I'm going to talk today about the discount purchasing programs, discount programs available through the Nebraska Library Commission, and I wanted to start with our mission just because I think that the discount program really does fit in with our mission. The mission of the Library Commission is statewide promotion, development, and coordination of library information services, and we also serve as an advocate for the library and information service needs of all Nebraskans. So when you think about it, one of the biggest challenges faced by libraries throughout the state is funding tight budgets, having to try to get as much as you can for as little as possible since budgets are very tight these days. And so what we at the Commission try to do is facilitate that. Anything that we can do here to try to make libraries and librarians jobs easier and librarian libraries in the state better able to meet the needs of citizens that's what we want to be helping with. So the discount program does fit in very closely with our mission I believe. There are really three parts to our discount purchasing program. There are discounts on databases and e-resources and this is probably the most widely known component of our discount program. Many people take advantage of it, many libraries take advantage of it. We also provide discounts on books and supplies and that is something that I don't think quite as many libraries are maybe aware of and also on conferences and so I do want to especially for people who are new to Nebraska who might be listening to this recording I want to provide some background information on the discount database discount program but I also want to take this opportunity to publicize our discounts on books and supplies and our discounts on conferences. This page just shows you our discounts on databases and e-resources index page and so I am going to go ahead and switch out to that page so I can actually show it to you live here. This is the page where we list all of the database discounts that we have available. The page as you can see is alphabetical and we try to cross reference products not only by vendor name but also by a specific database or resource name so hopefully however you're thinking about the product whether you're thinking are there discounts on EBSCO databases we'll have EBSCO listed in the E-section or maybe you're thinking about a specific EBSCO database we'll also have databases listed by specific product names so there are a couple of ways you can use this list. This list is probably primarily of interest to librarians who may be new to the state who want to get an overview of which products we have some sort of a deal with which vendors we already have a working relationship with. This is a great place to come to see what some of the options are. I'm just going to go ahead and jump quickly into one of the pages just so you can get a sense of what type of information you'll be able to find online. So I'm going to go ahead and click on Plumbia University Press and you'll see here not only is the vendor listed but also some of the specific database products in this case they're clumped together since they typically use the name Columbia at the beginning of the product name but that's not always the case so just going in to look when we have a particular deal with a vendor we'll provide a descriptive information on the databases that are included in the program. In this case we do have pricing that we put up on our website we don't always put pricing up because not all vendors want their discounted pricing available on the open web for their competitors to see. In this particular case it was okay with Columbia so we do have the pricing listed. You can see that they offer Nebraska libraries a 20% discount I believe off of list price. Yeah 20% discount off of this price. When I can I do try to include the list price as well so you just have a sense of what the discount is. Scrolling down towards the bottom of the page you will have more detailed information such as what the subscription term is. If there are order deadlines you'll have links to order forms, licensing agreements, instructions for how to proceed with an order for the product, information on how you can request a trial on a product if we're not sponsoring a statewide trial on it but you'd like to try it out before you consider ordering it. We'll have that information, tech support. So that's pretty typical of what you'll find on one of our pricing pages. Okay here we go we're back in our slideshow. Did I lose the little window? There we go. Okay just to give you a little bit of background about how the database discounts work. Many times vendor will offer us a straight percentage off discount. For instance Columbia University Press offered us a 20% discount off of list price. Facts on file offered us a 10% discount off of list price and then some database vendors such as SIRS will actually construct pricing that's really customized for our particular constituents. We have a lot of small K-12 schools in the state more than in other states and so their typical pricing didn't really lend itself to being affordable for our small schools and so they did come up with a special pricing for K-12 libraries with fewer than 300 students. That's something that you won't find offered in a lot of other states so in that case it's really unique to us here in Nebraska. Sometimes we work directly with a vendor and we have a deal with them that they have made specifically with us. Other times vendors will offer the same discount through a lot of different library networks and consortia in the United States and Columbia University Press I believe is an example of that Oxford University Press so they will approach many different library networks and they have a discount that they're willing to offer and it's the same for all networks so some of them are really customized for Nebraska and others they're going to be sort of generic for all different library networks across the United States so sometimes we have a little bit more flexibility with some discounts than we do some of those other more widespread discounts. We also often have situations where a vendor agrees to offer us a discount but the discount amount is contingent on the number of libraries that we're able to get to subscribe to a particular product and those are a little bit more tedious to put together. EBSCO is a good example of this. EBSCO will often offer database trials in the spring and the fall. We make those trials of specific products available to all Nebraska libraries but then what they do is they will say we'll offer you this discounted pricing as long as we have five new subscriptions as a result of this trial so that means a library that's never subscribed to an EBSCO product subscribes to one of the products featured in the trial or that library that subscribes to EBSCO products subscribes to a new product as a result of the trial so those are a little bit difficult because we don't always know whether we're going to get the discount until after we find out who's interested sometimes the discount changes depending on how many libraries are interested and so we have to do a little back and forth negotiating double checking with libraries to see if they're still interested based on the price we're able to achieve so that's something that we do in both the spring and the fall with EBSCO and we go through similar processes with some other vendors so those discounts are a little bit more they're not a quite as straightforward or clear-cut as some of our other ones. Finally we also do cooperate with other library networks. This is nice in situations where another network has a deal already set up with a vendor. Some of these networks serve more than one state for example BCR serves Colorado and a number of other states surrounding Colorado. Lyrasis which used to be solanet serves a lot of states started out in the southeast and now it extends up the eastern coast. So some of these other networks they have so many libraries that are members that they are able to get bigger discounts than we might be able to based on the number of libraries we in Nebraska could bring to the table so it works out really well for us to piggyback with them on their deals. Sometimes we don't have quite as much control in these situations for instance the subscription term might vary from what we typically use. There's a little bit of back and forth you know making sure that our members are going to be able to get on board with those discounts but it also brings a lot of benefits to our members especially if there's a product that maybe one or two libraries in Nebraska are interested in. We don't really have enough libraries to bring together to get a good discount but if we piggyback with another state or network it benefits us and it may also benefit the other state because it may bump their numbers up a little bit more so that they can get a bigger discount so we try to do whatever we can to arrange database discounts. A little bit more about the database discounts that we coordinate. As I mentioned earlier when we were looking at pricing for Columbia University Press products we will publish pricing to the website if the vendor allows it. If not you'll usually see a note there that says please contact us for pricing and we'll include an email address phone number for you to use to get in touch with. It's usually me or Jeanette Powell who can provide you with pricing. One of the things that we do in conjunction with the database discounts is we do do centralized billing for vendors if more than one library subscribes. That's something that we can do here that benefits the vendor so that will sometimes make them more willing to provide a discount to our library since we're saving them some work. What that means is the vendor only has to invoice the Nebraska Library Commission for the total amount of the subscriptions entered into by our libraries and then we in turn will pay the vendor directly so they only have to worry about one financial transaction. What we do then is we turn around and we invoice the individual libraries and then the libraries pay us for the products and that does give libraries a little bit more flexibility. Sometimes libraries want to pay for a product right away so we can sometimes invoice them early or maybe they need to wait a month, maybe a little bit longer than the vendor would like and we can often accommodate that whereas the vendor might not be so willing so it does make things a little bit more flexible for our libraries. One of the things we do to try to make this more manageable however is we do try to keep the subscriptions on standard terms and so we usually work with two terms. Our preference has always been July 1st through June 30th but we also have set up some subscriptions to run January 1st through December 31st. This just streamlines the process on our end so we know when to start looking for the renewal process to start. It keeps the billing so that it doesn't occur throughout the year hopefully for the sake of Doreen or business manager who does it all. So you will see that we are often the discounts do require a July 1st to June 30th term or a January 1st through December 31st term. Sometimes we do have libraries that are interested in subscribing midterm and many times it is possible to get a pro-rated midterm subscription. We'll just set it up so that it starts next month and then it runs until the end of the term June 30th or December 31st and then we get that library on the cycle with the other libraries that are also participating in that particular deal. So that is something that you will notice. Finally I just want to point out and this is something that we can do because we are a state library agency as opposed to a non-profit network or consortia like some of the other networks that cover other parts of the country. We are able to pass the entire discount on to libraries and there's sometimes surprises vendors because they're used to working with networks that they're not trying to make a profit but they do have to cover their expenses and so oftentimes vendors will say okay we're going to provide a 10% discount. The library can get 5% and then the network can keep 5%. In those cases we will pass the entire 10% discount on to the library so that's something that we can do because we are a state agency and we're not trying to raise any money to cover our own expenses as a result of these deals that we're arranging. We're really able to do it because it fits our mission and it helps us accomplish our goal of making things easier for libraries. Before we move on I just want to check and see if there are any questions. If anybody has any questions please feel free to ask them or type the question in the question box. We do have your microphones muted right now if you have one so if you want to ask your question over the microphone go ahead and click the raise your hand icon and we'll see that you have a question that way. I'll go ahead and go on for now and I'll check back for questions later. The next component of our discount program I want to talk about is our discounts on books and supplies. As I said I don't think that as many people are aware of these discounts as are aware of our discounts on databases and so that's something I definitely didn't want to promote today. I'm going to go back to our page that shows you the list of databases that we offer discounts on and I just want to point out at the top of this page we do have shortcuts to our other discount programs so you've got discounts on books and supplies up here and discounts on conferences so those are shortcuts. You can always get to the other two portions of our discount program. So I'm going to click on discounts on books and supplies and then you'll just notice at the top of this page you have links back to the discounts on databases and links to discounts on conferences so we do try to keep it sort of circular so you can get to the other discounts as well. These discounts are with usually library supply vendors and book jobbers. Oftentimes the way these come about is the book jobber or the supply vendor will approach us at the library commission and ask if they can through us promote a discount. They often call it for your member libraries and so we consider any library in Nebraska a member. You don't have to go through any formal process to be considered a member so sometimes the wording the vendors use sounds a little bit funny just in terms of how we do things here in Nebraska but anyway you're all members of the Nebraska Library Commission so one of the reasons vendors do this is because they know that we do have streamlined ways of communicating easily and quickly with all the libraries in the state and so it's a good way for them to get word out about their product and promote their product by offering a discount. They know then that we will publicize it through our mailing list through our blog through other publications so for them that that that reach makes it worth them offering a discount. The one way in which the discount on books and supplies program differs a bit from the database program is that transactions usually occur directly between the library and the vendor so we have information about the discounts listed on this page but then the library contacts the book jobber or the supplier directly to make their purchases. This is fine the only downside is that we don't always know which of these discounts is being used unless someone has a problem and they contact us about it we don't necessarily know if you know one of the vendors is not living up to the terms of their discounts that they offer so if you do ever have problems be sure to let us know. The other thing to be aware of is that often these vendors or book suppliers will provide a particular what they call a discount or promotional code and so that is something that you have to take note of on this page and then you will have to mention that discount code or type it into the website so that you'll get the discount. Often there'll be sales and promotions that these vendors are offering and most of the time I think in all cases they will give you whichever discount is more if they're having a promotion on a product and that discount is more than the discount they offer through us they'll give you the sale price so that's something just to watch out for but I think that they're all pretty good about trying to get to the best price. Many of these discounts have to be quote-unquote renewed on an annual basis basically that just means we contact the vendor or they contact us and say okay here's the new code for the next year all the terms are the same or I'm gonna make these slight variations in the terms so occasionally you know one of those will get away from us and then a library will call and say oh this looks like it's expired can you renew it so we always do that quickly we try to stay on top of that. Other discounts were presented several years ago and they didn't have an expiration date and so they're still up there and so I'm in those cases you know there hasn't necessarily been any change for several years. I mentioned the fact that we often don't know which of these discounts are being used and what people's experiences are. Some of you may have seen that I posted a message to the trial mailing list a couple weeks ago asking for feedback asking librarians to let me know which of the discounts on books and supplies they used and what their experience was like and I actually got 21 responses which to me is very good I'm sure there are many more than 21 libraries out there that take advantage of it but the fact that 21 people took the time out to respond to me I thought that was a good representative response and lets me know that people are using it and so just just out of to give people an idea of which discounts are being used I just tallied what people told me and you'll see lots of the libraries who responded said they used Highsmith, Demco and some librarians actually indicated what they purchased through the particular suppliers so barcodes, card pocket, spine labels, label protectors, etc. I specifically want to point out the Ingram discount that's pretty significant it can be the percentage discount varies on type of books but it can be up to 41 and a half percent so we do have a number of libraries that use that Ingram discount in order to save money on books. We also have some libraries that take advantage of software choice which is a discount that's actually arranged by the Nebraska Department of Education but libraries and schools can get discounts on software and a virus software, Microsoft products, etc. so you can see a good representative sample of what some of our libraries are taking advantage of. The final discount I want to mention is discounts on conferences. Every year for as long as I've been here we've been offering discounts on information today conferences. This is something that information today this is an opportunity that information today makes available to many different library networks and consortia across the country and again they're always talking about members you can make this you can make these discounts available to your members and then they say you can consider members as broadly as you wish and so every year we will put up information about discounts on computer and libraries, registration fees, internet librarian and web search university. So you can pretty much be sure that there's going to be a discount on our website about these three conferences and the registration fees are discounted over 50% so if you're ever going to go to one of these conferences it's definitely worth going through us. Now again what information today asks in return is that we collect all the registrations and then send them in as one batch so again that's an easy thing for us to do and if that's all it takes for us to save you 50% on the registration we're more than happy to do it. So I just want you to all be aware that those conference discounts are always available as well. This final page just provides you with URLs of maybe different websites. I'll set up the two primary ways you can create libraries and see about this account. The first one is a mail list. You're not a member of the trial mailing list. I would strongly encourage you to join that mail list or make sure someone on your library is a member. That is where we will announce database trials. For instance, if I just go for that database and try to group together for a discount, that information is going to go out over the trial mailing list. After the trial has been in progress that's where I will ask libraries if they're interested in possibly being part of a group and getting discounted price again one of those databases and so that's where the back and forth goes on. We have enough libraries to get the discount or no we don't. Are you still interested in this other price? We'll also post information to the Encompass blog if we have a new discount available or a new trial. So those are the two primary places where you'll see information but again I'd say the trial mailing list is the first and foremost where that kind of information is going to get posted. That is a good overview I think of our discount programs. That's all I have formally prepared to talk about today but I'm more than happy to answer questions if you have them. Go ahead and as I said just feel free to type questions in or raise your hand and I can unmute you. Well if we don't have any questions I think we're going to finish a little bit early today. Hope everyone has a happy holiday and by all means stay safe driving. So thanks for joining us today.


I came from Madagascar and I study economics and I'm 21. I live in Tama Salve, just 200 kilometers from the capital of Madagascar. I'm Tanana Rivo, right? Tanana Rivo, okay. Right, so do you want to become an economist? Is that your goal? Yes, it is my dream to become an economist, to analyze my economic situation of my country. What area of economics interests you the most? They tell us because there are so many different areas. Development, development. What do you think about in general economic development aid to Africa or to the developing world? What are you learning about the benefits, the pluses and the minuses? I know there's been a lot of debate about the results of development aid. Do you have any thoughts on that? As the case of my country, it's a very often developed development country and I would like to aid to give the people who live in countryside an aid aid, how to develop, how to progress in, because here the system is a very, very old system, especially agriculture people use old system for developing, like to hot plant in the very ground. It is very, very old system and I'd like to to help them, how to progress, how to manage their capital and so on. Specifically, what would you do though if you were in charge of helping the people in those regions develop, what types of programs would you focus on if you were in charge? I will build, I will gather all the people who are in agriculture department and I will help them to give them ideas, to give them ideas and to build such as an association of the product, the product of Lychee for example, because Lychee, do you know Lychee? Of the fruit, yes, the fruit. There is no manufacturer of Lychee, we export them and we export them, there is no manufacturer here.