Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is our weekly online event here. Yes, it is a webinar. You can call us that. We won't be offended by the term. We cover a variety of library activities, topics. Basically anything going on in the library world, we want to share it on our show. The show is free and open to anyone to watch, both the live sessions that we do and the recordings. We do these shows live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. And then they are recorded as we are doing it. They are then posted onto our website. So if you aren't able to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. You go to our website and see all of our recordings going back to the very beginning when we started this in actually January 2009. It's been a while now. We do a mixture of things here, presentations, interviews, book reviews, many training sessions. Like I said, anything library related, we are happy to have it on the show. And we do have commission staff, Nebraska Library commission staff that sometimes do presentations. But we also bring in guest speakers very often as we have this morning. And today we have a lively group from our South Sioux City Public Library here in Nebraska. I've been to Northeastern Nebraska and they've been with us multiple times. But two years ago they did a session about turning your library around. They did, some new staff would come in, did some great changes, updates, new programming and things. So the director there, Dave McSturff is on the line with us today. Hi, Dave. Hello. And he contacted me and wanted to do an update to let you know what's been happening since the last time they were here. I hadn't realized it had been a whole two years. It didn't seem that long. But I will hand it over to you guys now there, Dave. And you can introduce who's there with you and go ahead and take it away. Okay. Thank you for being here today in the room in the office here. We have Odessa Meyers, who's the children's librarian, Dan Neiman, who's the assistant director, programming director, technology director, pretty much does everything, and then me on Dave McSturff. And to give you a little background right now, it's probably, we're supposed to have a warm today. Today, it's supposed to get up to about 25. So I've got shorts and a t-shirt, going to enjoy the outside weather while we got it. And for those that don't know anything about our library, you notice the first picture here, the birds. We have an aviary in our library. And that's kind of one of our very distinguishing things that people know about our library quite a bit. And just yesterday, we got three new birds that were introduced into it, some dogs, and an orange weaver type bird that's from Africa. So we have a very unique kind of library here. And we're definitely different thinking compared to most libraries, or what I call the old-fashioned thinking library. That's definitely not us. So our presentation is called Turning Your Program Around Part 2, what the South Sioux City Public Library did to change the public perception of the library. And so we kind of used some of our old slides and added new stuff that we've been doing. So for people that haven't been here before, June 1st, 2009, the library definitely changed. I was hired, Odessa was hired, the library board that was in existence was replaced in this midst, and a new board was put into place. The perception of the library at that time it was boring. Nothing to do in the library, programs just the needs of the people. When you walked in the door, the walls were white. There was nothing up on the walls, no posters, no books on display, nothing. You didn't see a kid in the library. And a lot of people's comments, they didn't know we even had a library in the community. So in the last five years, these are kind of the changes that we've seen. We'll go through some of our stats, because I like stats. And then we'll turn it over to Odessa, she'll tell you what we did with the kids area. Then we'll tell some of the programming and then I'll finish up with some of the other things that we've done. Circulation checkouts when we started, you can kind of see we've doubled. More than doubled in just five years time period. And a firm belief I have when I stepped in the first thing that I said, pick a genre. And this was to all the staff and everybody started choosing books in their favorite genres. And we definitely saw checkouts improve quite a bit. And we really looked at kind of the unique genre that we're here to. Not wanting to put down women, but in a lot of libraries that I'm at, where it's a lot of female staff, they don't tend to think of guys sometimes for magazines and things like that. And our library, it was almost like 90% of the magazines were for women. And we've kind of changed that. And now we see a lot of change in checkouts and different things like that. Computer usage, you can see it's gone up 10,000. Reference question, that's just a little bit of a jump there. Adult programming attendance has just skyrocketed. This year we're already ahead of where we were last year. And children's program attendance, the total that we have for 2008, 2009 back then, we are already at that number in the first four months of this year already. So we're looking at another increase this year for children's programming attendance. The number of programs is what, once I started counting this up, I kind of really had to stop and make sure I was getting the right numbers because it seemed odd. When we first started, there was about 160 programs in a year here at the library. It was the kids' programs and adults' programs. Now for this year, our children's programs will average around 600 programs in a year. And that's with one full-time children's librarian and a part-time library, children's librarian that takes over in the evening. We do around 100 adults' programs in a year. And we do around 800 technology classes in a year. And that's with a staff of 10 people and only four of them are full-time. So a total of about 1,500. So that's a little bit of a jump, too. What do we do to accomplish this turnaround? The big thing, and Dan will kind of talk about this a little bit, interviewed library patrons. That was one of the first things that we looked at for the people that were actually using the library. And then we wanted to figure out the people that don't use the library, how to communicate with them. So we created a questionnaire. And I've actually sent the next questionnaire that we were going to be putting out. And that's a handout that's available. We created a four-page questionnaire that we're going to be putting in different areas in the community and then also handing them out to library patrons and then putting it online. Dave? Me and Lee. Dave? Yeah, hi. I just want to let everyone know that that's one of the things that you sent me ahead of time. Yes. Yep. Those of the handout and also another two hand documents that Dave sent me will be available with the show notes afterwards as well. I put them up into our slide share account so that people can see exactly what was on the questionnaire for their own use. So it will be available afterwards for everyone. Okay. And then meet and re-meet. And I don't think re-meet is a real word, but I didn't know what other word to use. With civic groups and gift presentations. And that's a very important thing because when you first start, especially as a new director, everybody wants to kind of meet you and see things like that. Well, you got to keep letting people know what you're doing at the library and how things are changing. Meet with your local agencies and see what the library could do to assist their agency. And that's something that I'm really kind of proud that we've been working on. There's another couple things in the works right now that hopefully down the road will be quite a change for our library and might be something that other libraries could start doing. Talk with the area school. Do a review of the services your community provides to try to fill in the gaps. For those that don't know our community, our community is about 50% Hispanic. There is no movie theaters in our community. There is no music venue places. There's no museums. There's no sporting events except for high school type stuff. The kids could participate in after school sports, but there's not any other kind of things that are in there. There is a Y in our community, but it's kind of out of the reach of a lot of our patrons. So the library tends to be the spot for a lot of people to be able to go to. See what other libraries are doing and recreate their ideas to fit your needs. And we do that quite a bit. Utilize the skills of your staff. That's the one that I'm really always kind of surprised when I talk to other people. I'm surprised how many people don't really ask their staff to help participate and do any unique things that they may have skills at doing. And keep an open mind. Even if an idea doesn't catch on or out of way, keep trying. We've tried some things that maybe had one person show up at.   So that's a big thing. Just kind of keep trying. So now I'm going to turn it over to Adapta. So changes in our youth programming. Like Dave said, I was hired in June of 2009. At the time that I was hired, 30 times were held consistently. And two programs that ran once a month. And so that was their consistent. Dave said that I think there was like 160 total programs in the library when we both started. We've increased that. I was three-quarter time for the first two or three years, two years I worked here. And I increased by 200% or something like that while I was three-quarter time. Now that I'm full-time and I have an assistant, a part-time children's library. And in the evening we increased even more by offering different programs at different times. The one big thing that I found, because my ultimate goal was to get more children's library. And one thing I told Odessa and Dan is we may be doing a lot of programs, but the big idea here is to show what can be done so we can actually get staffing numbers and up to be able to provide even more once they get impressed on what you're able to do with just a three-quarter time person.  And so this year now that I have myself at full-time and we have an evening, we're very fortunate to have an evening part-time gal working with me, we can do four storytime programs a week. That's just for the preschool and poppers. Now if you don't have a lot of time to plan or your part-time to four, you know, do multiple ones, they can be the same storytime. They can be the same craft, the same story, offer them at multiple times, different times through the day to fit other, fit working in as non-working parents or not outside as a home working parent. We show two of these a week. That is a, no staff needs to be there watching. You know, we have it in our library fall and we can put the movie in and it'd be good. I have a baby storytime once a week that has been increasing. The attendance has been increasing quite a bit on that one, because word of mouth is finally getting out. We have an art program which is free art. I set out supplies and they come in and they make their art program or they make their art project. So we have a weekly night of fun program which can be anything from board games to jigsaw puzzles to creating a little hand-held game out of paper, place and a balloon, things like that. And once a week we have a employee here who lives bilingual. That's once a month. And she does a Spanish storytime for us. I do the craft and she does the book. And then we were fortunate to be able to add clubs that are held once a week and we'll get into those clubs in just a minute. We do a lot of partnerships with the community which helps with me trying to it frees up my time because I don't have to plan it. I just have to set it up and organize. So on the left-hand side of the screen we're going together with the extension office and every child's ready to know. I can't think of who she's with. So we offered a T-week program. The parents interacting with instance where they were running the program. They utilized the library as a house. And I invited the people that were already coming into our library to join and get the word mouth spread, spreading through the community. Dr. Powell is a local gemologist who comes in and does the whole program for me. All I have to do is advertise. And the schools we have invited to come in and do multiple different programs. The one photo we have is the music in the school program. Where they come in, they hold the program in our library. We do have a staff member helping them set up the things like that. But the program is there for us. So if you can work with your community, it frees up a lot of your time for any kind of planning that needs to be done because they're doing the program themselves. Our summer reading programs, we work with our local office group. There's a lot of times that budgets are hard to come by to get some of our summer reading programs to get some of those digital formers in. And though we do have a small budget for our summer reading program, we also work with our South New City Optimist Club. And during the holiday season, which ours is wrapped up, they have an annual reeve auction. And because it's held the last two years, it was held in the library. And the staff helped work the reeve auction this year. And it's a new location to advertise another fairly new building in the community. But some of the proceeds, South New City Optimist Club does everything that was used in the community. And so some of the proceeds come back to the library to help with pay for our big performance, such as we bring in a zoo with educating animals. We bring in mad science performance. We bring in jugglers, puppeteers. And some of the proceeds help pay for our performers. And so if your budget is really small for the summer reading program, work with your community organizations and see what they can help offer to you. Since this is the big thing with the program, you want to keep your programming consistent. It's a major help for your family self. Remember when to stop in the library, what day they need to be here. Being consistent in special programs, whether it be monthly or yearly, is also a benefit. It's a benefit if you can have a program that's weekly. Like all my parents know when toddler time is, or what day a paddock cake house program is held. They know Friday they need to be here at 10 o'clock for a toddler time. Or seriously, they need to be here for the paddock cake house if it's a baby. And so if you have it, they know consistently what day to show up on. And it's a schedule for that. Our Winston nightclub that we've been able to introduce with Julie, she's not using children's librarian. We started at late this year. So they're just in the beginning takeoff with the attendance. Isn't that huge right now with them? We have a consistency of maybe five kids every Wednesday night for our club. But word of mouth is something that's how our programs grow in this community. And so it takes a little while. It might take six months before we see a huge increase in that. So we have robotics clubs. We work with the Extension Office again. They come in, they bring their robotics in, and the kids get to build their robots, and program the computers to run the robots. We have a Lego club, which is structured buildings at times. And then there's also three building times, so the kids can have fun. That will help get your twin boys into the library as well. Same with the Mad Sciences Club. We introduced some science experiments and activities with the kids. Now you have to realize that in our community, we have parents that work to shift a lot of times. So these kids are not getting any of these hands-on activities like they did when I was a child growing up. My mom would say, oh, mom, we have the ability to build Legos with her or do different science experiments, like make our own silly putty in. Really simple things like that. Parents aren't able to do that today. And so we as a library have taken that on to fill in these things that are missing in kids' lives. And the technology kids' clubs. We do right now have our traveling laptop we use for our technology class, which I think Dan talked about her days. But on Wednesday nights, it's not utilized. And so once a month, we have a technology kids' club where we use our laptop cart. And we let the kids choose what they need help with, if they need help with their Facebook or their email. Or we will find a new game or application for them to try and introduce it to them.  And so those are just some things that we do with our clubs every Wednesday night. You want to make the library a fun place. We do have, I believe Barnes & Noble is where we get our posters. We have Diarrhoi's When We Kids poster up right now advertising the new book. We have our team space down in the lower left corner where we're putting up book reviews for the kids to push the books. Kids are always hanging out in there. We have a checker table. Kids are always playing with. I do happen to have a skill of making cue cupcakes for the kids. And so I'll make cue cupcakes once in a while and bring them to the kids at a story time. And then class time. Some libraries only do reading where they'll do a fingerprint reading. And that's great and that's perfect. We do incorporate reading and puppets in our story time. But we also make a craft. And I'll tell you, those kids just look forward to making something to take home with them. Here is the craft in the very lower right hand corner of what they've been making. There was a little lie in that. And kids, two years old can do something like that. The other three pictures are of my baby time. We have older siblings that do join us. I open the baby time. I say it's good for one or from birth to two years old. We do have some infants that are coming. But then we have the older siblings that aren't in school yet, coming with their two-year-old siblings as well. We do a craft with them, which is something that parents can recreate at home. We happen to make two or three bags with baby oil and paint. And it made marble painting inside of the bag. We get bubbles out like they could blow bubbles. We have puppets that the kids play with. It's very interactive and very encouraging for the parents and the kids to get on the floor and play together. Of course, we celebrate Dr. Seuss. Most people do. We had one of our staff members be able to dress up as Dr. Seuss this last year and walk around and play with the kids. They made their own Seuss creations. They had a guessing game of guess who the Seuss character was. We had reading time as well. We have a successful... This is my first year having a very successful TAB group. Very self-efficient. They can pretty much run themselves. It's taken me four or five years to establish it this way. And so this year, I was comfortable introducing a advisory board for our middle school kids. And that's our Minions. They chose their own name. TAB is specifically high school. This is 9th through 12th grade. And Minions is our middle school kid. 6th through 8th grade. Currently, we have 15 active high school TAB members and 8 active Minion members. What their job is is their running activities for other teens and the youth in our community. They try and help open up the library for others that may not always come in here. And I've seen a lot who avoid coming in and being active TAB members to make the library a funer place, a cooler place for them to hang out and be. These are a couple things of our TAB program. Last year, we had a spooky teen only Halloween party in the basement. Yes, it did take my time in the evening. We did it prior to Halloween. The kids had a flap. We had kids dress up. We had games. We had one of the kids, this Hispanic and his grandma and him made a pinata that we couldn't bust open because they made it so strongly. And we just had use of the library's basement. It was spooky and dark. We had black lights. It took myself to staff it. And that was it. I had all my teens. They brought their own music. They brought snacks in. It was very fun. They got to do their own type of thing. This year, what they wanted to do, and this was all the teens wanted to do it, they wanted to run a Halloween party for the kids in our community. And so we had a huge turnout for that. Dave was in his gesture costume down here reading and playing magic tricks with the kids. Our teens came up with the craft they wanted to do. We created the games. We had Tim, the both finalist skeleton. We had a vintage game they taught from the Frankenstein's mouth. They did face painting. They created paper plate monsters. They really went all out. And they came in and they decorated the whole kids area for the Halloween party as well.  Thank you, Dave. A huge asset to your libraries. And to participate in anything. And really give them the reign to take and give you the ideas. Be open to anything that they suggest because they have great ideas. They want to do a puppet show. They want to do so much with the kids in our community too. They have plans to do a murder mystery dinner theater, which last one we did with three years ago. So I'll be working with a new tab group. Just a huge asset if you can encourage the kids to come in. And now it is dance time. Okay. Programming with adults. You've never programmed for adults about programming with them. And part of the thing that helps is bringing out most of the best in your library staff. And each of our library staff members dobbling, they all get in one way or another into programming, whether it's children or adults. So we include everybody and we include everybody based on most of them, their interests, their ideas. Because I'll have one set of ideas. Dave will have one set of ideas. But if we take all of our staff and get their ideas together and get them motivated, then we can have even more programs and do more fun things. What's kind of frightening, we have these those just hanging around in our closet at home. Yeah. This is from Off Like a Pirate Day that we used a couple of years ago to introduce the Mangle Language software that we have. We also try to connect with our library members. This was during our band book and we had a lot of fun. Dave's talking with one of the people that were there that morning. We value the opinions and thoughts and ideas of all of our card members. And then we also reach out to the rest of the community that are not card members. We consider everybody of the girl. They have a card in our service area if you want to reach out to everyone. This is also from band books that we're able to get our city administrator on the right to come in and be part of the read-up on. On the left is our newspaper reporter that covers a lot of our activities. We're able to make the most of that event to reach out to the broader community. Almost in every interest is a library service. The garden before we came here gardening was not really on our radar before David came here in 2009. But Dave has an interest in gardening and got a community garden going. That's an outreach for the library and garden classes seed saving. For now, we have our first tomato tasting contest for child varieties of tomatoes that were grown in the community gardens this year. Angled yarns is another program that has grown up, I didn't just from the last year or so, from a couple of our ladies that were interested in just getting together and practicing crochet and knitting in different homes. That's a big argument. There are a couple of our members that are involved in that group and they have a lot of fun doing what they do. They've created a lot of unique items. The sprites, again, was another group that just started this year. This is a writing group. This is one page of our leader of our group, Angela. She gets the program going and we've had already one writer's workshop monthly to share ideas, do different writing activities and just kind of keep going on practicing writing because that's a very solitary thing that you might have other people talk about once in a while. We definitely have a lot of technology classes. The Spanish technology classes have done a very big boom to our program with one of our most successful things we've done. They've not only made the help with attendance but they've also made it like a poor group that always comes to all the classes. They're always ready to learn different things and our 10 staff with the Spanish speaking staff members. And we have hatred driven programs. Some of the programs we start, some of the programs other people can suggest there are also programs that maybe we suggest like one or two families or something to really push it forward. The view movies is an example of that. One of our members that got some recognition from the Mississippi Journal on their interest in monster movies. I think his family sometimes is one of the main states that made the view movies a popular thing in our community. The cult show we've had different readers from different volunteers almost every year with our cult show and it started off as just something we did. Now we work with Outlaw Trail so you can see the bi-way, the cult way that's usually in October. For different stations from south to the Valentine's Travel Highway 12 exactly different cult activities for book clubs this is something that has grown usually and really without our doing a lot for a moment. We have a book club that I do cover to cover it's regularly this is some of our recent books. Oh yeah, we have a book club in our teens too I forgot that. Yeah, we have a teen book club we also have another book club that we can get together and discuss books. We also we also work with the Daxons about the book club to get materials for them and we will post-pollinate our group to go to their meetings sometimes their group will come by sometimes we'll do both things together and so that's another area that we have kept going and really members have really perpetuated that well and then we have community-based programs two of the primary programs when we moved into the building was a ESL program ESL classes and our GED classes but things that were stalwart they find on having we really don't have to do anything to offer a space for them to teach those classes let me encourage people to take them and we try to find out from them what materials we can have that would move back up what they're doing in their future we've worked a lot with the bi-wave system in Nebraska we've done the Outlaw Trail bi-wave stuff with the group show we also work with the Bullwoodson Park bi-wave which is also on that bi-wave on the Bullwoodson Park program of course we're doing the bi-sub-payment and we also try to track their events and see how we can plug in with them our community program we work with the ALA and the National Endowment for Humanities to bring the Civil War with them the Civil War and the Constitution program to work south of the city area that was a a really good program to have so what through the Civil War what related to the Constitution was well-attended and well-spoken this is one of our speakers Grant Heeder who is our opening speaker for the program where he talks specifically about what and the impact of his presence on the Constitution we've also worked with the National Endowment to bring the Muslim journey to bookshelf work library this is a program that encourages understanding of the diversity of Muslim and Islamic community diversity of ideas and promoted their books. We have a booktop where we have covered all the basic books and we review those periodically and promote them on our Facebook page for the people to read and thinking about cultures other than just the Western European cultures and then the one book programs one book, one Sea Land we participate with those every year and those are all sorts of fun different reading ideas but they also are very programming. This year the one book, one Sea Land we're doing the Orphan Train so we're going to have speakers on the Orphan Train in Nebraska come here in April for that program Ban Books Week was really highly popular last week was more well received than I had even expected. We had a read-a-thon on one of the days during Ban Books Week where we invited people to come in to download 15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour or whatever and we had several our collection of Ban Books were frequently recommended and a lot of them discussed one of the books on the shelf and participated in that and they were very proud to be identified as a rebellious reader being a rebel is kind of a fun thing and how do we get the word out the website is one of our starting points as far as getting the word out to community about different programming we also develop electronic newsletter that we have a link to on our homepage that gives us all of our programming gives bios of different staff members reading collections new booklets as well as the programming for the month we also have a page in our simply new book about everyone who has every household has a water bill or a record book they all get an insert from us called our programming there and our Facebook page on social media Facebook is our most popular and most used site and that's a source for a lot of library information we've had a lot of contact with our community Facebook page and then we have a library blog that we keep up with library information that will be of interest to our patrons as well as the program we also have a Pinterest board which we relatively is relatively new to our library of starting we have a lot of our staff that pins things but we have just recently created a Pinterest board as well for our library for different displays we do different reads, read-alikes different crafts you can create that are book-oriented things like that and we also have postcards that we have at the desk for different programs put two programs that I'm on each site to try to infer some entire small people to come and get involved in a program they may not consider that to me with the phone ringing in the background one of the things that keep emphasizing over and over utilize the community as much as you can the library Cardinal festival this will be our fourth year coming up the library the city and one other group were the ones that actually started the community event and I'm glad now that a lot of other groups have gotten involved because I was putting in 13-14-hour days up during Cardinal festival when it was starting but now we've kind of paired back our involvement in it we do certain things specifically for but we're not being as much into it as what originally it was and now this is going to be a continuing thing year after year and it's the city-wide festival the Chamber of Commerce we've been working with them a lot and the community college and one of the things that the Chamber now is doing is this Christmas tree was actually donated to the library this year planted before winter sat in the Chamber purchased the lights and everything and now this is one of their program is that they do a winter holiday right before the shopping season is supposed to kick off and then the library for the operation with that we have a box that people can drop off like their deans to win things we put a display up in the display case for businesses in town so that's kind of cooperation back and forth between the city and the Chamber we keep talking about building programs out of the interest areas that your staff, friends, group or other volunteers may have I'm one of those directors looking at magazines during the work day just a lot of them doing their work but you get a lot of ideas out of these magazines something as simple as I think this was a country woman magazine and one day one of the staff was looking at it and they came up to me after talking with another one and well what do you think about trying this so that's a new idea that we're going to be starting this next year just from that my background with gardening we started a community garden group here in town and then started the community gardens and the library was one of the main ones that started that we now have two big garden spots and out of that have now grown a community farmers market a community orchard is just now in the process of being put in this next spring the orchard will be planted right now they're doing classes at the library on how to take care of orchard and then this year we also started the community garden club and get master gardeners to come in and talk to beginning gardeners on how you can grow stuff and then kind of out of that became the seed savers library we had been doing seed distribution for four years and I had never known that other libraries were calling it seed savers libraries we've been doing it for four years so we've been doing this for a while this year we did a tomato tasting contest at the end we had six judges that judged we had participants you can kind of see some of the growers in the background watching paying attention to what was going on we had six categories we had almost as many participants as seed savers exchange which has been doing this for years and years and years so I was very impressed next year we've already talking besides having the tomato tasting contest also having a salsa contest and there are some of the categories right there and then once again one of the staff had a skill that we didn't know anything about till I kind of walked by saw a magazine sitting on the shelf walked up and I just had to say you know that would be cool somebody that knew how to carve pumpkins and she kind of like well I do that you know my idea of carving pumpkins has taken the big old butcher knife putting you know getting the triangle eyes and that stuff out and she knew actually how to carve the cool looking pumpkins so we actually had a class on that and that's now going to become one of our usual things once again without having a movie theater in town we are the movie theater so we do a wide variety of what we do real to real what we call real life type situation movies Dan talked about the B movie night at the Bijou and once again very unique type group of clientele that comes to those type of movies so you can really get creative on what you want to do the classic movies and discussion we tried that for about two years never got few detentments so we're moving on to a new idea with that but did you hear how long they said that we tried the program before we decided to quit and we would get anywhere from one person to maybe ten people show up but never caught on to what we kind of wanted but we kept trying so we're going to kind of try now what I call unique ideas like a spaghetti dinner we'll serve a spaghetti dinner and what type of movie do you serve with a spaghetti dinner a spaghetti wester so that's kind of the thing what we're going to go for you look for unique kind of twist on things and introduce those at different times plus there's more things that we've done the immigration services we had that here at the library for about two years it got very popular once people in the community start knowing it got so busy here and then there were people going over to the agency where they were actually doing the work that we shifted everything over there now so now people are now knowing to go back over there Medicare sign up trivia content I mean just all these different things that's fun out of things the smoking workshops food canning classes we actually just purchase two canners and that's something that somebody's going to be able to check out in the future it has all the stuff in there except for the canning jar they'll have to buy their own canning jar so we'll be doing classes on that we put in an art gallery like I said when the walls but we first started take those pictures down and that's what the library looks like in the art gallery is done by volunteers they come in and put everything up themselves it stretches around the whole reference area back in that area we added a 50 plus area which now is where the garden groups meet the tangled yarns group meet the scribes y'all the wide variety the book club met there the other night and all the chairs and everything that's back in that area is designed for more mature people that might not be able to get up and down quite easily the chairs are actually a little higher than normal and you can stand up without struggling to stand up we added the mobile computer classroom which was through a grant with the Nebraska Library Commission was able to get we now have 15 laptops that we can do classes with we have the lcd projector and we've contemplated now getting to the point of getting a couple cases and start taking those out into the community like to the senior center places like that these are the 42 tech classes that we teach in English and Spanish each one last 30 minutes to 45 minutes and we kind of have a sequence set up that if someone is interested in trying to get a better job these are the type of courses that you want to take if you are brand new to computers these are the courses that you want to take and so like I said the Spanish ones have been extremely popular so if you have anybody that speaks both Spanish and English and they're interested in volunteering get them involved in doing tech classes for you what's the future hold for us cooking classes that came out of that one staff looking at a magazine and we're doing a one for December we've got something planned for January and February and we're slowly kind of getting ideas on doing different things like that film classes you know how to create your own movie genealogy classes community health workers we are going to be one of the sites and it will be housed here at the library and twice a week there will be a community health worker that will be located here people can come in and ask questions of them and then they're looking for specialized individuals right now that are going to take training in the community to also answer community health social worker is the one that we are really interested trying to get going through the community health worker for and I have been talking about the context needed to make but I would love to be able to see at point for especially the rural communities that can't that don't have social workers around anymore that we are on a rotating schedule and we are located for the social worker one day per week or two days per week they come in and answer the basic questions and take care of that lot of simple little things that library staff does right now adult teens and young children's computer areas we are looking at redoing our tech area here so that the little little kids we just got a grant that we got two of the AWE type computers they are going to set up and we are looking at designing hopefully with the schools in the summertime that kids would be assigned to come to the library and do summer work at the library on these computers on working on the skills that they are lacking have a specialized just adult area for technology and a specialized area for them to use so that is a lot of libraries right in the province for the kids and the adults don't quite get along when they are doing technology together the last thing I can say everybody always goes my goodness how much money do you guys have in your budget field around this we spent maybe about $15,000 over five years for this so about $3,000 a year budget wise and a lot of our things are free we specifically look for things that we could do for relatively no costs at all our movies are part of our collection that we have we are well known in our area we draw a lot of people from three different states to get library cards here and check out our movies so we are well known for that our kids program is so attractive that we get people from free from all three states in here that come actually to our kids program they don't even go to their own local library so that's a big thing to us if we can do it if we can figure a way utilizing staff utilizing volunteers we try to do it so it all turns out are there any questions out there? Thanks Dave and Odessa and Dan does anybody have any questions nothing came up while you were talking everyone was listening very intently to all the great programming and things you've been doing there if anyone does have any questions type them into the questions section of your go-to webinar interface or if you have a microphone just let me know I have a microphone I want to ask a question and I can unmute you that was I remember we did this one two years ago guys and it was and then I was just stunned by how much of an increase and how much you've done I was going to ask about the money but you mentioned that already about how you as far as staffing goes I know Odessa you were new in 2009 and Dave you as well did you do have to this must take a lot of I'm sure a lot of people are wondering how much time does it take to do all of this and did you have to increase your staff a lot or how did you manage to pull off such a huge increase in the programming and the services that you're offering well actually we had one full-time staff member who retired and I was able to replace her with three part-time people but like Dan with his tech classes waiting he does them these are all things that we all know how to do everybody kind of went through and said okay I know how to do this I know how to do that I really don't have the plan I mean you pretty much putting together there's a PowerPoint that's at time but once that's done Dan his Thursday afternoon they're pretty much his tech time where he's got that set aside if nobody comes for the tech class then he still does his reference questions and there's other little things that he does when I have mine I set mine specifically that I do in times that I know I'm probably not going to have a meeting I have to go to or stuff like that if I do have to go somewhere one of the others to step in like I said with the story times if you can repeat your theme my well my story programs are all thematical you can do two three different story times each week to encourage multiple people coming in so it takes one planning time you know an hour to find your books your crafts create your master and you're ready to go and you can get two or three programs out of that one as long as you have it at different times different days you know yeah I thought that was a really good suggestion that you made yeah that you don't once the one book one time you just you say we're going to do it at 10 a.m. and at 2 p.m. and maybe it's you know and so on multiple days because everyone's schedules all these parents and the kids are going to have different schedules to that they need to work around and that's a great suggestion yeah yeah and hers is probably the most high and intensive I think Dan and I probably have the easiest for programs is so much of ours you know how hard is it to put together a movie you know and for us it's just naturally stuff we would do anyway with the the web page so you know just type in this that we've got a movie at such such a time or you know little things like that some of the things do take a lot more time I go out to meetings with a public health program that with several different special meetings there's another organization I work with that I go to and they've been in that group for four years and I show up for the meetings and so I mean a lot of these things like I said they don't some of them just don't pop up overnight and other things are just extremely easy the art gallery that was like one phone call somebody that was interested in doing it we've never done anything since then when I was three-quarter time it took a lot of time to try and get everything initiated and started to change our library into what it is now but now with myself being full-time and I do have the evening children's library I have a day that is set aside for tech classes and it's also my planning day so if I don't have anybody come from my tech classes on this specific day I can do all of my planning in that one day and have it done for the rest of the week or for the next week and so you just you just will find you'll be able to create your schedule to find time if you just want if you have the desire to do it yeah I think that's a good tip there that in the beginning like you just said Odessa it may take more a lot of work to get started and get figure out like you guys pretty much change the whole focus of what the library was because when you came in it was none of these things but once you get it all figured out and how it's going to work after that first big initial push it's going to be just like no big deal do a new one you know you'll have that you have this process down and you'll know where to go for your ideas and for your you know if you do crafting you'll have your website down you have your things that you go to to know my filing cabinet I have two drawers of my four drawer filing cabinet and it's a really long drawer so I don't know how to describe it but it's full of my four years of almost five years of story time that I've done and so if I get stuck or I run short on planning time I go back to one that I did four years ago pull it out well there it is yeah those kids aren't going to those kids aren't going to be coming to it now so yeah I've been trying to convince her she could do that more regular kids four years ago are now in grade school right you're going to have a whole new batch of little of kids that would have never seen that one before so but we have not really repeated a whole lot of things I keep track of all the movies that we've shown over the time I think there's probably about the only movie that I'm going to show now for a second time is it's a wonderful life and otherwise everything is relatively brand new you know it's just kind of and the big thing is don't put yourself in a box really think outside of the box a lot one thing that I want to work on with the adult programming is we are unfortunately and I imagine a lot of libraries are this way parents like to drop their kids off in the kids section of the library and go do what they want to do and so we want to organize this is an idea in my head and I want to organize it where we do have a craft time specifically for kids while the adults are doing a program on the adult end of the library and so we're having two things we're still watching those kids but we have activities for them while they're getting to do their activities it's going to be like a parent's night out at the library that's a cool idea we have one question that came in about when you're counting up your statistics for the programs you've got there are you including ones where you just offer space and the partners facilitating their own event and so like the library staff is not involved in it you're just saying yes you can use our meeting room for whatever does that get included in your statistics or do you count that differently? It's like for the GEDESL classes at the community college that whole thing there is that doesn't get counted but like say when we did the music in the schools we set up the whole thing we kind of coordinated it the schools came in did the presentation those kind of counts we did take because that was something that we actually participated in too When I organized with the community like the extension office and such to bring in or the gymologists who came in with his gym I made the initiation I contacted him I got it set up I advertised it the kids came in and utilized our space we counted that as a program that we did even though he was the one running the program Cool she says thanks for the clarification on the stats there Just a couple of comments have come in very impressed with how you turned your library around to meet community needs thank you for sharing I thought that was great too one thing that I noticed that you guys did and I've seen other libraries do it as well is looking into the community to see what is missing you said there is no movie theater so you've become that for the town I know another town in Nebraska there was nowhere in town to print out photos you know like you would go to like your local Walgreens or Walmart and bring your flash drive or whatever and be able to actually print out the pictures there's nowhere that did that so the library figured out and was able to get a photo kiosk so people would come to the library for that so I think that's something that you guys have done and that's just a great tip is don't just think about like you said Dave don't think outside the box look for what's missing in the community and become that thing That was one big thing with our DVD collection why it grew so large because we have one red box in the community and that's it and in our DVD collection it's so unique compared to probably most libraries that we draw a lot of people specifically for that and we do have one other comment from actually Brian Moss who is the at the eastern library system here in Nebraska is hoping that you might be presenting at our NLA fall conference next year possibly on something considered as being held up there in South City does anybody submit anything no not yet well you guys should we're going to be right in your town he looks forward to visiting the library and seeing what you're doing there I want to come and visit actually and see because I keep hearing about it whenever you guys do sessions on here and then help us live I want to see that aviary I want to see those birds so I'm going to make a point that you crawl in the aviary with a bead in your hand being the bird okay as long as as long as I don't get pooped on I'll be okay okay any other last minute questions from anybody on the line here today we have just a little past 11 o'clock now so it's about our hour I mean the big thing I emphasize over and over and over again you know the old idea of what a library is and we have real good example just right across the river from us they are very old-fashioned type library and we draw half our kids attended parents for our kids program because they don't like what they do over there it's a story and you go home and here they have a story they do a craft they have a snack and the kids are here for three hours with their parents not doing my program they're here reading books and playing afterwards after it's done they still stick around and use more of the library's resources yeah we do have a public stage for the kids to play with we have educating toys so it's a little playroom that they hang out in an hour or two after the storytime is even done so we schedule so many tech classes because we have so many different shifts of people like right now we've got a Spanish tech class that's going on and then there may be one in the evening another time and then we'll have some in the afternoon I'll have them in the morning afternoon and per day so you have to be flexible in your community if I could figure a way to do one at 2 a.m. in the morning we would do one at 2 a.m. in the morning because we have people getting off shift but only Dave would do that one I'm the only salary person well maybe that's what you'll come and tell us about in a couple more years that is one of the things we put on the questionnaire would it benefit people to have the library later on certain days or earlier on certain days and going as late as 11 p.m. or midnight because you have people getting off shift at 10 p.m. again that would be all Dave because the rest of us want to go home well doesn't look like any other new questions have come in while we've been chatting so I think we are safe to wrap it up for this morning thank you thank you so much guys Dave, Odessa and Dan that was great as usual lots of information was poured out there to everyone and we will Dave if you can send me that PowerPoint presentation I will upload it to our slide share account as well so it will be available along with recording afterwards and I'm going to pull back presenter control here here we go to just wrap up for the day like I said I have been on our slide share account we've got the the handouts that Dave mentioned I actually listed the technology classes that you offer you sent me and the evaluation and I've been saving into the commission's delicious account any of the things I could catch that were websites that might be out there that were things that were mentioned during the sessions this will be included as well in the archive when the recording is up so that will wrap it up for this morning show as I said the show is recorded has been recorded and will be available here on our archived and compass live sessions page where you can see here we've got all of our previous shows as I said going all the way back to January 2009 we first started so you can watch all those there and I hope to join us next week when our topic is on a unique well hope it's unique a collection that some people have heard of and think is oh yeah we always have that and some people have never heard of cake pan collections lots of libraries are doing this those kind of cake pans that make difference things like a picture of Barbie or something like that or a dinosaur and this is a library in Iowa that's going to be joining us north liberty community library D crowner is their library director and they have a collection over 250 cake pans that they are going that they have and that they are going to she's going to be sharing with us what they are doing there with that so hope you'll join us next week for that also end cup is live is on Facebook so if you are a big Facebook user please do go ahead and go over there and like our page on Facebook we post when new sessions are being added when something is started like this morning I said you can join us right now on the fly when the recordings are available we post here as well so when it is done and processed and ready for you to watch you'll be able to go there and find that out so that will wrap it up for today thank you very much for joining us and we will see you next time bye bye


Take two, let's go. Welcome to Code Corner with Katie. Let's take it. Welcome to Code Corner with Katie. Let's see what's on Thinking Man's mind today. How many exit or exit access doors are required in a room with one or more operable partitions? That's a great question. We can use the egress calculator in order to figure this out. I'll be basing my answer today using references from IBC 2015. Other additions are very similar. Always consult your state and local codes as well. This is a five-story hotel and it has an area with meeting rooms. Meeting rooms and ball rooms and areas like that are places of assembly most common, but this one has operable partitions. It has a full sprinkler system. Our single doors are three foot by seven foot and our pairs of doors are six foot by seven foot. Let's see using the Ossobloy egress calculator whether or not we have enough exit access doors from each space. You have to look at each one individually and then look at it as a whole so that if they're using just this meeting room, do we have enough exit access doors from this space? And then if this is open here and you are using the two meeting rooms together, how does that change the occupant load and how does that change our number and width of our exit and exit access doors? And then last but not least you have to figure it based on all of the operable partitions open or worst case scenario if they were using this as one very large meeting room. Let's take a look. You don't have to fill this in the room name and the date or the project name unless you're going to save this for your files. We have the assembly occupancy calculator and that's the one we want to be on. And because it's a meeting room, a meeting room can be configured as unconcentrated use with tables and chairs or with just chairs only that are not fixed. So let's figure it based on concentrated use with chairs only not fixed. We said it was a building that was fully sprinkled. And the first thing I want to do is enter the room link, the first one and the width, which was 26 by 42 and hit add. That will calculate the occupant load just for the one meeting room. Now I want to put in my second one. It was 32 by 42 and all of the rest the fully sprinkler stays the same I hit add. And then I've got one more space the 27 by 42 is our third meeting room. If all the operable partitions are open, let's hit calculate, then my total occupant load is 510 people and I need a minimum of three exit or exit access doors from that space. My minimum clear width per exit exit access will be 32 inches. I've got 76 and a half inches total clear egress capacity with my doors need to swing out and panic hardware is required. The main entrance would need to be 38.25 and I can download this and save this information to my file for future reference. So what this is saying is because each of these rooms are more than 50 people I would need two exit access doors from each of the rooms. And then when fully open and used as one large room, I need a minimum of three. Let's go back and take a look at what we had. We had 26 by 42. I do have two exit access doors if this partition is shut. Same thing here, I've got two. And if this is shut, I have two. When everything is fully open I've got a total of six exit access doors from this space. I'm way over what I need, which is great. It's better to have more exit and exit access doors that makes it safer and faster for people to exit. Especially in an assembly occupancy. You can get ahold of that egress calculator at egresscalc.asaobloy.com. You can use it on your desktop, tablet or smartphone. It is a free tool for you to use to calculate occupant loads, egress with the swing direction of doors. Make sure that you have a proper quantity of exits all very quick. I also have some classes on Aasaobloy Academy for further information and continuing education opportunities. Please visit Aasaobloy Academy by clicking on the link in the comments below. I'll also link the egress calculator for you too. And please click like and subscribe to this channel. You can follow me on Twitter at our consultant and or connect with me on LinkedIn for updates. If you have any code questions or if you want to see a code question featured on a future episode, feel free to email me at Catherine.floweratasaobloy.com. Thanks for joining me in the code corner today. My name is Katie Flower and my goal is to help you achieve safe purity in the built environment.


Enrolling learners There are a number of ways in which your students can access your course. For example your administrator might enroll them for you or they might be automatically enrolled from outside or they might be able to create their own accounts on the Moodle site and enroll themselves into your course. In this video we look at how you the teacher can manually add students to your course and how you can find out the other ways in which they can access your course. To do this we scroll down to the administration block and then click the link Users. The two we are interested in are Enrollment methods and Enroll users. Enrollment means how students get into your course whereas Authentication means how they get onto a Moodle site. If we as the teacher click Enrollment methods we can see the different ways that they're able to access or be enrolled into our course. The first one we see is called Manual Enrollments. This means that students can be enrolled by the teacher. The one user here is the teacher herself who's already been enrolled. Note that for our teaching with Moodle MOOC on the Learn Moodle site Manual Enrollment is not available. Guest Access has its icon closed so that means that currently no guests can look at the course but the teacher can enable this by clicking the icon. Self Enrollment means that users can enroll themselves by clicking a button. This is currently disabled because the icon has a line through it. Clicking it to open it would allow us to give students permission to access the course themselves. If we now go back and then look at Users Enrolled Users here we can do two things. We can see the list of who is already enrolled in our course, currently just the teacher. If there are a lot of users we can search for them by using the search box at the top and we can also filter this by the different ways in which they've been enrolled and by the role in which they have in the course. To Enroll Users manually we click the Enroll Users button and then choose the role that we want. Currently it's set at learner or student. As a teacher we don't normally have the rights to enroll other teachers into our course. We'd have to ask permission to do that. We then scroll down and choose the users that we want. So for example to enroll this student we click the Enroll button and then we can scroll down and finish enrolling users. This is fine if you just have a few users to enroll into courses. However if you have many it might be worth investigating other ways of allowing them access. Let's go to a different course in a different Moodle site and explore cohorts. Here is the Enroll Use screen again but this time if we click the Enroll Users button we see a new option Browse Users and Browse Cohorts. A cohort is a group of users created by a site administrator or manager and we can add cohort members individually from here or we can go back to course administration, users, enrollment methods and add a whole cohort using what's called the cohort sync method. You'll only see this if your site has set up cohorts.


Okay, we're officially being recorded. So this meeting is called to order. So first item is approving the minutes from the January 20th meeting. I didn't personally have any comments. I guess the chancellor is not here. I also need to take minutes. That's horrible. You can ask for volunteers, but since you volunteered Jim. I'll volunteer fine. Jim minutes. So any comments on the January 20th minutes. Okay. We'll move that we accept the January 20th, 2000 motions. He said to accept them and we'll just do a show of hands. All those in favor of accepting the January 20th meeting. I see a unanimous approval from all three of us. So they've been accepted. So next item of business is what have we done since our last meeting? So Connie, nothing. I've had, I had one single interview for affordable housing trust. And there was one opening and one interview. And everybody loved the interviewee and the interviewee, I believe has already been appointed. Jim, just out of curiosity, since they're already appointed, can you just say who it is? Yeah. Allegra Clark. Okay. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I certainly had been going to the meetings beforehand and ready. Sort of was very up on how it all worked and was very interested. Keisha, you do anything in. Since the last meeting. I have not had any interviews. No. Okay. So that was the one and only. Okay. Enough about that. Do we know anything about upcoming interviews? Paul, do you know? Yeah. So we're interviewing for. We're interviewing for the arts committee. I think that's, there might be a third one in there. Oh, human rights commission. So that's, that's out there for the current for current vacancies. We have board of registrars where for reappointments, but the board of registrars is a different process. The way we do that is we reach out to the Democratic and Republican town committee. And they, we ask for three nominees from them. Sometimes it's hard to figure out if there's, if there is a Republican town committee in this town and they often don't, we try, we send it to different people, hoping that they are Republicans and that they can respond. If they don't. And expect to hear from them in a few days. Or not hear from them. We'll, we'll post that because then it defaults to our normal appointment process where we would advertise for someone, but they have to be. They have to be public and because the board of registrars is supposed to be balanced. And then Angel and I have started going through getting ready for the reappointment process. And so we, that will be happening pretty soon. We can start advertising with all the slots are the, in talking with the council, there was a debate over automatic reappointments of someone who was ready for a second term. And they were concerned that those, I would not post those because it was someone going into their second term. They thought it was important to post those. And I was sort of like, well, I don't want to be disingenuous with people.  And so what the sort of wording we came up with is that there's a vacancy say on the shade tree committee. I always use the shade tree committee as my, you know, but there is a person looking for reappointment who's eligible for reappointment, something put in language to sort of, you know, messages to people that there is someone, there's an inside candidate in essence, but the people know that there's a vacancy there. So because I think we know the charter says all vacancy shall be posted. My argument was that's not a vacancy if someone's going for a second term, but I didn't see the harm in posting it as long as that caveat was there. I don't want to like invite, you know, if we have, if we have two people going for the energy and climate action committee for reappointments that we posted, we're going to get 20 applicants. And it's like, well, we're really not looking to change horses in midstream at this point. I don't think, you know, I, do you have thoughts on that Connie? One on that. It's not clear to me that second term is automatic. And I think there was some discussion of that. It's on the paper. So if it weren't, somebody might be going for reappointment, but there may be a problem with their service or whatever, in which case you wouldn't want to collect up some other interested people. So I don't know how that issue plays against, I hear your point.  So I have a signal that I think is important, but it brings up for me that question about how automatic is reappointment. Somebody read a letter of the paper about that recently. I mean, I just remember reading it recently. So I don't know. But my other thing, Paul, but not to interrupt this part of the conversation is, I saw in your time manager report, and maybe also in the paper that you were forming a new committee to look for a site for a homeless shelter. Right. So is that going to be, are those, are you advertising for those positions and will RAC be involved at all in that? So it's, you know, I know that the charter says we're there to help evaluate and select candidates, but I don't know. I don't know where we, where we fit in terms of when a new body is being formed or sometimes there are certain decisions around how appointments are being handled. So I'm not necessarily looking to expand our role, but it's a little bit weird like, oh, there's a new committee. Oh, will we be involved with, we have a role in commenting or whatever. Yeah. So it's a good question. I, so I start up committees all the time. Committee a week, you know, hiring, hiring committees, committees on, on this or that, the other thing, this one's a little bit higher profile, which is why I reported it to the town council. My intent is this is an advisory committee to the town manager and not, not subject to this process. And the way we've structured it, I mean, I do want to share the charge with the council. So they're, it's something they care a lot about, but the way I structured it is like someone from Craig's doors, someone from, you know, filling slots, slots. Yeah. Okay. There is another committee that we haven't talked about yet, but a building committee for the DPW and the fire. And so putting together a charge for that, that will be something we will seek, you know, broader participation on because it's, it might have some designated things like an architect or something like that, but it's going to be broader. I think it's going to be more open selection. Yeah. So would you, so would you anticipate that rack would be involved in that? I would ask for a rack to be involved. Yes. So, you know, it's great that you're joining us today, Paul, so we can get kind of updated on some of those things. So we know what's going on. I have a thought. Let me see if it's still in my head or if I lost it. Just. Just regarding the, the reappointments and the way you're posting it, I think that's a great solution. You know, one question to you and it's a hypothetical. If you're in a situation where there's somebody up a reappointment, who you're not sure about, would you post it differently? I might put a different phrase in there. It might make it a little less, you know, but, but other applicants are welcome, you know, but if it's like, I mean, John Harnick is the affordable housing trust. If he's up for reappointment, I'm not going to message to people that that's really, if they can see. Yeah. And I think, you know, me personally, and I think the view of this committee in general. Is that we're fine with the process that exists. That we don't feel that reappointments should just be open to everybody without, you know, Do you feel that people should be re interviewed? Personally, no, but I don't know if I can speak for these other two. So do you guys have comments? I don't think people should be re interviewed either, but I do think there should be an element of making it public. If somebody does want to apply. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I, that does raise the question. And I think we have a, a spectrum of opinion on this. About reappointing people who have served, you know, more than the six years of the two terms. And I know John Harnick's one of those people. And so, you know, that's, that's still out there. And I think Paul, it has a lot to do with what your preferences are. We each have our own opinions. I know for the, the personnel committee, you made a decision. To reappoint someone who had been a long standing member. So it kind of raises that. Issue a little bit. So Connie, just, you didn't exactly answer the question. Okay. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I don't think they need an interview. Okay. Okay. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I don't think they need an interview. Okay. Okay. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Okay. Okay. So. I don't think there's any more on upcoming interview assignments then. I imagine once we get into. You know, I think we're going to be doing that in June or so we're going to have a big new push for. Open assignments. Yeah. We're trying to get a bit earlier start on that. So that in April, May is when we'll be doing those interviews. So that the council can act on them in June. So we're not acting down. But they, their schedule is pretty heavy throughout the next three months. Yep. Okay. So we're going to talk about the survey and our proposed memo to the town manager. I could read the memo now and then I don't even have to send it. But maybe instead of doing, I'll give it a little summary first. I did send. Wording basically. The survey had great results and, you know, all positive. And I think that's a good point. And I think that the areas that we felt could maybe be tweaked for some improvement. Or when people talk about was the mission of the committee explained clearly. And was the. Time commitment of the committee explained clearly. And basically. What. I wrote in this memo. Is that a suggestion that. The committee, the committee should have, the committee's drum set. Should write something out ahead of time. So they have a really clear. Well thought out script to read. Of the mission and the time commitment. Just so it's a little less haphazard. It's a little less hit or miss. As to whether they touch on all the important points. an advanced look at this memo. Did anybody have any comments on changing anything or is it? Yeah, Connie. I did. So I never thought you'd have a comment, Connie. Yeah, I know. You can't don't give me anything in writing and not come back. So I thought it was it was it was a great draft. Thank you for doing this, Jim. There's some I didn't have a lot but I'll just tell you what I saw this is a memo that becomes more of a standalone perhaps going out in a packet to the town council or in some other way being being made public. So I formalized a couple things that you can agree on. Well, first of all, in the header part from Jim Pistrang, comma, chair, comma, resident advisory committee, which is actually the way you had it at the end of the letter, just making it consistent. Subject RAC post interview survey, I would spell out resident advisory committee. Again, thinking of this as a standalone document going to people who don't know what it is. And then just near the beginning of high Paul, I would say, you know, dear, you know, Mr. Bachlemann, or again, for a former front formalized. At our RAC meeting on January 20, 2021, we reviewed the feedback that we received from the survey that Miss Mills, executive assistant to the town manager, sent out to, and this is the only place I kind of struggled and I didn't rewrite, but to all interviewees in the fall of 2020, I wanted something that said sent out to all applicants for town manager committee appointments involving RAC representatives since the inception of the RAC in 2019. And maybe even adding, and again, the sentence is too long and a mess. The RAC created under section 3.3c of the Amherst home rule charter, because for someone who's encountering this in a packet or in an archive, it just doesn't have enough. I just wanted to have the more formal content. And again, for us, this is fine, but we're in the last sentence of the first paragraph where it says Angela, I put Miss Mills, the survey summary, if that was fine, and it's just that I struggled at that beginning part. And then just lastly, where you had the recommendations, question five, your last sentence, a prepared script will eliminate confusion and increase clarity on the part of the interviewee. Perhaps a list of items to be prepared to speak on should be sent to chairs and staff along with the interview invite, so that there's always be prepared to talk about time commitment, schedule, whatever, just that list could just be kind of the three or four points whenever they're invited to an interview that there's a reminder that that's what they're expected. So maybe add another line that says the script should include and then some bullet points. Yeah, that's all I got. And what the things it would include would be the time commitment. I mean, I sort of do say that. You do. I might as more about suggesting that a bulleted list goes out when they're invited, because chairs change, people forget. So I'm not quite sure what you're saying you would change there. Are you saying that? I'm adding, well, that they, you say a prepared script will eliminate confusion, but I mean, I say before that a written script describing the time commitment in meeting schedule. Right. But how are you going to let the chairs and the staff know that one time or each time they're participating in an interview? I mean, kind of I'm leaving that up to the town manager to figure out. I mean, we could be more explicit there, I suppose, or we could, you know, this is to the town manager saying, these are things that should be done and it's his job. Yeah, of course, there's some recommendation in a memo to call. So yeah, doesn't have to do that. And you don't necessarily have to get that detailed, but I have found everything from being totally unprepared to being very on top of it by staff and chairs and interviews. So it's just a suggestion. Anyway, I'm happy with whatever you take and do with it henceforth. Okay, what I guess I will do is I will send out a new version of the draft. I mean, this is kind of a this is a strange conversation because we're talking about composing a draft that's going to be sent to somebody who's sitting right here with us. But you're right, it's a public document that we're sending out, although this meeting is a public document too. So yeah, since you are when this happens all the time when people send things to the manager, and it's really intended to go to the town council or whoever, and he knows about it and he's part of, you know, part of the drafting in the discussion. So Paul, are you content with the memo as such and what purpose do you see it serving? Well, I'm not sure if I've read the memo, honestly. Oh, I have it. So, but I think the reason for the memo is important, because I think the council is interested in the process and they because they have a parallel process for their appointing appointments, which is much more elaborate because they do so so many fewer appointments. But I do think it should be seen as a fairly public document that would be shared with the council. Because I think people care about this is a there's a lot. This is a major touch point for a lot of our residents is this the interview process in the in the appointment process. So, and also just to sort of reflect back on how rack is doing, you know, in a way, it's not a bad thing. So, I can I one question is, should this memo also be, you know, cc to town council? Or should I let Paul decide or share it the way he wants to share it? So, that's one question. I will definitely I can formalize the names and the wording. One problem is, once I have this new version of it, can I send it without us reviewing it and voting on it again, which we can't do by email, we can only do it our next meeting. So, we could approve it for you, Jim, as amended as we discussed. Yeah, if it's a little different than the exact, you know, words we talked about. And just I, I think it's up to Paul to send it to the council and I'm assuming he would because I think it is a general interest and helpful. So, I would just send it to him. Okay. So, to review the changes I'm making just things about, you know, my title chair comes before the committee, spell out committee and the subject, address the town managers, Mr. Bachman and Angela Mills. And then the line about sent out to interviewees be more explicit there, sent out to, you know, interviewees who were, you know, town manager appointments that worked with the resident advisory committee. I'm not sure I need to state the charter and the line and the charter that has people can look that up. That's fine. I looked up the committee this morning because I wanted to like, since the inception of the RAC, I wanted to know in 2019. Yeah, make it clear. Yeah. Because from the beginning of our time, for everyone, got an interview, got a survey. Is that true that everyone get a survey or is it just the people who were interviewed in this past summer and fall survey? I think, yeah. I think it was just the more recent interview. Okay. That's what I thought too. And could maybe Angela could clarify with you the span of time that it represents because I think that is important. Yeah. I'm pretty sure. I mean, I'll look at her emails and if I can't get a clear picture of it, I'll ask her. But I'm pretty sure it was, as Keisha said, it's just sort of the more recent ones. Okay. I think you're right. And I, yeah. Okay. In that case, all those in favor of the amendments we talked about and approving me changing it and sending it without further looking at it, say aye. Aye. Yeah. It's approved by everybody. Okay. I will do that. I will copy you guys when I do send it to Paul. I did something horribly wrong. We can fix it at the next meeting. Oh, Jim, do you want to list, this is often done, do you want to list all of our names after you're, you know, where you had, Jim, do you want to list the members? Yeah. RAC members. Yeah. Thanks. I just thought of that. Great. And it's technically just the three of us. Is Angela an official staff liaison? Staff. Yes. Okay. Hang on. Great. Okay. I don't think there's any public here. So there's no public comment. We usually do talk about approximately when we want to have our next meeting. And we could have it in a month or we can wait and have it in two months. I see is two good choices and possibly two months just because nothing much has happened and nothing's likely to happen in the next month. So should we try and pick something for May? Very exciting that May is just two months away. Well, we can go. Tuesday the 11th. That works for me. Kisha, does that work for you? It should be. It should be fun. Tuesday, 11th. Same time. 11, 11. Oh, great. Nice. Yeah. And for the foreseeable future, I guess we're still zooming our meetings. So they were just in the town room this morning. I just came up from there. They're trying to figure out how to do Zoom, hybrid meetings, Zoom and people in present who are present because I think that's where that's our next phase because I know there will be members of the council or committees who don't want to come to a meeting in a small room. But we also, people are going to want to get back together. So they're trying to work on the technologies. And we've been talking to lots of places around the country on a listserv. And the technical issues are the ones that are most complicated because of feedback and open mics and all that stuff. It's hard enough on a Zoom meeting, but then when you put a public component in it, I think they're figuring it out. If you've talked to any high school teacher lately, you know all about the different issues involved in this. And it's very difficult. It's really hard from a teacher's perspective to keep everybody engaged and to give the same experience to your Zoom participants. It's just about impossible. It's really hard. Just a quick, funny story that I was talking to a friend of mine who teaches kindergarten. And she's doing a hybrid and she's just like at Whitson, she finally got the kids in person to settle down and do reading. And then she went to the bathroom and came back and all the kids were giggling because she had kept her microphone on. And everybody could hear her and kindergarteners were just crazy about Miss Betty Ann.  Our bodies ourselves. Right. Yes, your teacher's P2. Well, it's more and more people are getting vaccinated, too. I mean, I'll be fully, fully covered by our main meeting. I don't know about... Yeah, I get my second jab next week. Yeah. Keisha, have you already been vaccinated because of the work you do with children? No. But you'd be eligible. One thing that Tata's doing is we do a regional site with North Hampton, but because we're regional, we're allowed to take 25% for our own use, basically. And so for the next four weeks, that's going to be prioritized just for teachers and childcare givers, anybody forward facing with children. And that's going to be shared out with different people. So if people want to get it, we're hoping to give it... Almost all of our teachers, like Mike said, that almost all the high school teachers have been vaccinated, mostly all through CVS. CVS has been just chunking through lots of people. Yep. I actually went to the North Hampton Senior Center. We had been canceled because of lack of supply, but they were really good about... They got back to us and said, can you come in the next half hour last week? So, dashed over. Cool. Good. That started. Yeah, it was very nice over there. So, we don't have a target date yet, Paul, for starting to have people come in in person. Well, the staff is here for the most part, we're about... I mean, for hybrid meetings. Oh, no. No, we're just trying to figure out the technology of that. And, you know, there's a lot of reluctance to it because people find the Zoom as... We've gotten a lot bigger participation from the public. And I think... And because it was Zoom, you can record every meeting, just like we recorded this one, then it is up available. And I think if we just goes to strictly in-person meetings, there's a loss. And I don't know if... What's kind of interesting is how people settle down on this. But it may be that for this group, if it's available, we may be having a face-to-face in-person May 11th, we don't know. Yeah, unlikely. But yeah, we're sort of... I'm looking... Yeah, I just kind of... Yeah. ...forced to July issues. Yeah. Oh, okay. Doesn't matter. This is easy. Yeah, it is. Yeah. Okay. Anything else anybody have to discuss? Sounds like we're all good. In that case, I move to adjourn. All those in favor can raise your hands again. It's unanimous. So we are adjourned. I'm going to stop recording and end the meeting. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Good to see you. Bye-bye.