All right. Hello and welcome to the Nebraska Library Commissions Public Library Accreditation 2022 workshop. I am Krista Porter. I am the Library Development Director here at the Nebraska Library Commission. I am in charge of accreditation. My department handles public librarian and board certifications e-rate, host our weekly webinar show, Encompass Live. Lots of things we do here at the Library Development. Today, though, we are going to talk about public library accreditation, the process starting up again in 2022. As I'm sure everyone is aware, we were on hold. We did go on a break due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the beginning early 2020, I did give everyone an extension of a year of their exploration of their accreditation, their library's accreditation. I didn't think that there was so much going on. Libraries and you all staff did not need more things on your plate to have to deal with and handle. So accreditation didn't need to be one of them. And then we did a second extension in 2021 because the pandemic is still growing strong. And yes, the pandemic is still happening now. However, after two years, I think we are settled in with how we are all dealing with it and working within the pandemic. And it is time to bring back public library accreditation. We have made some changes to the accreditation program as well. Nothing too major or earth shattering or drastic. I don't think that will scare you and make things worse. The idea is to make it easier, hopefully on everyone who's doing this and we'll go through some of those changes today. I know some of you here are up for renewal right this year in 2022 and that's great. Some of you may be renewing in future years, 23, 2024, any farther than that. And that's great. Good to get a head start, get an idea and learn about what we're doing with accreditation. Any changes that will be coming toward you. I know if library directors, board members, maybe even community members on with us, that's great too. The more people you can have involved in the process, the better. Not something to go at it alone. So as far as the changes that we have done to the program, we are going to go through the basics of the program in the workshop today. But the first thing I did want to mention is we did bring together a public library accreditation review committee earlier this year who met twice to look over the program. The current iteration of public library accreditation has been in place since 2013. And nothing has been really changed since then. I decided it was about time. It was time to do a self-evaluation review of the program just to see if there's anything that needs to be tweaked. Over the years, of course, libraries, library directors, our regional library system directors have mentioned to me things that could be better or could be changed. Thinking of how this program works in theory and deciding how to do it and doing it in practice can be different. So over the years we did learn some things. So we brought together a group of public library directors, some who had been part of the review team when they made the changes back in 2013, and some new directors, as well as all four of our regional library system directors were joined the group as well. We have some minor changes, some updates, some clarifications made to some of the guidelines, some changes in the community needs response plan process, and we'll go through all of that. The first big thing is that you'll see here that the accreditation is now good for five years rather than three. This is, I think I can hear the cheers already in the background there. This is something we had been mentioned to us many times that three years was not a short and long enough time for anything to have changed, for any libraries to have noticed something different, have different demographics in their community, in their communities, come up with any changes or new goals, new ideas, new things to do. It was too short a period. So we have changed it to five years, kind of fell into that five year process anyways, five year period anyways, by doing the two years extension due to the COVID-19 pandemic. So anyone who was due back in 2020 ended up getting five years already. So we just kind of fell into that this year. In order for that to work, we did have to change the expiration dates of most of the libraries who are currently accredited. Previously we had a group of three groups of libraries about the same amount of people and the same amount of libraries in each group would be up for renewal every year. So we had the same process just rotating. With it going to a five year process, we now had to have a group of five groups of libraries. So many of you had your expiration dates moved even beyond 2022, 23, all the way out to 2026 for some people. Some libraries have gotten a lot longer of an extension, but we need to do that to have libraries up every year. And we now have about 36, 37 libraries per year at the moment for re-accreditation. There I believe 183 libraries in the more currently accredited. Every year we get some new ones. Hopefully we'll get some new ones this year. So some of you did receive notification from me back in May about your new expiration date. It is available on our website and new certification forms will be sent out to you in the next couple of weeks. We're working on that actually as I speak. So you have a new certificate showing your new expiration year. Some libraries will still stay that 2022 as their expiration and they're up for re-accreditation this year. So on our library commission website, this is our main page for library accreditation. But if you are on our website anywhere, you have this menu, this menu is on the side. And if you hover over where it says accreditation and certification, this will bring up other three main pages about that. And these three items are all gathered together in order because they are all related. Board certification and library and certification feed into library accreditation. So we will be talking about all three of these things today. Your library boards need to be certified. Your library director needs to be certified in order for both of those new things, our requirements for being accredited among other things that we'll get into. And there's lots of resources here that we will get into about both of them. But I'm going to start with the library accreditation first. And then when it gets to, when we talk about board certification and library and certification, we'll get to those. All right. So the Nebraska Library Commission's accreditation program is something we just do here in Nebraska. There is not a national program of library accreditation or even for librarian or board certifications. It is not run by the American Library Association or Institute of Museum and Library Services or any other group. There's not a national thing group that we answer to or that dictates these requirements to us. It is done state by state. Some states do not have accreditation or certification at all. Some have just certification, no accreditation or vice versa. So if you talk to any of your colleagues, not in Nebraska, you may hear different things about this. But Nebraska or Nebraska, we do both. Hold on just one second. I'm just going to... Okay. All right. So what is the purpose of accreditation? Why would you want... Why be accredited? The reason for accreditation is, as it says right here, to encourage excellent library service in Nebraska communities. We want you as a public library to be providing the best services you can to your citizens in your community. And this sets some benchmarks for you to reach. Minimum standards of what we think libraries should be providing, what they should be providing as services. You can compare yourself to other libraries as well to see what other... Look, it's the town down the road. Next community over is doing something. Maybe we should try that. Breaking rights, just saying, hey, we are accredited at Silver. Or we have increased our accreditation from Silver to Gold. There's a different levels of accreditation. So you can share that. You want to share this information with stakeholders, anyone who may be interested in supporting the library, providing funding or resources or anything. This is something to be very impressive to anyone like that, that your library has gone through this process. Which can be a pretty big process to some. And that you have made the effort to meet these standards that are put out by your state library agency. That's us at the Nebraska Library Commission. That is definitely something for them that they want to see. We do, as I mentioned, send a certificate. You have my certificate. Many libraries in a frame are hanging up those certificates. We have an online graphic that you can use on your website or on any documentation or anything that you send out. That is just a little badge showing what years you are certified. And our regional library systems have window clings that you can put on your window saying are accredited library. Another big thing that is a reason to be accredited is money. There is certain funding, certain monies that are out there that you are only eligible to apply for and receive if your library is accredited. The first one of these, which you may have just received recently if you are a library doing this, is your state aid. State aid to public libraries. I just search up here under state aid and it comes up state aid. Let's see. And here is the main page for that. State aid, these are funding that we get from the Nebraska legislature in our budget to give a money, just extra money to libraries. But one of the first things you must do is you must be accredited and you must have submitted the public library survey that we do every year. Sam Shaw, you probably hear from him. He is in charge of our survey and he reaches out to you in November. It's usually due in February. And then by now you would have received your letter notification of your 2022 state aid monies. So as you can see here, the list of the formula, how the amounts are determined each year and how much each library received. So it is based on population served depending on how much you get. This year for 2022 it's a base amount of $565 and depending on your population extra per capita is added on to that. So in order to get any of this funding at all, you do have to be accredited. In addition, if you are, we have three levels of accreditation, bronze, silver and gold. If you are silver or gold, you'll see here you get an extra extra money on top of that $565 plus per capita. You get another $200 if you're silver or an additional $400 if you're gold. So this is a pretty good chunk of money that you could get as a library, but you must be accredited to receive the state aid from us. In addition to that, there are grants that are only available to accredited libraries. Over here on our website we do have a grants pop out menu here, which has lots of information, but all sorts of different funding you can receive. But first I'm going to jump right up here to NLC grants. These are grants that we offer through the Nebraska Library Commission. And we have four basic grants that we offer almost many of them every year. Some years we don't have enough funding to do all of them. This most recent year we did do all. Continuing education and training grants, internship grants, library improvement grants and youth grants for excellence. In order to apply for any of these grants, your library does need to be accredited. I will make a note about that right now too though. In 2022, this year only, the library improvement and youth grants were funded using ARPA Money, the American Rescue Plan Act. This is grant money that is given to us from the Institute of Museum and Library Services from the ARPA Act, which is related to helping communities respond to and recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a special pandemic funding that we received and we use that funding for our youth and library improvement grants this year. So for this year only, the accreditation requirement was waived. That was something we were not allowed to do because of where the money was coming from. No accreditation requirement and no matching funds required. So that was just for this year. So if you look at anything right now on the website about these grants, you'll see that. Next year, unless there's some other monies that we are given for that same purpose, which at the moment we have not heard of anything happening, next year it will go back to the usual rules where you must be accredited to apply for all four of these grants. So our CE and training grants are for if you send your staff to workshops, conferences, anything like that out of state, or bring in a training, someone to do professional development for your library staff. Internship grants, we can give you either $500 or $1,000 to hire an intern to work at your library, give you an extra staff person. Library improvement grants are for anything in your library, equipment, furniture, services, programming, anything you want to do in general in your library. And then youth grants for excellence are similar, same type of thing you can ask for as live improvement, but specific for youth and teen services. So anything you're doing for them, that would be equipment training, summer reading program, anything related to that. So in order to apply for all of these grants, going forward, except for this year, you must be accredited. Also, there are a couple of other grants that are Nebraska based that these organizations, these agencies have chosen to only make them eligible to accredited libraries. They're done here under other funding sources. The second item here, community development block grants. These are, there we go, it's coming up. These are from Nebraska's Department of Economic Development and libraries are eligible. There are lots of grants here for different areas in your community, but libraries are mentioned under public works facilities. So your library can apply for this grant for anything you might want to do in the library, but you must be accredited. You'll see here the application deadline is September 1st this year for this year's grants. The accreditation process opens up tomorrow. So you do have a chance if you're not accredited or not, or need to be re-accredited to have that all done and taken care of before the September deadline of applying for this grant. So you could definitely have all that ready and be able to apply for this if you want to do. The other item on here, the other grant that is also required being accredited is the USDA Community Facilities Grant Program. So this is through, there we go, the Department of Agriculture Rural Development Area. They have community facilities, loans and grants. And they also mention libraries. They put them under educational services, libraries are right here. So you could as a library apply for these grants as well for anything in your facility, but same thing, you do need to be accredited in order to be eligible as a library to apply for this funding. So library commission grants and those two grants there. So receiving, becoming accredited would give you the ability to apply for all of these grants and receive even more funding for your library on top of whatever your regular, your basic library budget is. So lots of good reasons to be accredited, I think. It does take some work. It does take some time. Lots of teamwork to do this on your side, but I think the benefits are great. So the schedule for accreditation, as I just mentioned, the process opens in July, July 1st. I send emails to all libraries who are eligible or up for reaccreditation this year or who are eligible to apply for the first time. In order to be eligible to apply for this first time, if you've never been accredited, you do have to have submitted our public library survey and our library commission supplemental survey that goes along with that. This is what Sam sends out in the fall. By now, by July, as I said for state aid, he uses that information for your state aid payments as well. It is used for this. We know who has applied and we know who is eligible to try out for being accredited. So by the end of the day tomorrow, you should all have an email from everyone who is up for reaccreditation and is eligible to apply for the first time. You have an email from me opening up the program process and inviting you to start working on it. You have to complete an online accreditation application form, which we'll go through and we're going to look at all the questions and everything in that. And you have to have an up-to-date community needs response plan. This is a separate document that you write up and send to me either mail or email. It is not an online form that you fill out or anything. It's a separate document that you write. You're form, online form and your plan are due to me by October 1st. After I receive both of those, I will look at them both together and see how and evaluate them and review them for you. And then you will know at the very latest by December 31st of the year if you are reaccredited or accredited for the first time. Now that December 31st is the farthest deadline out. If I receive your form and your plan tomorrow and I have both of them and I start looking at them within a week or two, you would hear from me if you are reaccredited or what your accreditation will be. Do have to give me some time to read through them and evaluate everything of course and get back to you. So this is just the ultimate deadline is that you have everything to me by October 1st and then I will get back to you at the very latest December 31st. All accreditation is renewed for the calendar year. They will say that your expiration is December 31st, whatever year that you expire. Now the October deadline is not a in stone deadline, meaning that if you miss that, you're completely out of luck. I can give you extensions of a month or two months if you need to, if there are extenuating circumstances. Just communicate with me. Let me know if you're having any issues. I know we have, well obviously right now we're dealing with the pandemic. In other, in previous years, we had the flooding in Nebraska, we've had tornadoes. For any reason, just let me know what's going on and if you need to, I can give you, as I said, either a few months or I can actually give you an extension for another year if you need to. I actually just did that earlier this week.  And they were due for re-accreditation in 2022 this year. So the director contact me is very concerned. I don't know what to do. You need to help me with this. I'm like, you know what, let's just give you another year.  You do not need to be dealing with this while also learning how to be a director at this library. So I just bumped them to 2023, no problem. I've done that with libraries who haven't construction projects done renovation happened to be happening at the same time when they were due or new building built those all sorts of reasons. I'm very happy to give you either a few months or another year extension if needed. Just let me know. Like I said, this is a program run just through just run here through us at the library commission. So I have the power to do that. So that is the basic schedule. Open up tomorrow. There are requirements for applying. As I said, you must have submitted the public library survey, whether you're being re-accredited or new and the supplemental survey. Both data from both of these surveys are actually used in your accreditation application form that you submit to me. We pre-fill some of those questions in from the survey data. We want to know some of the some of the things from that the survey, but we don't want to make you re-re-submit them all again. I'll re-enter them all again. So we just pull it automatically and push put it right into your form. There are 12 minimum qualifications that you must meet and we'll go into those. It's just the basic things we think any library should be doing just to even start being working on being accredited and have your community's response plan submitted to me. The plan doesn't have to be its final version or approved by me. You just have to have gotten it to me for me to start looking at once you have. And so those are all of the requirements to be accredited. During the survey, meeting the qualifications, submitting your plan, then you can go and actually start the online application. As I mentioned, there are three levels of accreditation, bronze, silver, and gold. And they work on a point system. Previously, before 2013, when they did this current iteration of accreditation, there were still three levels, but you had to meet all of the criteria and the lowest level to earn that accreditation. And then you could start looking at the criteria for the second level. You had to meet every single criteria and that second level in order to earn that level of accreditation. So if your library only missed one item or didn't meet the minimum standards or requirements for one thing, you missed out on that level entirely. We didn't think that was, we didn't like that back then. They thought that was a little much. So they came with this new program of doing it by points. There are all sorts of different things that you can earn points for. And your library may earn points on one particular guideline that another library wouldn't and vice versa. You may be really good at something that someone else is not so good at or you may be doing something that other libraries are not. So we wanted to be more personal and really you reflect more accurately what you're doing. Every new community is unique. Everything you're doing in your community is specific to what your people need. And it's not going to be the same as the one down the road. And the littlest libraries are not going to have the same things that they do or their community needs as the biggest libraries. And comparing them to each other is just not really fair. And isn't really accurately reflecting how good of a job you're doing in your specific unique community. So the point civ system is much makes it much a better comparison. So you've got 175 points for bronze 200 silver and 250 for gold. There are more than 250 points, but there's not there's not like platinum or gold plus anything called as the highest level.  You'll see all the how you can earn all these different points and what all the guidelines are in just a sec here. Your community's response plan. This as I said is a document that you write and send to me with a whole separate page all about their community's response planning and how to do that that we're going to go into in the second half of the workshop today. You really are at the library. This is trying to get you to focus on looking at your community's needs and what their priorities are and trying to get involved and responding to them. Not just saying from the library side, but we know what we want to do. We're just going to do it. This will help you with that kind of planning and we'll go into all of that. The application form itself is organized into five categories, governance and planning, resources, services, cooperation and collaboration and communications. You have five main categories that kind of tried to gather everything up for you. As I said, the statistics that you've reported in the public library survey will be automatically prefilled into some of the questions here because you already have that info. You don't need to do it again. Right now today because it's not July 1 yet the live accreditation application form will not work for you yet it will say it will open on July 1. But we do have a preview application that you can look at just to see what the form looks like and what the actual questions are you will be asked. This is just a static form. This is not anything you can click on. You can see if I try and click, click, click, click on any of these boxes, nothing happens. So this isn't a live form or anything. This is just a static duplicate of the actual live form. Right now, if you wanted to look today, or if you're not up for accreditation, you don't get a live form to use at all because you're not, you're not due yet. We do, when we have our libraries being re-accredited only the ones up for re-accreditation this year are the ones that are there allowed to get logged into the live form. And the new libraries may be applying for the first time. So if you're not up for re-accreditation in 2022 but you want to see what the questions are for future knowledge, you can go here and look through the preview application. We will go through a live version of the form that I'm logged into kind of behind the scenes so you can see today what all the questions actually are. So we have some of the guidelines are pre-filled using your public library survey. Some of those questions are also done using peer comparisons. Instead of just saying everyone has to meet the same criteria, some of the questions we compare you to other libraries in the communities of similar sized years. The comparisons are done on these, just these nine guidelines and there's way more than nine in your whole application form. But these nine things we do a comparison to see how you are doing as related to communities of your same size. This is libraries within 15% above or below your community's legal service area. Now this was one thing that was discussed in the review of the accreditation program. Some libraries had mentioned over the years that they didn't think the peers were accurate to them. They didn't think the community, the particular community that they were being compared to was similar enough to theirs. They have a way bigger budget than we do or they have a way smaller budget or they have a different population of people than we do. And that's not really a valid comparison. Can you do something different? So we did look into other ways of making this comparison, other criteria to use. We looked at school lunch, the national school lunch program numbers for the free and reduced lunches. We looked at IMLS's locale codes, which is a different way of comparing places. And we did some testing on some libraries and in the end it's still the peers came out the same anyways. The same libraries communities popped up. It didn't really make any noticeable difference in who you're compared to. So we're sticking to just it's libraries of similar sized years and communities of similar sized years. However, you can have that tweaked and changed if you think something is not right or you know more about a community and you want to discuss, you know, can we be different libraries be compared to something, you know, other libraries would be better. We can totally talk, you know, totally start that conversation with us. For the peer comparisons, you would reach out to Sam Shaw.  So he does all of these peer comparisons for me. So if you want to discuss with him that you think some of your peer libraries really aren't accurate ones, just reach out to him and talk to him about it. And we have done this before we've pulled some libraries peers and put different ones in. He can also provide you with a list of who are your peer libraries and their public library survey data. All of this public library survey information is free and open on the internet for anyone to see and use. It's public information. You submit these surveys and then it's published out there by IMLS and by each state. Sometimes we have it on our own page. You can go and see all the Nebraska libraries and what all their data is. So if you want to know, okay, what are the numbers for the libraries that you're saying are my peers? He can get you that data so you can see, oh, are these really comparable to us or not? In addition, for some libraries, we do not have enough communities in Nebraska that are the same size or similar size. So we do reach outside of Nebraska to get some more, so we have something valid, like a valid comparison. And we looked at libraries in Iowa. Iowa seems to be very similar to us as far as their communities and their libraries. And so for some libraries, you'll see Iowa libraries mentioned listed in your peer library listing. And we'll look at all of these specific comparisons and we get into the application form. You can meet either the average of all your peers or the median, the value line of the midpoint when the statistics are arranged, to earn the points for that particular criteria guideline. So you don't have to meet both the average and the median, just one or the other, and you earn those points. This is definitely something that is, we think, more equitable, reflects more accurately what is happening in your community and compared to other communities. So that's also for the reason for the points system. So it's a much more realistic and we think definitely more valid way of comparing. So definitely if you, this is something I know some libraries didn't know that you can get this data from Sam. Ask them for a list of your libraries and their data so you can see what is actually being used to make all these comparisons. All right, anybody have any questions right now about anything I've mentioned, the basics of the program, the peer comparisons, the application, what we're going to dig into the actual application form and look at it live in just a minute here. So you'll see everything in there. Any questions about the application form itself? The plan we're going to look into in more detail in a bit here too. Any questions about your levels, your requirements, the schedule, sending things to me? Go ahead and type into your questions section. Just checking that over here. I'm just going to double check one thing. There it is. I can't see if you're when you're actually typing in. So I have to wait to see if something pops up after you're done typing is I'm just going to give another second here for if anybody does have any questions they have. All right. All right, so let's look at the accreditation application form itself. There are to start in the form. There's multiple buttons here, links here where you can click to actually get into the form when it goes live tomorrow. And then you can look here at the 12 minimum qualifications, which is the first page of the form. So I'm going to jump over there first. As you can see here, it says the process will begin July 1. So tomorrow that big red box will be gone. As I said, these are the basic things that we think all libraries should do at a minimum before you even get into all the other guidelines that we do. We use to evaluate your library. There is once you check all of these boxes, then it will let you get into the actual full form. There is a little help guide here to many of these qualifications are based on Nebraska state statutes, Nebraska laws. So there are laws that you must follow as a public library about how you run your library. So some of these, in order to be considered a legally established library in the state, you have to follow these. So we have a pop up here, a whole separate page with help information about that. Links to the statutes, links to information about the different laws and federal regulations, Open Meetings Act, all the different information here. So this can help you learn more about what we're talking about when we're talking about all these different statutes. So the first statute is being legally established under state statute. Chapter 51 is the main chapter in Nebraska law that talks about how to establish your library and your library board and what all the current requirements are. Some larger communities may use chapter 16, but most of our libraries are doing chapter 51. It explains how you are established by an ordinance or recommendation from your community, how you have a library board that is then set up of a minimum of five members and other rules about that. You comply with Nebraska library laws, rules and regulations that would be the chapter 51 and anything else local or federal that might affect your library is working.  You have a library board governing administrative or advisory for libraries who are under the 5000 population has governing boards. Over that you have the option of having governing or an advisory board. And that's all laid out in the state statutes. You have your own bylaws and you fall in Nebraska's Open Meetings Act law this is very important the Open Meetings Act is talks about how you must hold your meetings how they are open to the public etc etc. We have a link to information about that here and the lights in the state legislature with the actual sections are. And I'll also mention that last week. Yes, last week, we did an income our income is live was about the Open Meetings Act. We did an update there are some changes coming this there have been some changes over the last few years and new changes coming to it in July. So I highly recommend that you watch that or look at the slides for that I will have that as a link in our on our accreditation website. Soon so you have a quick link to that. Let me make sure that you are following that open meetings law your board is. Now, both your board and your library director need to be certified. And this is where we're going to pop back over into the certification sections of our accreditation page so. So as I said, as I showed you at the beginning here we have on the same pop out the all the information about library accreditation and then about our board and librarian certifications. So your library board has to be certified in your library director has to be certified there's two separate programs for the board and for the librarians. Additional library staff can also be certified if they want to. You can earn some more points if they are, but the director is required to be. And I will mention here to when we're talking about being certified because I get this question a lot. If you are working on being certified for the first time or being recertified. That's okay you don't there are some require you do have to get to the full certification but as long as you're working on it. If you're a new director like the one I was speaking about before that just started last this month. They may apply for certification for the first time. But as long as they are working towards it and I can see that then that still counts as meeting the qualification for accreditation purposes. So here on the page we do have information about the board. There is an application form for both the board and librarian certification program so your board has to apply let us know you're in the program and your director does. We have a board manual which has got great information I highly recommend making sure you your library director your library board uses this as a resource for everything how your board is supposed to run. We have a companion document directors guidebook for public library directors for how you run your library these are both online documents that you can use. You can look at your board status to see if they are. Currently certified and when they're due for recertification there's also a CE record review for. librarians and your director and then we've got links to submit your credits submit if you've applied if you sit if you've done something you want to earn continuing education education credits for. We're going to go into the pages here to get a lot more detail about all of this. So this is the page for library board for library boards. The whole purpose of this program is to make sure that you are doing good and being an effective library board keeping up on new education new things. Just keeping up to speed on how you're supposed to do your job as a library board member. So any so and what you need to do to be certified is for library board you must earn 20 hours of getting education credit during a three year certification period your board certification is good for three years. So this is a three year process accreditation is now a five year process and these dates will not necessarily match up you may have started your board may have started working on their certification at a completely different time than when you're the same the different year than when your library was accredited and that's perfectly fine. This 20 hours is your board as a whole has to earn 20 hours of see not each individual person and that is through in a three year period. So by Nebraska state statutes you have to have five board members at a minimum. And between all five of them you have to earn 20 hours in total. So that's four hours per person in three year period. Easy, easy peasy to get that done not it shouldn't be an issue at all. In addition, if your board members are all doing something together, they each earn that credit. So if five of your board members all sit together and watch an hour long webinar, then you've earned five hours of see each person earned that hour. So your five hours and already just by watching one thing together. So lots of ways that you can earn that and keep up with that to get started in the program you do have to do apply for certification. You have to let us know that you are trying to get your board certified so that we know when CE forms are submitted to us it's for this purpose. So you do have to submit this form first and then we give you your start date of whenever you're starting your certification based on whatever you have submitted this form to us in the first time. After that, you can submit your CE activity to us we have a form here where you can fill in and say just what the library is what your board members did and their names. What's great about this form is you don't, you can submit one activity and then multiple board members names all in one shot you don't have to do a separate one for each board member here. So you would say we attended this webinar on this date, and here's the names of the five people that did it, and then you get five hours of CE for that you just throw that all in one section there. So I leave the page. You can check your board status to see what is their certification level are they certified and and when is it due for recertification. So you can see here, we've got all our libraries listed here, you can sort of differently if you want to by default by city. And you can see whether board is certified and when their expiration is you see the ones in red have expired and need to work on getting recertified. Some of the boards have just never done the program yet. As you can see here, your expiration date for certification live for a library for library boards is all over the place and it varies. This is based on the dates that that first application form was submitted to us. So September 30th of whatever some year was when Ainsworth submitted theirs and now that's their renewal date. Almas is April 11th whenever there's comes up. So as you can see here, it does not match up at all with your accreditation. Even when accreditation was on a three year process, it still was, you still did it one year at a time at some random date. So I'm going to look here just at this one since I was just talking about it. All of these links here, you click on the library's name and it brings up that library board specific details about their certification and their CE they have earned. So you can see for the current period of three years what we know that you have done and how many when it was how many credits you earned and who did that. We should tell you how many. So right now Alma has 12 credits they've earned CE they need eight and they need it by April 11th of next year. So they have plenty of time to get those last eight credits done. We also list who we know are your current board members. If this information you think is wrong, let us know we have a link here it'll go to our CE people and we'll double check and fix that for you. No problem. If you think there's something missing here that you know you did that they did attend or that you submitted and you don't see it yet also reach out to us. Mary Gaible is our administrative assistant here in library development and she keeps track of that for everyone and she can double check for you and see what we are missing. If you attend something live at the library commission like this workshop right now, I will send the attendance report to Mary and tell her you attended and you need to earn the credit for this. This is for boards for librarians for anybody. If you watch a recording of something or attend something elsewhere something that's not the library commission's live event, we don't get sent all of that information at all. You need to submit that yourself using that sort of the reporting form. So live events run by the commission, we will either in person or online. I submit for you anything else you've got to do it yourself. Okay, back to our board certification page. So there are, let me have any question about that to have the process the timing how that all works. Sure. All right, so there's lots of ways that your board can earn CE credits, attending workshops webinars conferences, anything in person or recorded you can earn CE for you can see how much you can earn and submit it here. Now for boards, the, the key about what you can earn CE for is, it has to be something to do with doing your job as a library board member, meaning, you know, not just anything that you're earning that's a continuing education program. So for example, if you attend a workshop or a training session about summer reading program that's great, you're welcome to keep up on that and if you're interested in it. But that's something that's the librarian's job to do. It's not you as a board and library director's job as your duty for your duties as a board member is running the less the summer reading program isn't part of that. So you wouldn't be able to earn CE credit for that has to be something specific to your job, your duties as a board member. And we have a lot of explanations that of that here and you can see the kind of things we're talking about. And so these other areas, other resources that we have up here. The library commission has paid for all library, Nebraska library staff and boards to have access to trustee Academy courses and short takes for trustees trustees mean board members. These are available from American Library Associations United for Libraries section. This is a division of LA that's about for trustees friends and foundations. And so we pay for everyone who have access to these resources. So these are the kind of things and the same type of topics that you could have access to, you would earn credits for as a board member, working with the director library budgets, intellectual freedom, etc, etc. The short takes for just some shorter things that you can watch. So if you need only a small amount of time, watch a bunch of these and earn credits together. You can also link to some other states that have some good board and trustee resources out there. You can watch any of these and earn CE credits for it. There are some other webinars we've done more links to the United for New United for Libraries has their own workshops and things that they do that are board related, you can watch any of those live or recordings. Anything else you can find out find out there I mean we've given you some things we know about but if you come across some other webinar or some event that has something to do with being a trustee or a board member. Then you can submit that for CE. All right, we'd have a question here that came in which actually this is a good question. The question is we have had some turnover in our board does that affect the certification. Do you mean a board member left and, and you're in the middle of recertifying does their do that was just what they've attended still count. Yes, you don't lose the CE someone has as earned because they left the board. It's still valid and it still counts. So if there is a change. For example, if let's see here. So you can see here we give the initials of the people who had attended all these things. So if there had been someone else who had been on the library board like, you know, for example, Jane Smith was on this being the abbreviation, but she's no longer on the board, but up here she did attend something and there says there's a little JS that's okay you did not lose those CE credits that's fine. So turnover is okay we know that happens people coming down go. Also, and I should mention this too since you did mention turnover. If you're, you know as I said you have to have a minimum of five members, but if you're in the middle of trying to replace people and you're only you're down to like three or four because there happens to be the turnover happening right now. That's okay. We know there will be transition time sometimes when you don't have the full five, but you're working on getting another one and that's okay. Just let us know as soon as you have the new people on so we can update all of our information here. So having turnover and having brief times when there's not the full amount that you normally have is okay. You're welcome just thank you that's reassuring. Yeah, we we we're we're not trying to make this hard for you but we're trying to make sure you you do you know, you keep up with the law, we don't want you to get in trouble for that so you know, help you with that problem. All right, so that's all the information on the board certification any other questions about library boards or their certifications before I move on to the library and one. All right, so library certification public library and certification this is someone that any library staff member can do. Library directors are required to be certified in order for their library to be accredited. This is also about online learn or ongoing learning professional development keeping up with what's going on in the field. Keeping your education going on you can become a librarian, you know, 1015 years ago and that's great but things are going to change you're going to want to keep up with what's happening. So that's what the purpose of this is for you to make sure you keep up without your continuing learning. Same thing as the boards you have to submit an application as an individual letting us know that you want to be in the certification program. This is so that when we know we know that when you attend something like this workshop or anything else that when this when I submit the attendee report that it's going towards this. If you don't actually apply to be in the certification program attending something nothing will get added to your CE record for the certification because we don't have one. You need to let us know you want to be working towards certification. There's different levels that will get into a second here. Librarians and directors have to do 45 CE credits in a three-year period. A lot more of course than a board because they are running the library so it is much more. But that is still only 15 hours per year over each because you have three years to do that. So that's still not too bad 15 hours per year when you break it down like that not too bad at all. So there are different levels of certification are based on your education level. You may have attended library school library program at a college or university. And if you did you can depending on what level what how high your degree was you are in that particular level of accreditation of certification. The certification that is required for accreditation is detailed over here on the help page that we have. And it is based on your community's population legal service area. So the larger your community the higher your level directors level of certification must be. And the same thing for your library staff if any of them want to. So and if you are you know depending up to 24 and 2499 you can just be have level one and then two three ten thousand above our bigger have to have level five which is a master's degree in library science. Or if you don't have these degrees you have not attended college or university classes that is perfectly fine. We understand that not every librarian in the state not every library staff member is going to want to do that or can afford to do that or wants to actually get a degree. We have our basic skills courses for that purpose. These are classes that are offered throughout the year with just the basics of how to be a librarian how to do your job. And if you complete those courses then you earn the appropriate level of certification for your library size. Our basic skills classes are offered throughout the years. The year we have some required classes and some electives and you can take them when it's convenient for you over that three year period they're offered every year January through December on a rotating basis. So every year every class is offered offered again so you have plenty of time to get through all of them if you need to take those classes. As I said with the boards in the library certification you can be working towards that too. So if you are due for recertification or if you apply for the first time and you haven't done the basic skills yet or you haven't done the 45 hours of CE credit that's okay. This new driver director I told you about they're probably signing up right now but they're going to be up for re-accreditation next year. Definitely if not done 45 hours between now and then but that's okay. I can look at your CE record and see you've actually been doing something and you're working towards it and that's perfectly fine. We have our basic skills are on our calendar so you can look up those if you want to keep up with them. You can look up your own CE record as well just like we looked at the library boards record. I can't show you one of these because it's personal to each person but you can look up your own. There's a password you have to get into your own record and there's a password look up here. You can get that email to you if you don't know what yours is. You can see same thing as the board one. How many hours have I earned? How many hours do I need? When is my certification up for renewal? If you do submit something to us or that you've attended something do give Mary at least a week or two here. It says 10 working days to have something show up in your CE record. It does take time. It's done manually. It's not an automated thing. When I send her the report for today give her at least a week or 10 days to get that information into your record to reflect it. How can you earn CE for Librarian? We have a link here. A whole separate page because there's so many things that librarians can do and more detail about that. Same thing as library boards, workshops, webinars, conferences, anything that's about doing your job as a librarian. Anything library related you can attend and earn credits for. You can take college courses. Just courses here and there if you want to. If something library related and you can earn CE for that. In person, online, recordings, all counts for all of this. Something else that I didn't realize until I started really getting into myself. If you teach or present at a conference you can earn CE for doing that presentation or that teaching. For example, if you do a presentation at the Nebraska Library Association Conference, let us know that you did that and you can earn CE for that hour or however long that presentation was. If you present on Encompass Live, my weekly show, or on some other webinar somewhere, you'll earn the credit automatically for presenting on Encompass Live. But let us know if you've presented for some other state or some other organization. If you've presented at one of the events that one of our regional library systems does. You can earn CE for those presentations as well. And we have lots more information here about what are eligible, how it counts, what counts, what doesn't count. If you have any questions or issues or wondering about this, Holly Duggan is our CE coordinator. She can talk to you about what is eligible, what isn't for both public librarian certification and board certification. All right, so we have a question here that just popped in. Let me see here. I did not know I needed to apply for my board to start certification and then been taking classes already. When I apply, can we use those classes from the last six months? Sure. If we would, what we would do about that, I would say reach out to Holly and explain that to her that you didn't know and see what she is willing to do for that. And she should have to see what the courses were or how long, you know, if you want to bump back your date or not. You'd have to talk to Holly and ask her about that. Sorry, I'm not exactly sure. That kind of thing she would do on a case-by-case basis talking to you about what you've been doing, how come they didn't get signed up to start with and everything. All right, any other questions about board or librarian certification? All right, so back to our qualifications. You want to get into this form soon. You need to have received local funding, we received local funding from your municipality. It cannot be a library run with a budget just done by donations or grants. You have to have actually a local city village township that actually provides you some sort of budget, some sort of funding showing that the community, the city is actually, your municipality is supporting the library. You have to do the most recent public library survey and our supplemental survey. I already mentioned how those are used in the form and we'll see that live in just a minute here. You have to have paid library staff working all, working at the library. You cannot be a volunteer run library entirely. Now, I will explain. You can have volunteers work sometimes, that's okay. If you need to take off to attend a workshop or a conference or for any other reason and a volunteer comes in just to run the library that day or a board member comes in and they're not paid, that's okay. As you'll hear there that that can happen, but that cannot be your standard staff. Your usual staff has to be paid staff. Your director has to have an email address and use it and check it regularly. This is how we communicate with you. This is on here because that has been an issue in the past where we have not been able to librarians and directors not checking their emails must be required that they do.  This is comes from the Nebraska state statutes. So this is your basic services checking out books using the computers, getting reference help from the librarians.  Yes, it's okay to charge out of non resident if you want to. That's something that we people do. Libraries do. They have to pay for a lot and non resident card, a certain amount of money and then they get to use the library for a year. That's okay. This is about people in your actual legal service area. You can also charge for certain other things, not your basic services. I know sometimes you would charge people for supplies for using the makerspace or for supplies for some craft event that you're going to have. Or registration to attend a special program because you're hiring, you're paying someone to come in and do it. That is all okay. These extra things you can still charge people for stuff, just not these basic services, your basic circulation, using the collection, getting reference help from the librarians. In addition, providing access to the internet at no charge. You can't charge a per minute charge or anything for anyone to use your internet. And then the last of the 12 minimum is making any report to whoever your governing body is, your municipality. By Nebraska Statutes, this is usually done in February of the year. But if you do it at another time, because that's just when your community is scheduled, that's okay. Just at least have something that you do submit annually an official report of the library's activities throughout the year, annually to your governing body. Now, if you've done got all of those things, you can then apply for accreditation. And it will come up and ask you for to log in now with a username ID and password. This is the same ID and password that you use to submit your public library survey, the bibliot that you lose to log into Bibliostat. We didn't want to have to make you think of, I have to remember some new new password or anything. So the same one you use for your survey, you use to log into your application accreditation form. There is a look up here if you need to look up your libraries if you don't know what it is. But I will that will be also be included when you get your email from me inviting you to start your process. It has the password in that email as well. So I'm not going to, I can't from this page log into one, but I've already logged into one like I said behind the scenes here so we can see what the actual form has in it. So this one I just use Keen Memorial Library and Fremont as an example. All of the information and data in here, as I said that you will see is from their public library survey is all public out there information anyways. So this is your form, you've got some basic instructions here, and you can see we talk about the items that come from your public library survey. If you meet that criteria, that guideline you get a green check. If you don't, you get a red X. You can see here, we've met the 12th into a qualifications here, but here that's what it looks like in the actual application form. And you can see we explain where that came from in the supplemental survey we asked about having a friends group and a foundation group. They have a friends and not a foundation. And you can see here it tells you on every one of these how many points you earn for each one of those. There is help throughout the form. That same help page that we opened up on the that showed for the minimum qualifications now in the form is a little pop up. And it has helped for all all the way through the form. And you can see here if we scroll through there's lots and lots of different help things here. So any of the items that we thought you might need to know a little more about we wanted to explain to you more links to useful information related to that particular criteria. Click on that yellow question mark at any time. Over here on the top right, you'll see there's a box with points and it's a floating box moves along with you. This is keeping track of how many points you've earned. So you can see here from right off the bat with just the data that's been prefilled into here from the public library survey. Keen has 59 points.  I earn 10 points for having my communities response plan 69. I review it annually or another five uncheck something number goes down. So as you're going through the form that box will float along with you so you can see where you are in your points total as you're checking and unchecking things. You can see who your peer libraries are now that you're in your specific form. This just tells you the peer libraries not they're a full data. And you can see your libraries in the middle with the ones that are above and below. I mentioned earlier, we sometimes have to pull in other states from other libraries from Iowa. And here for Keen, there's only a couple of libraries in Nebraska that are similar size to Fremont. So we pull in some Iowa libraries. If you want to know more, like I said earlier, the data from these libraries, their public library survey data, contact Sam and he can get you all your peer library data. Here is just a reminder of what our points levels are. I'm going to scroll all the way to the bottom here just to show you to before we go into each question. When you do get to the end, it automatically fills in with the contact information directors information from your public library survey. Your points total is down here as well. And then you can either submit or save and come back to it later. If you're completely done, you think you've entered all the questions you hit submit that goes to me. If you need to, if you get to a point where you need, you know, you need to go look something up, you're not sure about an answer to question, you get interrupted, whatever, you can save and come back later.  It'll pick up where you left off so you can, you won't lose any of your work. You don't have to start all over fresh. You don't have to do this whole form all in one sitting. All right, so getting into the specific questions, we're going to go into some of these, some of these are more detailed than others just to show you all the things that you can earn points for. As I said, we write off the bat because we click those first 12 boxes, we get our 12 minimum qualifications checked off. We have to have a community's response plan submitted to me. This was previously called a strategic plan. You may have may see that on some things and some pages. And if you have a previous version, it might be called that. We just changed the name to better reflect what the document actually does. It's about responding for your to your community's needs, not having a full strategic plan for everything your library does. I want to bring your attention to that this just needs to be submitted to me. You send it via email or even through the regular mail if you want to just send it to me. It does not have to be approved and the final version. And it can be a work in progress. That's okay. Previously used to have just it said an approved plan and that was just getting too confusing libraries are waiting and waiting and waiting to do this. I need to have both the plan and this format to compare them together. There are things that are mentioned in this application form about stuff in your plan and I need to be able to look at that at the same time. So submit to me your plan and whatever final version you think it is and then do your form. Similar time. Changes can be made to your plan after you submit it though. It is not in stone. I will look at it and see if I like if I think it's good for meets all the criteria. If anything need to be tweaked or changed, I'll reach out to you. If I see something in your form that you didn't check off or I see something in your plan that you didn't check off on your form. Your application form. I will let you know and say hey, you need to earn these points to or if there's something in your form that you checked off that you didn't mention your plan. I want to talk to you about that too. How come you didn't mention this? You said it. You did it here, but it's not here. So look at them together. So you just have to have your plan submitted to me, not have any final approval in order to check this box. Now, if you try and check anything else and haven't checked that box, that is one of the requirements for being accredited. You will get this pop up that tells you you have to have a plan submitted. You can't go any farther without checking that box. It won't let you go any farther in the form. So just make sure you do check that off and say, yes, I'm submitting something.  You should review your plan regularly. It is not something that is to be written and then put up on a shelf and never looked at for another five years. You do have to have it revised or written within the past five years. So looking at it, keeping up with it, making sure that you are following things you plan to do. Our next section is all about policies. What policies do you have? These are some that we have come up with as some examples of policies that you could have. If you have other ones that we don't list here, you're welcome to mention them and give you up to four additional ones that you can add. You earn one point for each one of these policies that you have. I'm just randomly clicking here. I don't know what Fremont actually has. So you can see I'm getting points for each one I have. You don't have to have a separate policy of each of these things. You just have to have any of these topics mentioned in any other policy. So for example, your customer complaints policy may be part of your patron behavior policy. Things may be part of something else and that's okay. Just as long as all of these topics are covered somewhere in your library's policies. We did make some changes here and add some things here as part of our review that I have mentioned that we did earlier this year. We added book challenges and considerations. This is a big thing that a lot of libraries are working on of course right now are dealing with. So we added that if you have a policy about challenges or reconsiderations. We added feedback to complaints. We just had customer complaint policy but you may have ways of getting other feedback. That's not just saying bad things about the library. We added disaster planning as part of your emergency and safety section. So if you have some sort of disaster planning policy. And we added a non-discrimination policy. So if you have anything like that in any of your, let's make sure you get all these here. Any of you have mentioned anywhere in your policies. And we added an additional, we had three other options. We added a fourth one. So you have up to four others. If you have something we haven't mentioned here, write it down here. And you can earn the point for that. Some libraries ask about writing policies. We do have in our help guide here information on writing policies and examples from other states and other libraries that you can use as a reference if you need. You can earn points for having a technology plan. Technology plan is something different from your strategic plan or your community needs response plan. This is specifically about the technology in your library, the computers, the internet, the actual stuff you have running your internet and your technology. How are you keeping up with that? What is your sustainability plan for that? When will you be updating your computers? How often? So if you have one and give us the date of the last time you looked at it here. And then do you have a friends or a foundation? Now, I'll mention here too, that as I said this, and you can see here, this information came from your public library survey, which was submitted anytime from last November to February. I believe it was a deadline. But if something has changed from the time you submitted your survey to when you do your accreditation application form, we can make that change in here for you from behind the scenes. I want this form needs to reflect the state of your library right now when you're submitting it, not when you did your public library survey last November, December, January. So for example, at the time this was submitted, they didn't have a library foundation, but maybe since then they've actually created one. And one has been set up for the library, and they now want to be able to earn these points for having a library foundation. Just reach out to me, let me know, hey, this is different now from when I did our survey, you know, three, four months ago, and we can go and we can switch that for you and get you earning those points. So do let us know if anything has changed on any of these, any of this information that comes from your survey. The second section of the form is resources, your income facility staff, basic running of the library. This is where you first get into your peer comparisons. It shows the library's income, the peer average and the peer medium, median. And if the library meets either one of those, they earn the points. So for local income, open hours, the schedule of open hours reflects an attempt to meet the needs of the community. This question is more about how do you ask, have you asked the library community, what do they want. It doesn't mean that you've changed the hours. Sometimes you may, you know, put out a little survey saying, when do you think the library should be open, should we have Saturday evening hours, whatever. And you may get some, you know, suggestions that are not viable. Just like, no, we know nobody's coming in on Saturdays, we tried it Saturday evenings, we're just not going to do it even if like two or three people said yes. But you've attempted to meet the needs, you've asked them if they, what their opinion is about the library's hours. And then of course, you must meet all federal, state and local codes for safety and access. I kind of hope everyone would check this. If you don't, that's a concern. And we do have information here, links to, this is about the Americans with Disabilities Act, Safety Guidelines. Nebraska has its own accessibility guidelines and checked if there's anything local. So this is about meetings, you know, state and federal law. Staff, we have staff expenditures, this is staff salaries, and this is where the certifications come in. If the library director is certified at the proper level, and if you have any additional staff that are also certified to that level. So you see here the level required for Fremont because they are, the population is more than 10,000, they have to be level five. And the director is, this is all automatically carried over. Number of library staff you have, and then this one is important. Financial resources committed and expended by the library for professional development. So this is if you have a line item in your budget or your specific funding you have spent. The library has spent to send your staff or director to conferences, to events, to meetings, to attend something, to take a class, or bring someone into the library to do professional development for your staff. Anything that you've spent for that. Next section here is technology. Do you have an integrated library system? Do you have a computer catalog? Is it available online for your library system available online? Do you have broadband internet access at speeds adequate to meet user needs? This question and the last one here, adequate number of computers as determined by your community's response plan or technology plan. Both of these questions are very subjective, and this is going to be your opinion. I hope you'll be honest about it. Is your internet fast enough? Are people complaining about the slowness? Are you struggling doing your job because it takes so long for a page to load or something to come up? If you are, then you would not want to check this. You don't have internet access adequate to meet yours or your user's needs. The same thing for number of computers for your users. Are people waiting in line constantly? Are they complaining that they can never get on a computer because there's not enough? Same thing. Only check that if you think it's going well. Do you have a telephone with an answering machine? Technology accommodations for persons with disabilities. This is slightly different than meeting the American with Disabilities Act. This is having extra technology like screen readers and special equipment for anyone with disabilities to use your library services and resources.  Does it reflect the mission and goals of the library? You will have your mission statement or vision statement will be in your community's response plan. I certainly hope that's the point of your library that you're reflecting that mission statement. How do you do with weeding? Comes from your public library survey. Library staff using online websites. This means going out onto the internet using your search engine of choice to look up information for your users or helping your users do it themselves. Just going online and using online websites. And then the next four here about your collection are all comms from your survey data. Your local expenditures, circulation, turnover rates in the circulating collection and collection size. So numbers wise, how do you compare? You can see here if we have two out of the four. Our next section is services. This is providing what services are you providing out into your community? Do you have any outreach programs that you do? So this is going for people doing bookmobile, going out to people who can't come into the library. Doing a story time at the local daycare center. Things like that, getting outside of the library and getting the library out there into the community. Do you use interlibrary loan? Do you have interlibrary loan where you borrow items for your citizens yourself, your own program? Or if you use the library commission's interlibrary loan program? For libraries that do not have the staff or funding to do it themselves, we do provide an interlibrary loan service to do it on their behalf. You can look on our website to look up interlibrary loan if you need that. And then we have attendance at programs. How is that compared? And I'll mention this one too. Attendance and things like your circulation of items. We do understand that over the last two years with the pandemic, some of these numbers may not be doing so well. It's not doing well for everybody, for most places. So your comparisons here, we're going to see how they go. We're going to pay attention. If anything, we see drastically changes someone's accreditation level. We will tweak some of this if we feel the need to. So we'll see how it comes in when your data starts coming in. We start seeing how the peers are, how the peer comparisons are going. We've had lots of libraries who are concerned about the fact that our public library survey data, it looks terrible because of the COVID-19 pandemic. We had less programs. We had less people coming in, less things circulating. But for some libraries, it kind of just switched gears. We did have more people doing pickups, more people attending our virtual programs. Wow. So we'll see how it works out in the end. And it also, it's comparing you to other libraries. Lots of libraries are struggling the same way you are. So as far as accreditation is concerned and these peer comparisons, everyone's data is wonky. So it may all wash out in the end and your accreditation level will be completely unaffected. We'll see how it goes. But I'll let you know I am paying attention to that and we will take action from our sides if we feel the need to, if things start looking really wrong or wrong. Yeah. Library programs or target services are specified in your community's response plan. In your plan, we were going to mention specific groups, specific, you know, we're going out to the senior center and doing a story or reading or bringing books to the seniors because they can't get to the library. We're doing storytime out at the daycares. So, or any or people coming in, you have a specific program, a teen makerspace night or something. So that is a specific audience that you are targeting with some sort of program. Then you've mentioned it, you can earn points for that. Databases, do you use the databases that we provide to the library commission and that would be Nebraska access. We provide that to you at no cost to your library. We receive funding from the state legislature for that. So if you use those databases, you can earn points there. And if you subscribe to have something, anything in addition to that, any databases that are licensed by your library on top of what we provide you for free. This is something you, as you can see here, this was just, you submitted this in your survey. And then you can see here all the different ones that Fremont says that they have. Part four of your application form is cooperation and collaboration. Okay. This is working with other organizations, other entities in your community. And just somehow, you know, working, letting people know outside the library that you're there. And you can see here, we're now getting into areas where there is not any peer comparisons. Nothing is pulled from your public library survey. This is where you can put in all the things you do that specific and earn all these points for things that are unique to your library. A library director or someone on the board attending at least two of your municipality meetings throughout the year. So you don't have to necessarily be on the agenda, be presenting, but just being there. The meetings of cities and villages are also operate under the Open Meetings Act. It's a public body. So they are required to be opened as well. So you can just go and attend and sit there. And that counts you or a board member. It keeps you kind of in their eyes that they realize the library is here. We exist and we're doing things and we're paying attention. Please pay attention to us and we can do things together. The library participates in community organizations and groups to keep people out there knowing about that. And we will help here. We're talking about things like Rotary, Kiwanis, other community groups, business groups, Chamber of Commerce. Are your staff attending their meetings and letting them know, hey, we're paying attention to what you're doing. Maybe we can do something together. Let's talk about it. Do you have a team board? This is an area that some libraries have struggled with over time. I think it's getting better. But parents bring in their little kids for library programming all the time. Adults come and use the library for the resources they know all about it. But you kind of lose it when the teens become independent and do their own thing. They don't always come stick with going to the library. So many libraries are coming up with a teen advisory board to find out from the teens themselves what they would like to do at the library, what they could do at the library. So do you have that at your library? Do you cooperate with other entities for providing shared services?  So for example, some libraries are doing story walks and maybe putting it in the local park because they don't have the grass and open space on the library's location. So that's a cooperative service that you're offering in conjunction with the Parks and Rec Department. Advocacy efforts. Are your library board members or any staff participating in them? The Nebraska Library Association has their annual Advocacy Day. ALA, other organizations have advocacy training and workshops and events. So does anybody participate in any of those? You can list the names of the people. You can earn up to five points for people who are attending those, participating in that. And then you do any sort of resource sharing. We have multiple group purchases here at the Library Commission, Overdrive. Nebraska is just a program we offer where you can loan books to patrons from other libraries. And our Pioneer Consortium. These are just examples.  Are you in any of those? And the last section of the application form is communications. This is how you are getting the word out about your library and what it's doing. On your library website, do you post your mission statement or vision statement, whatever you call it, and your library policies?  For these things here, I will also mention what's on your library website, what you're doing in social media. I will check these. So if you say you have something, you check this box and say you have something on your library website, I will go looking for your library's website and make sure I can find it. If you provide interaction, do you do anything social media? Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, whatever is the next thing that comes up. Are you using it regularly? If you say you are and you list here all the different ones that you are on, I will go and try and find your library's profile on each of these, whichever ones you list that your partner using. Even though we have that social media and a lot of people, and it's great for PR, still need to do things non-internet related. There are still people that do not have a Facebook page or Twitter or don't want to have Facebook, don't want to do that. So you do still need to do newsletters and if you have a local radio, put posters up in the laundromat or wherever. Put flyers in the bill. Everyone gets a utility bill. Everybody gets a water bill. You put a flyer in there saying storytime coming. These summer reading programs start tomorrow, next month. Anything that is non-internet do you do? Do you have exhibits and displays in your library? So this would be like here's our book display for Women's History Month. Or here is where we allow someone who has a teacup collection to put them in this case and show off their collection. Those kind of displays and interesting things in the library. Letting your community, your public use a bulletin board to post up their own notices. And then reporting to the library or village board usually monthly. So reporting more often than just that one annual report that you submit, actually being on the agenda and talking. It usually used to be your library director or the library board president, depending on how you do it, just letting them know here's what's going on. And then any of these reports that you do, your monthly one, your annual report, do you put them on your website? I'll go and look for them. And communicating with other organizations, business leaders, civic organizations, you're reaching out with mailings or emails or something to the Kiwanis or the Chamber of Commerce saying, hey, the library wants to do this or we have this service. So previously I'd mentioned talking about just attending their events or being a member of the group. Actually sending them some things even more going beyond that and communicating with them about what the library can do for them. And that's the end of the criteria here on the forum. You can see our points have been totaling up here on the side of the floating box and at the bottom. If I think I'm done and ready to go with this, I would hit submit and then that would come to me. You would hit submit and it would come to me. If there is, like I said, it's not in stone. If anything, I was just double checking something, a question that was coming in here. Okay. I'm sorry. If after you submit this and you submit your community's response plan, as I said, I will look at them both together. I will compare them, see if everything is mentioned in both places. And I may reach out to you to make any tweaks. Like I said, we can make changes to your plan. We can make changes to your application form boxes you've checked or not checked until we come with a final version of both. And then that indicates what your accreditation is at. If you're not completely done, you just save and resume and then come back to it and pick up later.  I believe they are up for a re-accreditation this year. So that is our application form. Does anybody have any questions about the form, any of the criteria, any of the guidelines, anything that you are confused about, want to know more about? Go ahead and type in the questions section. And I do see we have a question here. Kendra, I do see your email. Someone did have a little technology issue and wasn't able to get the question in the application. And they go to webinar. That's fine. That's a question about policies. Do we need to submit the policies with the community's response plan or just check the boxes? We do not require that you submit the policies. I know that does seem kind of, I'm doing this on the honor system, but I am. So you're not required to send all these policies to us. It would be if you want to, that's great. I can also review your policies if you want me to take a look at them just to see are these good? Are we doing this right? So you're not required to submit them to me. And they're not part of your community's response plan. No. But if you do say here that you have your policies on your library website, I will go and look. So that would be a way of submitting, I suppose. So do keep that in mind. If you say you have your misstatement, your policies, that's how I can go and see them. But no, we don't require that you submit all of your policies to me. I am trusting you to say that you do have all of these. Any other questions, comments, anything else you want to know about the application form itself? All right. Get back to my main accreditation page here. Okay. All right. It doesn't go any of his questions right now. That's fine. What we're going to do now is in the second half of the workshop, we're going to talk all about the community needs response plan. But before we do that, we're going to take a little break. It's been about an hour and a half, about halfway through our time allotted for the workshop here today. And we're going to take a five minute break so that I can take a break and you all can get up, walk around, hit the restroom, refill your proper coffee, whatever you need. And then we'll come back and pick up talking about community's response planning. So it looks like it's 239, 240 by my clock here. So at 245, I will come back and I will pick up with a community needs response planning. So go ahead and take a break, walk around, stretch, and we'll be back in five minutes. All right. It is 245 by my various clocks here. So we are going to go on to the community needs response plan. Before I jump into that, does anybody have any questions you thought about while we're on the break on it? See if there's anything you're thinking of or wondering about before I move over to the planning. All right. We do have another, looks like another email question came in wanting to know about outreach activities. Would home delivery service count? Absolutely. Yes. Reaching out to anyone who cannot come into your, into your library. Definitely. Home delivery would count for that. Database question. We just added cricket access for use with our makerspace with that count. Oh, oh, you mean paying paying for and subscribing to the cricket online stuff. Yes, I think that would count for me. Yes, if that's something that you do, I know there is the sign up on the website for things. So it's something that you pay for and license specifically. Yes, that's the point of that question too. So that would count if there's something extra that you're paying for in addition to the free databases that we offer through the library commission. All right. So let's get into communities response planning. Any of the links here on the accreditation page will bring you to our communities response planning page where we also have the same notification here accreditation is resuming in 2022. The accreditation is about providing services to your community. So the community's response plan is about responding to those community needs. What is happening out in your community? What can you do? Finding out what's going on out there. And so that's what the purpose of writing this plan is. There are some communities that are really good at this. Some places do this all the time. You're reaching out and doing things. But in the past, it had been noticed that maybe some libraries were needing a little help with this, some more guidance, something to really like a plan to keep them on track with reaching out and looking at what's going on in their community. So this community's response plan is something that is required as part of being accredited. As I said, it used to be called a strategic plan. That was very intimidating, overwhelming, confusing to some people. Strategic plan is usually something that's big and it's about the entire, but everything your library is going to do all the time. And that's not what we wanted for this. So we changed the name. It was a recommendation of Scott Childers, one of our regional library system directors actually. The whole purpose of this is to how are you responding to your needs in your community? What's going on in your community? So let's just call it that. Community needs response plan. It's much more accurate to what we're actually asking you to do. It makes more sense. It's clearer, I think. So that is what it's called now. If you have a previous strategic plan, that's okay. The name isn't important, but that's just what we are referring to it now as to make it clearer. There are several required elements to this and we'll get into the details of that in a second. I'm just going to go through the overview of this information. We have some webinars and resources here that can help you with some of the things related to this. Census data is really good for looking up demographics, of course. Last year we did have someone from the Census Bureau come on and come up live and do a session for us on how to use that. Community engagement. This is a really good presentation that we had done about doing that, reaching out into your community. And then there are two sessions here that say strategic planning, yes, but it's specifically for libraries. And it's actually some really good basics about how to do this kind of thing, specific to just a library. So lots of their tips and tricks and information in there can help use this as well. We also have some examples of previous libraries, previous plans that you can look at for inspiration. You can borrow some of their formatting, some of what they have in theirs. That's not a problem. I do note here, these are from before this year, so they do mention some things that are a little different. As I mentioned, when we did do our review of the accreditation process and this plan, we did do some tweaking of one part of this. So you will see that these plans all look, have a different part than what you'll be required to have in your plan. But that's okay. The information is still good. The format is still good. You can still use it as reference.  Some things can help you create your plan. Now, these are not, it is not required that you use these. This is, these are just, if you don't have something already, if you need, need a, this is just a one process, one way to get there. You may be finally just writing up what you want to, having it meet all of the elements included in there. And as long as they're all in there, that's fine. But if you're not sure where to get, how to get started, you've never done one of these before. These are just, can help you get all of those parts. So it's not the only way to get there, but it's just something we can, we can help you. And if you just maybe need help with one area. Like, I don't know how to do all this focus group and asking community stuff. Just look at this worksheet and these help guides in that particular area. So it's just to, just some helpful things if you want them. All right. So as I said, there are seven basic elements to the plan. We will get, dig even more into this when we go through all of these resources and how to use them. All of these elements must be somewhere in the document you sent to me. And as I said, this is not something online that you fill in the blanks, like the online accreditation form. It's just a document, you write, type it up, send it to me, email it to me, send it to me in the mail. However you want to get it to me is fine. But all of these parts have to be there. Your library's mission state can be your mission statement, vision statement, goal statement, whatever you call it, that needs to be in the plan. You'd have done a community profile. So this is a basic overview of the demographics of your community. What makes your community unique, the trends, what's, who's coming in, who's, who's, who's leaving the community. This is where that census data can be really useful to you. So we'll get into a lot of information about how you can do that. Something about the community profile that I will mention that is very important is it does need to be current data. We are very lucky right now that we just did a census. The census is done every 10 years. It was just done in 2020. So we have some good numbers. The previous census census was from 10 years ago. You definitely don't want to have your old numbers on your plan. We'll have it be your current ones either using the new census or even more recent data since 2020. If there's been some sort of community profile done by your own municipality. There is other data that I'll show you and I'm going to get down to it that you can find more, even more recent census information from 2020. But this is one area in their library's plans where when a library is doing an updated one, I oftentimes have to send it back because the numbers are the same from the previous plan. Previously, the plan had to be done every, it had to be done within the last three years, now it's within the last five years. But even three years ago, your numbers would have changed. You can't have the same population numbers and census data as you had from the previous plan. And obviously not now when we're five years or more down the road, it can't be the same number. So make sure you get new numbers. An assessment of your community's needs, what's going on in your community. You need to be looking outside the library. This is not what the library needs, not what the library can do for your community. This is stop thinking about the library and just go see what's going on in my town. What are people complaining about? What are they asking for? What do they think is doing really well? Now, this is going to be big. It's not going to be just what needs are out there that the library can do something about. We want you to look at just everything that's happening in town. Many of those things you can't do anything about. It's not your responsibility. You have no way to do it. But there are some things that are going to float to the top and you're going to say, hey, we can connect to that. We can do something about that. But I just need to see that you were looking at everything that's out there and you give me a nice overview of here's all the things happening in town. And all the complaints and all the feedback. And now we've focused on these couple of things that we're going to try and help out with. The next section, next part four, this is the big change that we made. An analysis of the library strengths and resources and barriers and opportunities for improvement. This used to be called the SWAT analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. That was the hardest part of the plan that many libraries just could not get through, didn't understand, struggled with. And in our review committee, they said, yeah, that's just and also places people don't like that. Sometimes SWAT just sends people over the edge. And it's like, I don't want to do this. And that's okay. So we are no longer doing SWAT. Yay. We are looking at the library. What are your strengths? What resources do you have? What barriers are there to providing your services and resource and what opportunities might there be out there? These barriers and opportunities could be in the library or outside of the community. So we've tried to make this really more useful and really more accurate again to what I really wanted you to be thinking about. So no longer will you see SWAT anywhere. You will see it in these previous examples because it used to be what we had that section called. But now it's just analyzing what's going on in the library and what's going on in your community and how that all connects. Then taking all this previous data, your community profile, all that demographic information, finding out what's going on in your community and what their needs are. What does the library have to offer or what does the library need? And distilling that all down into, okay, now with all of this information, what can we do about it? How can the library make an effective change on this? What can we do that can just do anything about this? So what you're going to do is come up with ideally three goals, three projects, three things you'll do between now and the next time you do another community's response plan in five years. Some libraries can't come up with three, that's okay. I know on smaller communities there may not be a lot to do. Two is okay. Definitely minimum two, but two to three actual objectives, goals with specifically what you're going to do. And we'll get into getting into all that specifics. And then an evaluation of this. How often are you going to evaluate your plan? What are you going to do? How are you going to? Who's going to do it? A summary of how that's going to happen. Ideally your plan is supposed to be a document that you use. This is not something that you write because I told you to do and then you put it on a shelf and then you come back five years later and see, hey, what do we need to update and change to do it the next time? You're creating these goals and projects and programs you're going to actually do. And this plan will have the information about what you wanted to do and the all of the data backing it up and the reasons why you're doing it. So this should be something you look at regularly just to keep track of what about these three little three projects we want to do based on this. Now, ideally a minimum once a year you should look at the plan, your community's response plan and make sure it's still accurate and useful. Things will change over time. This plan does not have to be in stone. If you decide you're going to do some sort of project and then something out of the blue happens like what happened in Nebraska a few years ago and we had the floods and everything else went out the door. That's perfectly fine. You could have said in 2019 we're going to do this program, but then you got flooded. So I was like, you know what? We're going to do it next year. We're going to do it at a later time or we're going to do it differently because of the flooding. And that's okay. You think the whole reason for evaluating is for being able to tweak and, you know, change on a dime and decide we got to switch up how we're doing this. So those are the basic seven elements that have to be in your plan. They don't have to be in this order or anything, but I have to be able to find all of these parts somewhere in your document that you send me. I highly recommend taking a look at other libraries plans here. There's some really good examples. And the format isn't what's important. It's the content. So here this is Gothenburgs, which is good through 2023 actually. They have this table of contents at the beginning where they set. Here's all the different parts and where it all is in here. You can see they have this one. And then they get into who's our planning team, how we did it, our mission statement. Here's and then here is in paragraph form. Here's our community profile. Here's some good data about our statistics and our demographics and the education level and everything in economics going on in our community. Lead Winside's plan starts with a picture of their library. There's their mission statement first, who was involved in the planning process. And then they go right into it. They don't have a table of contents or anything. And they just do here's their community profile with all their data, just bullet points. It's perfectly fine too. All the numbers right there that I need. I think Paca is another one that's different. Paca, they talk about their mission statement. They put the library bill of rights in here. That's important. They have an index that they come up with first. Telling you what page everything is on. And then getting into an overview of the community, their community profile. They've put things under lots of different headings here. Income population, housing, business, city government, et cetera. So there's no wrong format to do this the wrong way. You just need to have all of these elements in there somewhere. Feel free to borrow another library's format. If one of these really speaks to you and you like, oh, I like the way they did it. Take it, update it with your library's information and use that same format. That is okay. So now we have these templates and guides and resources that can help you get all this information. So now we're going to dig into all of these things here that can help you each part. And like I said, this is just one way to get there, a process. None of this is required for you to do it this way. But hopefully this will help you gather all this information that you need. Right off the bat, we have a 12-step process. 12 steps that go to doing your community's response planning. And you can see these do all refer to different worksheets and help guides that are on our website, on the webpage that we'll pop back to. So this is kind of your outline of all the different steps that you would want to do. And so you can check them off as you do each one and you can refer to the appropriate worksheets or help guides or anything on the main page. So this kind of, you can print out this one page sheet if you want to and use it as a guide to keep you going throughout the whole process. So the first thing we're talking about is planning to plan, having a plan. You don't want to jump into this, like jump in the deep end with no plan, no thinking ahead of time. So you want to sit down and figure out what are we doing, when are we doing it. So we have a worksheet here that can help you. There it is. Just to kind of organize what you're going to be doing. Each planning step may be taken from that 12 steps there. What needs to be done, who's going to do it, when is our target timing for having this done. So like just an overview of everything that we need to do, just to keep track of things. So you can take those 12 steps and plug them into here and then figure it all out and kind of have that kind of an organized manner. You do need to have a team, the planning team. I do not do this on your own as a library director or as library board president doing this alone. You don't want to. This is a lot of work doing the plan, doing the accreditation application form. You need a group of people helping you do this from your library staff, board members, community people, whatever. We have had issues in the past where one particular library that I do recall, a group of people, a lot of staff members came to a workshop of mine a few years ago and they had no idea what they were doing. I said, well, you did this a few years ago. I said, no, the director did it all on their own. They had done the application form for accreditation. They did the community needs response plan all on their own, submitted it. Nobody else was involved in the process. And so, and then that director left the library, went for another job, moved out of state. I'm not exactly sure what, but they were no longer working there. So when the library came up for re-accreditation, nobody knew what had happened previously and nobody knew how to update it or what was done or how it was done. Don't put yourself in that place. Don't put your staff here in that place. You want people doing this with you. It is not a one-person job, definitely. You may be a one-person library, but bring some other people in to help you. So if you have other library staff, find one or two that maybe are interested in doing this. What you can also do is break it up, break up all of these parts of what you would need in a plan and assign different parts to different people. So not everybody has to do this, but just assign a couple people, go get our demographics, go look at the census data and figure out all our numbers, and that's just their job. So try and split up the work among people. Library staff, a board member or two might be interested. Anyone in your community who may be interested in what the library does or is interested in when you're super users, we always have those, the regular users of the library. Someone in a business or someone who doesn't use the library who you know who you think would have good input or you want to get the more involved in the library. Bring them into this process and say, hey, we're trying to do this plan. You don't use the library. We could use your input on wondering and to help us understand why.  I think 12 people is a lot, but if you are going to be dividing up the work, that would probably be good that you have more people. But you don't want only a couple of people. It is definitely a large enough group to get things done. You're going to have to work together. You may have some people on this team that have difficulty with that, but try, you're going to have to be able to corral them and work together and develop consensus to come to resolution about different things. You might not all agree, and that's understandable if you've ever worked on a committee, but make sure that there are people that can work together or if you're willing to be the person that has to make them work together. So there will be a lot of that you will need to deal with. And we have other resources here about planning and project management that can help you do that. So our second worksheet here is about doing your committee profile, finding, doing your demographics of your, what's especially unique about your community. We have a worksheet here that you can use that you can fill in. There we go. Now this is a lot of data here. You do not have to fill in every single part of this. This just gives you an example of the kinds of data that you can get from census information and then fill in the numbers here that then you'll have them somewhere all in one spot that you have them collected to then look at and work with. So we do give you information about going to the American Community Survey on the Census Bureau website, and I'm going to go to the Census page itself and show you that. So just all the different things, education level, languages spoken, work, economic conditions, business care conditions. Lots of information here. Lots of data that you can gather. So like I said, not all required, but this would give you an idea of what kinds of data you can find and a single place to gather it all together. Now we have, Sam Straw has, as always, every year nice enough to provide me with the same thing, but statewide. So this is that same worksheet, but for the whole, for the state of Nebraska. So the state population, and that's at least the state numbers of education level, languages spoken, household, economics, et cetera, et cetera. So if you want to compare your community to the state as a whole, this would be something that you could use. So this is just a reference for you to use if you want to. So what we do now, if there is something like this is already available, don't reinvent the wheel. Don't do it yourself. Some communities already do their own community profiles or have done a community survey or something, gathering information about what's going on in the community, both demographics and community needs for both of these sections here. If something's already been done, don't do this at all yourself. Just go find that document and get it and use what's already been done. Your Chamber of Commerce may have done it. Your municipality may have done it. Your community may have done it for county-wide information. So first look to see if something has already been put together and just use it. Don't give yourself the extra work here if you don't have to. But if you can't find that and do need to, this will help you do that. And the idea of this is you need this actual data. You may think you know what's going on in town or people may comment and they may anecdotally say things. People claim what is happening or what the trend is at all. There's no young kids in town anymore. Everyone's left the town. There's no little kids around. Well, find out. Get the actual data. Look at the census numbers. And you may be surprised to say actually, according to the US census that we just did, we actually have an increase in young families in town. It doesn't look like it. I don't know why, but the numbers state that. Let's find out why. Let's reach out to them and reach out to them and see what we can do for them. So you want data to back up anything you're going to do at the library, whether it's the goals and things you plan in this, just in this form or anything it can help you with. So to gather data, I'm going to go here first to the main census page to start with that. Okay. So here is the data.census.gov is the Census Bureau's main website. And they have a lot of information here. There's tables you can look at and so they have resources to explain how to do this too. And there's also that webinar that we did last year. So definitely look at that. So there's a lot here. I'm just going to give you kind of an introduction overview of it. You're going to really have to dig into some of this data about your community to find the numbers. But you can do maps and tables and profiles. All sorts of information is in here. So I'm just going to scroll back to the top here. And since we're looking at their form before, I'm just going to type in Fremont. There we go. As you can see, when I just typed in Fremont, depending on what may come up, there's lots of Fremonts in the United States, as you can see. You can put in Nebraska. You can put in, I just started doing city. So it came and then Nebraska came up.  So here we do have Fremont, Nebraska. So if I click on that, it will go to their main page. And so now we are in all of these tables and things that were kind of general ones on the main page. We now are all just about Fremont. And there is a lot of tables, as you can see here, a lot of maps available. So depending on how you like to look at data, you can look into any of these if you want to. There are some quick facts down here. You can dig in doing some specific searches. They gave you some of this as like a tip at the beginning on the main page. But here they've done, if you want to just look up Fremont help, housing, income and poverty, click on one of these and get into just that subpage and just that data. So you can dig into all those numbers. What I like here, though, is really nice is there is this profile for every community that is an overview of kind of gathering in some of these numbers. And once it gets loaded up here, it does this little zoom in. There we go. It takes a little time to load up sometimes. See, there's a map of Fremont. But then here are some of the basic numbers. Total population, employment, families, housing, health, education. So this is a nice, and then here I like this, just for me, these bar graphs showing, you know, looking at numbers for me, it's okay, but I can see this better. It kind of catches my attention better. And I'm like, aha, look at this. 18 and over, 65 and over, under five. So ancestry, all of these different things. So this is a, you know, more graphical kind of profile. And really just bringing up those numbers for you. So this is the kind of thing you can use to fill in that sheet, that worksheet that we had for you for Fremont. And then you can dig into each of these documents. If you want to see even more detail, all of the data that is deeper in there. Now, if you want to look at a different nearby city, you can put in some other city's name here. So you know, if you know that people from a nearby community come to your community to use the library, put in that city's name and look up their data. So you might not only be doing demographic and profile information about your actual city, but you may be doing surrounding communities as well, because they use the library, or they could potentially use the library and you want to know what's going on in their communities. You could do a community, whoops, or a county, if you wanted to, dodge Nebraska and see the same thing on the county level. So the county has a profile, same thing as the ones for the city. So depending on who's using your library or who might like to use your library, you may do this more than once for each community, each area, depending on where you want to pull the numbers from. Let's get back to our, there we go. So census is done every 10 years, but in between the census, they do do the American Community Survey. So this is something to be aware of that since 2020 they've still been gathering data and you can find some of that information here. They do it in five year blocks sometimes, but right now we've got a recent census so that's good for you to use because it's within the last five years ago or so, but previously when I was doing this, if it was much longer since the last census, you would want to use the American Community Survey data so that you have more recent information. So for example, for when we were doing accreditation in 2019, did not want libraries using the 2010 census data. That is just too old. 10 year old census data is not useful to you for when you're trying to figure out what to do today in 2019 at that time. So the same thing could apply here right now. We've only got one from a couple of years ago, so that's great. But if you want to see a trend, this is the kind of thing you can look at. American Community Survey data gives you five year trends and data so you can see the change over time. So that's another place to go into and to look at. As you can see, social, economic, summary information, comparison, so much data in here. If you are a data person, a data nerd, and you like this kind of thing, this is great for you, you'll have a lot of fun in here and spend maybe too much time in it. But just do it to get the enough data for what you want to do what you think you need for your community's response plan. And as I said, if it's already been done by your community, somebody has gathered this, just grab that and don't worry about going into there. So the next section is your community needs. What is, what's happening out there? What are people concerned about? What do they want? There are lots of different ways you can gather this information. Like I said, if there's been a survey done already, just use it. If not, we have some ideas here. These are, the goal is what's important here, not the method that you use. You can use all of these different ways of gathering information or just one, one or two, whatever, or some other way if you know of it. It's about gathering the data and finding out what people are thinking out there. You, and what you want to do is you're trying to find out what is happening in your community, not what they want from the library, which I think is a very difficult thing sometimes for people to do and to adjust to. Your people who you're going to inviting to these focus groups or do these interviews or surveys with, they're going to see, oh, the library has asked me to do this. They must want to know what I want from the library. But that's not what you want in the end. You want beyond that. We want what's happening outside the library in the community. So what I recommend is start with a couple of library questions. Maybe if you do do a focus group or a survey asking, you know, what do you want from the library? What do you think? But then steer the conversation to broader community things, broader community questions, and we have some of those sample questions here that you'd eventually want to get. This is what you really want to be asking them about. And it sometimes can be hard for them to get out of that thinking and out of that mindset of it's the library asking me, so I've got to talk about the library. But eventually get to these questions. How satisfied are you with living in our town? We like most, least. Would you recommend someone else to live here? What's the most critical issue facing our town? So as you can see here, we're going to have to figure out itself. Not the library and what the library can do. So these are the kind of questions you want to ultimately have them answering in no matter which format you use to do that. So you can do a focus group.  We're going to have cookies and tea, and we're going to ask you some questions about what's going on in our community. You will need to facilitate that, or have someone come in who can facilitate. That can be, if you have a large group of people, sometimes you'll have people that are very louder. They monopolize the conversation and other ones that are quieter. You're going to need to have that skill to bring up the, let the people who aren't talking as much do answer questions as well and get their input at it. So that can be a little tricky to do. You could do key informant interviews is what we call them, which is basically someone who is an influencer in your community, a major stakeholder, a superintendent of the school, a very active parent, religious group, church members, church leadership, parent or someone who does not come to the library. You may know other people in town who don't come in and you may say, I want to sit down and talk to you about what's going on in our community and what the library can maybe do and sit down and talk to them. This may work better than doing a survey, a focus group or a survey, because you can get kind of a one-on-one conversation going with somebody. And so it doesn't have to be open. Some people might want to feel more comfortable talking to you. And if it's a group, a particular group, a church group, a civic group, ask them things like, what does your group need from our town? They may start talking with the library and it's okay. But be more direct and say, yeah, that's great. But what about in general? Let's just talk in general. Maybe just invite them out for a cup of coffee and make it feel a more casual thing. And let it just then get into, but you say, we're going to want to ask you some things and let's talk about it and ask, see how that goes. You can do a survey. It could be if maybe some people prefer to be really anonymous with their question answering and that's great. You can do an online survey. You can do a paper survey if you want to gather all, if you're willing to gather all that kind of information. If you do something online, you can, you want to spread the word and have people answer it. You can make flyers, put them out in the local bar, put them in the utility bill, put them in newsletters, church newsletter, school newsletters, just letting them know, hey, we're doing this survey about the community, please go to this URL to answer our questions. And you can just also your own observation. That's perfectly acceptable too. Just walk around, see what's going on in your community, attend meetings, attending the city meetings, you know, city council meetings, not for the purpose of you making your report about the library, but just listening to what the public comments are and what's going on and what the concerns are.  After you've, when you've gathered all this information from whichever way works best for you, then we have a worksheet here to help you just write them down. So by frequency of mention, so what are people talking about the most down to the least? So what is the most commonly complained about issue? There's, you know, the sidewalks are falling apart. We need a dog park. There's nothing for the kids to do in the summer, whatever the issues are. You know, so try and from all of these things you've done, you kind of keep hash marks, so to speak, of how many times something is answered and then you'll see what comes up to being the most commonly mentioned. There's going to be lots of things, as I mentioned earlier, that you cannot do anything about and that's okay. So bringing in businesses, having youth centered non-sports programs, that would be something you could. Affordable housing, you know, sidewalks, street improvement, these are all things that are important, but they're not anything you as a library can necessarily do something about. But some things will pop up like being a community center or doing that something for the kids don't have anything to do in the summer. Job training, all sorts of things. So these are the kind of things. You're going to see the things that will pop up and then you've got to kind of get creative with how you'll respond to them, thinking outside the box for coming up with what you will do with this information. So the third thing you need to do, you've got your demographics, you've got the community needs. What's the library have to offer? What's it like in the library? Let me open this up here. There we go. As I said, this used to be that SWAT analysis, but it's not anymore. We're just taking stock of the library. And we have here on this sheet here, the idea is to take what you know about the library and try and fit it into a box somewhere.  What is the barrier to us doing this thing? Is there an opportunity somewhere to us to improve this particular thing? And right in these boxes, whatever comes up. This could be a brainstorming session, definitely with your library staff, with community members. There's all of these, you just got to try and get the ideas out there. We have a question that came in about community needs. I'll pop back to that. Okay, so the question is, for the methods to gathering the community needs, how many of them do we need to do? More than one, like a survey in a focus group, or if we just did a survey, would that be enough? Honestly, there's no rules or requirements about how many to do. At least, I need something that tells me where you got this information from, whether there's already been a survey done or if you did a survey or a focus group. Whatever it takes for you to think you have some good data to work with, some good information. If you do a survey and nobody answers it, then you're going to need to do something else because you didn't find anything out. So it's going to be a case by case, it's going to depend. Start with the one that you find easiest or most comfortable for you to do, and see how it goes. And if you get enough data from that one thing, like everybody loves to fill out an online survey and they do it, great. You've got your data. If everyone loves to sit in a focus group and chat and just chat and brainstorm about things and eat the cookies and tea, and you get a ton of good information, then that's good too, you're good to go. But if something doesn't have a good response, you definitely need some data, some information to work with. So I don't have a dry answer for that, as in you must do too, because it's going to depend on what is best for you, works best for you, and how much information you get from whichever way you do it. So try it and see what happens. Any other questions about that, about doing community needs or any of the other things that we've talked about already, the first three things about your planning team, keep gathering community profile demographics or gathering those community needs information. And type into the questions section. If you're having trouble with that, as some people were today, you can send me an email, christa.porter at Nebraska.gov. I'm sure you all have my email from previous. I am keeping an eye on that obviously. So working on this taking stack, like I said, it's brainstorming. Get your staff together. This may be something depending on things like strengths and barriers and where we should be improving. Some of your staff or community people might prefer being anonymous. You could put together a survey for this as well to your staff about, we want to get your input on all of these things about the library, but we don't want you to feel intimidated about it. So that would be okay to do anonymous. It is hard sometimes for us. This is something that's mentioned a lot in our profession to be honest with ourselves about our strengths and really patting ourselves on the back about things that we're good at, but do it here. Try, put it down here that, you know, our volunteers are the heart of the library. Couldn't do it without them. We just upgraded our internet and it's the best in town. Wow, everyone should be coming here to use the internet. You know, whatever. But the same thing for barriers. You know, what is the hard things that are happening? Our building is too small. There's just not enough. We don't have enough computers. People are waiting in line all the time. We have hardly any children's books, or they're all so old and falling apart. What do we need to do something about that? And what can you do to improve? We have funding issues. Should we be, we should be applying for more grants. There are so many grants available. We just got to get creative with that. So just filling in all of these things here. There's actually a second section here. As you can see, the first one's here. And we, I didn't try and give you some examples of what we're talking about. At the top, we're talking about the library. Of course, specifically the director of staff, the building size, hours, parking technology in the library that's available, the funding for the library, our collection size, what services we offer, what programs and outreach we do, what programming and outreach could we do, opportunities for improvement. And then you can see, then we get into things like in the community, what is the economy like? What is technology outside the library? How is the internet elsewhere? Is there training available for certain things? Is there a community center elsewhere that people are who have been going to? What is our community relations, social climate in our community? What's going on with that? So look at all of these things outside in your community as well. But also you can think about how they might relate to the library. The technology, internet outside of anywhere else is terrible, but the library, that would be like a barrier. No good internet anywhere in town. Just the library's internet has, we've gotten this great fiber connection to the library. Or has fiber been run to the whole community? And isn't that awesome? And maybe the library isn't the only place. So you never know how that's going to come out. For the economy, is there employers coming into town, a new employer? That could be an opportunity for, that'd be a strength in the community and an opportunity for the library to make a connection there. Or is there an employer leaving? And that might be something that is going to be a barrier, a problem. That there's going to be, the factory is closing down or the processing plant is moving. So just going to put these kind of things in here. So that is about taking stock of your library and your community. So just in general, you know, how is the, this is the other community needs. It's about the community taking stock more about the library. And you're going to see how those connect hopefully. And the next step, which is developing our goals and objectives. We've got a sheet here, just a worksheet that you can put in. What are the two to three things you're going to do? What is the ultimate goal? What is the objective? What is, what is, what are we trying to do? We want to have a story time in the local preschools. And our objective is to bring more reading and more literacy to the young kids because we found out there's lots of actually young children in the community that we didn't know about. And they don't have a story time they do themselves or bringing of delivering books to the homebound, like someone said, or delivering books to the senior center because they can't physically get to the library easily. Something new that we're doing. And a way to develop these goals is to think about smart goals. This is an acronym