Okay, good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly online event where we cover anything that may be of interest to librarians. We do these sessions live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time, but they are recorded, so if you're unable to join us live on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. We get all of our recordings on our website and watch any of those. We do a mixture of things here. We do presentations, interviews, mini-training sessions. Anything that has to do with libraries, we'll put it on the show, pretty much. And we have commission staff that do presentations for us here. But we also bring in guest speakers, as we have this morning. And we actually have the beginning of a series of presentations on digital preservation. This is part one. We have Karen Kier, who is from the Nebraska State Historical Society, who has taken training and using this Library of Congress software. It's a model. So she's going to take us through, in a three-part series, on how to use this to do digital preservation at your own library or historical society or wherever you're going to use it. And this is the first one, and we're doing today, about the inventory and selection modules of it. And our next two will be on February 20th for storage and protection. And March 6th is the final one on managing and providing access to your collection once you get it out there. Great. Very much. Okay. All right. So I am going to hand over control to Karen here. Let's see. Here's the mouse, and she can take it away. Thank you. As Chris has said, I am Karen Kier, and I am the photograph curator at the Nebraska State Historical Society. But I'm also in charge of the Society's digital imaging lab. So we've been creating digital imaging, digital data, for something like 13 or 14 years. So this is really about how to manage all of your digital content, whether it be something you've created or born digital items as well. So we all know how complicated that can be. So what the Library of Congress tried to do is give you a, develop this model or these modules to help you break it down into doable parts and go through that. So today's program, we're going to talk about, we're going to do some introductions and I'm going to talk to you about what actual digital content is and digital preservation is. And then what we hope to get out of this three-part workshop. And then we'll move on to the identify module as well as the select module. We are sponsored in part by the Husker Heritage Network, which is a new training of opportunities for collection caretakers that help with emergency preparedness, planning, and care of paper materials. It's still in the planning sessions, so hopefully we'll have more information to come in the near future. Until then, please visit our website at Nebraskahistory.org slash connect. You can also go to savingtreasures.org for a lot of great information on how to take care of your physical collections. But today we're going to talk about taking care of your digital collections. So what this program is, is the Library of Congress is trying to get out as much information as possible. So what they've decided to do was create these workshops in several different regions and select people from each state and then send these people, train these people from each state and then send them back to do programs like this. And this is the group that we were, I was sent to Indianapolis, which by the way is a beautiful city. And the training happened at their library, their state library there, so we're standing on these beautiful steps of their state library. And there was 22 of us in the Midwest region. So there are 22 other trainers out there that you can find in your area that are also resources for you as well as me. So there are multiple people from different states. Yes. I'm the only one here that was trained from Nebraska. But there was a couple in Iowa, several from Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota, all over there, all over. As well as all over the country. This was just one of the regions. So they dig into this other areas of the country. Yes. So if you're not from the Midwest, you've got your own people too. Right. Which is a really smart way to do it because now they train us, gave us the information and sent us back so that we can disseminate their information. So I know that there is lots of information out there for you. So the DEPO's mission is of the digitization DEPO, which is the Digital Preservation Outreach and Education Program of the Library of Congress is to foster a national outreach and education to encourage individuals and organizations to actively preserve their digital content, building on a collaborative network of instructors, contributors, and institutional partners. So basically what they're saying is it's a big job and you might not be able to do it alone. So they encourage you to go out there and work together. I know that in my past life that I worked with the Library Commission and with the Western Trails Digitization Project a while ago and also we've worked with the Nebraska Memories website as well and we put all this great information out there and we're just talking about how now we need to make sure that this digital information is going to be available in for the future. And also I think we had the historical society before I got there worked with the collaborative projects with UNL for like then Willow-Cather archives and several other wonderful projects. So what this workshop is not going to be covering, we're not going to talk about digitization. And I know when I went to the workshop I had certain expectations about what the workshop was going to cover and I was a little disappointed but then I realized just how important the information they're giving me was so that I could go back and really talk to my colleagues and say, you know, we're not thinking about this and really need to be. So, you know, digital preservation is sort of like a moving target. Your needs are going to change and the software solutions are going to change as well. But the principles behind digital preservation will stay the same. Now I know not everybody is working with digital objects and you may not be collecting born digital items or you might not be doing digital imaging but or you might not even have plans for doing that in the future. However, I still think this is going to be useful because at some point in the future you will be talking about this. It will become more and more important as we move forward. So what is digital preservation? It's an active management of the digital content over time to ensure an ongoing access. Once a physical item is digitized or a digital item is created, you can't just put it on a shelf and expect that it's going to still be accessible in 50 years. We're used to working with our physical collections, whether you be a book in the library or for me a photograph, I know that if I do everything right and I preserve that photograph correctly, there should still be a photograph there 50 years from now or a book 50 years from now. However, you can't guarantee that if you create this wonderful helpful Word document today that you're still going to be able to open and access that Word document in 50 years or even in 10 years. So what we're talking about today is how are we going to make sure that we are going to be able to continue to access that digital information and that digital content over time. In digital preservation, it's been called a lot of different things, digital curation, digital stewardship, but for the most part what we're talking about is a set of activities aimed towards ensuring that access to digital materials is going to continue over time. And here in the United States, most of the time what we talk about is that it's the life cycle management of digital materials from the point of its creation on. Digital content is very fragile and it requires care and preservation to preserve them. It also, we're also trying to develop a, it also depends on the technology that's available, whether it be digital forms or the media as media becomes obsolete. Digital requirement requires active management to make sure that it's, to ensure that it's accessible as you move forward in its lifetime. That also means that you're responsible for that and you're insured, you're responsible for insuring, creating those policies that will continue to make sure that they're accessible. And also there's some like legal information to like, I know as we manage the state governments, we are legally mandated that we have to preserve those records into the future too. And also, I mean, as I take in donor information, I'm making a commitment to my donors that they're going to be there in the future as well. This same slide twice, I'm sorry, I'm going backwards, aren't I? There we go. That's why I'm saying slide twice, I'm going backwards, okay. So what the Depot created is this baseline module and they break it up into six different parts. Today we're going to talk about how to identify your digital content and then we're going to talk about how to select your digital content because we know not everything needs to be preserved. So it's deciding on what is the most important thing and what needs to be kept and preserved for into the long term. And then on February 20th, we'll talk about store and protect. And protect will cover some information about disaster management and we're talking disaster management and everything from tornadoes here in Nebraska to what do you do if your server fails? And how do you protect it from that kind of as well. And then on March 6th, we'll talk about managing and your data content over time and then providing access because we can do all this preservation things but it still doesn't mean anything if nobody has access to it. So I'll keep going backwards here. So we can think of these things as building from the center out, one encompasses the next. Identifying selector in the center because it helps us identify new and additional content and then select the portions to preserve. Then we're going to store it. What we've selected and we've identified and selected as important information, store it, protect it, manage it, and then provide it. So we're going to talk about objectives of these three workshops is to provide an overview of digital content management stages. So just concrete steps so that you can take concrete steps for each of these stages, help you identify specific, what will help you move to the next step. And then recommend additional sources where you can consult after the workshop. And I believe we'll be posting those online. Yeah. It has a Word document that has a whole bunch of information on it that will be included when we put the recording up. Yes. All right. So let's talk about identify. So why do we identify content? Well, it's important to do this first because preservation requires an implicit commitment of resources and we all know resources are tight. Whether those resources be monetary or just with staff. You have to be able to plan ahead. If you can't plan ahead, if you don't know how much content you're going to reserve. Now if you're scanning your entire photograph collection, that might be content that you want to plan to preserve. But there also might be digital content that you don't think that is worthwhile to expand that effort to preserve. An example of that is when I create a digital image, we create a high resolution tip image and that's our master image. And that's what I want to focus on preserving and collecting. But to make them easily accessible for our staff and for our visitors, we often create derivative images, lower resolution images. JPEG images that we can email to the exhibits coordinator who's in a panic. I need a photo of. And those things are not something that I'm interested in preserving. It's still digital content on our server. But we're not talking about long term preservation for that. That's the high res ones or four. The high res ones we're going to keep in plan and preserve and we're going to focus our efforts on whereas the JPEG ones are still helpful, but we don't want to focus our efforts or resources on preserving. But there also might be digital content that you don't think about, don't think it's worthwhile to expand that. So having this inventory is the best way to identify that content. Preservation decisions are based on understanding the possibility, possible content to preserve. So you need to ask yourself what content do I have? Will I have? May I have? Shall I have? Must I have? Or could I have? So we're talking about what do I already have? What will be recreated in the future? What could be given to me? And what is by law mandated that will come to me? The identify module addresses the need to adjust the scope of responsibility of digital content so that we can understand what is possible in the scope of long term management. The scope includes digital content that might currently be in the custody of the cultural heritage institution, as well as the digital content that has been created by producers of digital content over time. If the digital content is retained for more than five years, some type of long term management is going to be required to make sure that it's accessible when needed. So the most important aspect of an inventory is that it just exists. The format should be easy to manage. You should be able to document what's in the inventory. It should be usable. It should be available, which means not just sitting on somebody's hard drive, one person's hard drive. It should be scalable so that if you just want to look at the databases, you can pull up just the databases, or if you want to look just at the digital images, you look just at the digital images. And it should never be static. It should be updated continuously and periodically whenever you make changes to your inventory. An inventory can be as simple as an Excel spreadsheet on the server, a Microsoft Word document, a Google document, or some sort of shared online cloud document is a great way to do it as well. I know that a lot of the depot people are using Dropbox, which we found to be a great way to share information back and forth. They use that here, yeah, it's very easy. So basically anything that whatever you guys are familiar with, and it works easiest for your staff, you can go with. Exactly. You can use something in particular. This is just an inventory, and this is for your internal purposes. So whatever is going to work out, that's for you. You don't need big fancy software. So what should an inventory include? It should be a list of content that you already are preserving, other digital content that should be preserved, any new content that you're preserving. Oops, sorry, I just went in there twice. As well as anything that you're creating, content that may require, that may be required to keep, such as retention schedules require you to keep, as well as content that needs to be reviewed. Use available in familiar software so that you can get started as soon as possible. Use software tools that you already have. Free and easy open source tools are out there and easy for you to use. Just be consistent, comprehensive, and concise. The level of detail, inventory will depend on you, and you can determine the appropriate and less level for yourselves. Think about the extent of the content that you're going to be inventory, the nature and location of the content, as well as the resources available to complete this inventory. We're all under timelines and deadlines, so you may have to just do a simple survey if you're under a short timeline, or you can maybe take some more time to do a comprehensive one as well. So a simple one should just be what type of content it is, whether it's an image, video, website or document, what format is it, the date that it was created. We'll talk more about the importance of noting the date later on, as well as the location of it. So here's a really simplified inventory example. It just says what kind of category it is, the title and description, the creation date, the location and the extent, as well as the format. If you want to get more complex, you may want to think about copyright considerations, what operating system is required to read that file, the software program needed to read that file, and what tools are available to help you determine that file, to open that file format. Here's an example from ARMA of a more complicated inventory form. You'll see that it has all of those and much, much more. If you want to see that ARMA survey, here's a link to it, as well as another link to the California Digital Library, their inventory as well. I'll include all those links afterwards, as well. You don't have to try and scribble down that huge long URL. Sorry. Then I go right really fast, too. That's actually fine, because as we do with all of our shows, we put all of these links into the commission's delicious account. So everything that she's showing here and linking to, you'll have access to afterwards, no problem. So your inventory should contain all that is relevant. And everybody is going to have different types of relevant data, whether it be institutional records, special collections, scholarly content, licensed and open, research data, as well as web content. Lots of different file formats out there to consider. Images, videos, audio, text, drawings, structured data. And it's important to see if it is possible to indicate the range of the types of data as well. We all know that software changes rapidly. In one program, you might be able to open something today that you won't be able to open a year from now, or even five years from now. I know that we ran into that problem at the State Historical Society with a number of old access databases. They created all these wonderful old access databases and did all this work. And they put in a lot of work and a lot of resources into these records. And now they never kept up on updating and moving it from different platforms. And that information is just unusable now, which is sad, because there's lots of great information in those old databases. So in your inventory, it might be very helpful to know what specific software program is needed to read that file. So why is data important? Well, everything has a different lifespan. We all know paper will last a long time, if it's kept cool and in a dry place. There's a million-year-old, or not million, but there's thousands of year-old Egyptian tablets that are still readable today if you understand that language. There's a reason we still microfilm a lot of things is because that format will be able to be read. Even without a reader, you can still read it with you as long as you can magnify it in some way. Sometimes the analog is actually better. Exactly. However, we're moving forward in less and less people are going to creating documents and analog. Newspapers aren't created in analog format anymore. It's all done digital. So we have to take that digital record and put it on microfilm preservative. Yes. Digital files are another story. They just don't last as long. And they're hard to predict how long that digital file is going to stay viable, which is why it's important to put the date of the inventory as well as the date of when that file was created and when the date where it was converted as well or received. So let's talk about location. Where in your institution is all of this location, all of this digital content kept? I know at the State Historical Society we have a number of different servers and a number of different buildings, which is great for disaster recovery because if one building is hit, I know that there's a copy of something on a different server in theory. However, it also makes it a little bit difficult to know, OK, this database exists on this server, but this database exists on that server. And that's why it's important to understand where your information is located. So this inventory becomes important so that you can keep track of where your data is and that it doesn't accidentally get deleted or forgotten about as well. And some things are just more stable than others. I see there's a floppy disk right there in the center. Yeah. How many can have them? Do you still have them? I can't use them because I don't have. Actually, I had to. Because personally, I have because that's what I use when I was in school for my resume when I was first looking for a job. And in order to get some of the information out of that, I actually had to buy a separate external disk drive for my computer at home because computers now aren't sold with them. They're not sold with phones. But that's the thing, too. I had to try and copy it off onto a flash drive. And cool little one. Yeah. The little one is kind of cool. And it also goes to CDs as well. CDs used to be the go-to way to preserve your images. But what we're finding is CDs are becoming less and less common. People are moving towards flash drives and to external drives because it's much easier to store things on those external drives or removing away from CDs. We do have a comment from someone who said that they have a few of the flash drives that do keep a reader for patrons. Yeah. Because they may have the same situation, too. They've got the disk. And oh, what do I do now? I need what was on here. Yes. That's a good idea. Have something just in case. Yes. And therefore, well, we have a new IT person, and I haven't actually yet asked him about how we're going to go about reading some of our obsolete media. You want to scare me, right? Because we get in boxes from donors and things, and they probably have wonderful information on these five and a half inch ploppies. Remember those? And even if that data isn't corrupted, we have no way of reading it to check to see if the data is still viable or not. And even the Amazon cloud, which is a lot of people are moving toward cloud storage, I think that's great because it's almost unlimited. However, I'm a control freak. Yes, that's an issue that some people have. Do you want to give up your control to them? I mean, if they go down, if something happens there, you're out of luck until they can fix it or... Exactly. And this is a thing to the cloud being new. It's great that you get what it does, but you're saying technology changes so quickly. Is the cloud going to be the final and ultimate place? Who knows? And that's just it, is we need to continue to remain on the top of our game, remain being flexible and open to new ideas and searching out things like these webinars so that we can keep up with these new ideas and new models. And so that this depot training is really just to get you thinking about this and start telling you do, well, this is the steps. You do this, you do this, you do this. What it's telling you is these are the things you need to think about so that we can move forward and make sure that we are preserving these items. And we'll talk more about these different locations and the cloud later on and the other ones, especially when we get to the store levels. So when you're noting the location on your inventory, think about the method to specify online or offline locations, the general location. Going back to the method of location, some things are online, some things are offline and then some things are accessible to everybody and some things are accessible to just the public or to just certain members of the staff as well. So you might wanna consider that too when you're talking about locations. And if you move something, remember to update it on your inventory as well as the new location. Just be clear without going to extremes. You may just need to note that it's on server A rather than it's on server A in file C on drive, no. So to sum up the identify module is that you'll find that tracking stock and identifying the digital content that you have will not only help you in the future, but it also will help you identify resources that you may need, such as funding, staff and training. And it will also help you evaluate the tools you'll need in the future, whether it's a policy related or as specific submission to agreements. Like you might need to, for museums or archives, you might need to think about editing your donation agreement, your data gift, or specific digital tools that you'll need to convert digital formats into new formats as well. Okay, so before we move on to select, was there any questions about identifying and creating a inventory? If you have any questions, go ahead and use the question section of your GoToWebinar interface, and you can type in your questions, I'm seeing them here, as I did with that comment earlier, and you can pass them on. I can't tell if people are typing. I know. We do have a question of them. I was told that the gold disks are best for storage. Oh, you mean the gold CDs, yes. The gold CDs should have, they're advertised as having, some are advertised as having a shelf life of 100 years, or they have a shelf life of 500 years. My question to you is, are you going to have a piece of equipment to read that disk in 100 years? Or five years, because I think CDs are going out the door quickly, in my opinion. Your information will be safe on those gold CDs. My question is, are you going to have something to read that gold CD? Or are your predecessors going to be able to read things on those CDs? I know when I walked into the digital imaging lab or into the photo archives, I found a box of floppy disks. I'm like, what am I gonna do with this?  I'm like, what am I gonna do with this? I don't have any way of reading what these are on. So, they're still sitting on my shelf because I apparently make a good bookend. So, that's my opinion of a gold CD to take into consideration is, yes, the gold CD will last a long time, but you have to also, if you're going to have that be your ultimate way of keeping the information, is you have to also make the commitment to keep the piece of equipment that will read it as well. So, my suggestion. Yeah, what happens is we migrate the data. We migrate the data from media form to media form. So, the thing, the digital images that used to be stored on our gold CDs at the Historical Society now have been moved to a server that has, it's a dual server that auto, I don't mean, I'm sorry, I'm not an IT person, but it's one of those RAD servers that automatically backs itself up and you already duplicate itself as it serves and things and so, that's, that is, you know, we've moved away from the CDs already, not that they aren't safe, but just because our information is so. Right, it's a great thing. Okay. All right, so, I don't have any other questions? No, it doesn't play it. Okay. So, why do we need to select the content that we're going to preserve? Well, as time goes on, storage has gotten cheaper and how are the management of digital content is not cheap, especially over the long term. It's a commitment of staff and resource. Not all digital content may be worth, maybe worth preservation, maybe preservation quality. If you have a high resolution scan of your photos, do you really need to preserve the low quality versions of those scans, like I talked about earlier? And the idea behind long-term preservation is that you will be able making this content available at some future point. Is that, is that manageable giving management, manageable given the type of content that you're preserving? Also, the selection process for digital content is very analogous to the selection process of non-digital material. You don't collect material in your archive that doesn't match your mission. And you should keep those same principles in mind when you are selecting your digital content. So, when we're talking about selections, I think we all know what we're talking about. In the archives, we talk about appraisals and scheduling and libraries of selection. Museums, we talk about acquisition. We all might call it different terms, but we're all heading towards the same thing. We're determining what portion of that digital content is important enough to your institution to take on that responsibility of preserving. So, the steps to deciding what digital content you're going to preserve are very similar to the steps that you taught, that were, that you talk about when we were talking about your physical content. You're gonna review the potential digital content, just like we would review a potential donation. And we're going to define and apply our selection criteria. We have collection manuals and collection material to help us define what's going to be collected and preserved. And then we also know that once we make that decision, we're going to make sure that we implement our decisions so that it is preserved over time. So, how do we prioritize our selection process? Again, this process is very similar to your non-digital material, and it should be similar to your digital, and should be similar to your digitization selection process. What's significant? What's extensive? What gets the most use and the most requests? What might be the easiest content to preserve? What's the oldest and what's the newest? What are you required to preserve? What might be at risk? Some formats become obsolete a lot faster than other formats. PDS are viable for a really long time. Video files, however, get old very quickly. So, you need to consider all of these things when you're setting your priorities of what you're going to preserve or what you're most resources into. So, creating explicit criteria for the selection makes it possible to be more systematic and consistent with your selection process. Maybe you have an existing collection development policy that may be adapted to include digital content. There may be a review process that you may want to implement, and maybe some of your materials will also, will always be preserved. Maybe you want to evaluate how significant that material is and how unique it is, whether it's preserved elsewhere. Your selection criteria will depend on your institution, your needs, and your resources. We did have a question come in. Yes. The POS, or PDS? PDS. PDS, yeah, from the previous. Let's see, PDS. Did I misspeak? Maybe I misunderstood me. PDF, I think I said. Oh, PDF. PDF, I bet it's, I, yeah. Yeah, that's probably, that you missed it. That PDF, yeah. PDF, PDF, yeah, okay. Sorry, yes, sorry. I'm from Minnesota, so sometimes my Fs sound like SS, I apologize. So there's a few other things to consider as well. Does your content have long-term value? And if you answer no to any of these questions, you should stop. Does it have a long-term value? Does it fit your scope? Is it feasible for you to preserve that content? And is it possible to make this content available in the future? So if you're offered a collection that is restricted until the end of time, is it really worth your restricted that nobody can see it? Is it really worth taking that collection on if you can't make it available to your patrons at some point in the future? So you should have like, if it is a restriction that has an end date, a specific end date too. Go ahead and try again. Okay, there we go. All right, so let's talk about this management of the selection project. Treat the selection as an ongoing, structural project, plan and coordinate. So this is not something you're gonna do yourself. You should talk to lots of different people, specifically the creators of the items you're trying to preserve, whether it's a database or somebody's metadata or somebody's digital image files. Contact those creators and work closely with them. So come prepared when you do talk to them and identify with them a list of materials to review and send reminders before the meeting. Document the results and send them a copy as well. Okay, here's the question that came in. Is there a resource we can turn to to identify which format has the best life expectancy? For example, to know that a piggyback is a better option than if we're doc or to know if P&G would be better than here too or is there some guide, I guess, maybe is the question to what is best? I don't know if there's a specific guide out there. I do know that there's good information through the Library of Congress's website as well as the National Archives website. I don't know for librarians if there is as well. And I guess just going out there and keeping up and listening to the buzz. I know right now in digital imaging specifically, they're talking about TIPS versus JPEG 2000 and it's really, he said, she said at this point. So I don't know if there's a specific one. I might have to do a little research and get back to you. My email and telephone number is at the end of this program. So yeah. I represent the Library of Congress, right? Yeah. And I actually just did add the Library of Congress, the DEPO website that you've been talking about, the link to there. And I think there might be a third, yeah. On there, that website, definitely. Thanks. Great. All right, so, oops, that's okay. So you're going to be working with a number of people. Remember that it's an ongoing structure project and with any sort of ongoing project communication is the key. Make sure that every player knows their role and keep the content creators in the conversation. So you might want to identify who on your team is going to be the best at certain skills. Who's got the best analytical skills? Who's going to be able to review and understand the content, determine the relationships and significance of the data of the digital content and make sound consistent judgments? And then who's going to have the better interpersonal communication, our skills? Who's going to be able to communicate those needs clearly and compellingly? And this might just be the person who's going to go talk to the boss to get you more funding, to get you more servers. That's right, they're going to bring the funders. The people are going to give you the money and the support to actually do this. Yes. You need to effectively communicate with them. Yes, and that might not be the same person with the analytical skills, but it might not either. It should be that person who can, you might need that one person on the team. Okay, so Karen, Karen Mayer from the library here in Nebraska is here to link with us. I will add that link to our delicious account at the Library of Congress where they have their guidelines and standards for what we were talking about earlier. Thanks, Karen. Okay, and then who has the technical skills too? We work in a museum, or I work in a museum. So we work with old things, so new things scare us. So there's more, so that's how people have better skills than other skills. So when you're building your team, think about who on staff has all of these or who would have these skills. They don't have to have all of these skills, but maybe it's one person. Collection of people could end up like this. It's collection of things. We're talking about collaborations and things like that too. So documentation, I know that whenever I talk to researchers or students, I always say document, document, document. You can never have too much documentation, right? So supplement your inventory with descriptions. It doesn't have to be item level, but it should be enough to specify categories. And then how much of that content is there and will there be? And use, when is this content no longer active? We talked about restrictions, and that's just kind of one example for that. Things go out of date pretty fast. You know, every once in a while we have to purge those technical handouts as information becomes obsolete. And then everybody's favorite topic in mind, who has the rights to these? We might have the rights to preserve them, but do we have the rights to publish them and give other people the rights to publish them too? So you need to document who owns those rights, whether it be your institution or if they're in public domain. So a few other things to consider. Does the content have long-term value? Does it fit within the mission of your organization? Is it feasible for you to preserve that content? And then how will you make it available? So that's all I have for you today. So I'm sure you have lots of questions. The part two, we'll talk about storage and protect. And then part three, we'll talk about manage and provide. There's my email address, that's probably the best way to get a hold of me. But like I said, there's lots of other resources on that deep hell website that you're gonna provide a link to as well. So does anybody have any other questions for this first part? Take them into your questions section on your go-to webinar interface. We can see them from here. Wait and see if anybody has any questions up with anything. It looks like we answered people's questions throughout, which is good. Not a problem with that. Great, but yeah, there's Karen's email. If you do have any other questions for her about this part one, you can contact her for that. And then of course, join us on part two. We have some things coming through. For part two on February 20th and part three on March 6th, that will be held here same time here on our Encompass Live Show. So it doesn't look like any urgent questions. Great, then I think we will officially wrap it up for today. Thank you very much, Karen. This is a great start to all of this, definitely to get us going on what we need to do to just even think about, is this something we can do? Should we do? What is it all about? And should I even come for the other two? I guess. Yeah. But if you're not sure, this is a good way to start. And as I said, as we did today, the other two will be recorded too. So if you do decide, you know, six months from now that, oh wait, now that thing, we are ready to do that. Something's come up, we've got something. You'll be able to go back and watch these other sessions as well. So don't worry about it, I guess. Okay, well, thank you very much, Karen. Thank you everyone for attending this morning. I'm going to hop over here now to our Encompass Live website. Right here. There we go. So thank you for attending this week's show. As we just showed, our part two and part three will be coming off of part two on February 20th in two weeks. And then two weeks after that, part three on March 6th. So please join us for those. Next week, however, we're going to be doing something, our show will be about seed saving for libraries. This is something that has been a big topic in the last year or two. I've seen a lot of libraries doing this. And there was just, I believe last week, an NPR story about it, doing a way to save your library if you think your library needs saving. But it's just a cool thing to do is circulating seeds, heirloom seeds out to people who in your community, local gardeners, and then they can bring, when they grow, bring back the seeds. South Sioux City Public Library is just one library here in Nebraska. It's not the only one who is doing this. And they do it via the Seed Savers Exchange for based out of Iowa. And we're going to have Dave McStore from there and Bear Olson from the Seed Savers Exchange on to talk about doing this in your library. So how you can set up a seed growing or seed sharing program in your library. So hopefully you'll join us for that. And Encubus Live is on Facebook. So if you do use Facebook and want to connect with us there, please like our page on Facebook and you'll get announcements of when we have new shows coming up, when recordings are available. We also announced when we're ready to show today's show. So if you're not able to register ahead of time, you remind you, don't forget this is what we're doing today. So please do connect with us there on Facebook if you wanna keep up with what we are doing on the show. Other than that, I don't see any last minute


It's another one of these great books that goes bad halfway through. I'll explain. 32nd review. This is the autobiography of Lady Trent, a lady scientist in an alternate earth that's in a Victorian or Edwardian kind of era. She has pioneered the study of dragons. She was writing the book as an old woman and she writes about her childhood where her interest in dragons came from and developed and her first experiences actually studying them and it is fascinating, but halfway through it turns into a Nancy Drew mystery and it never recovers. This is my last official book review for 2006. I really wanted to go out on a positive note for the year and as I started reading this book, which I checked out from the library here, I was thinking this this is it because this is a great book. I had heard a lot of great things about it. I had seen other reviews who said that they wished that there had been more dragons and more about dragons and I see what they mean now now that I've read the entire thing. This book starts out strong. It starts out extremely strong. The book as I said is written in the form of an autobiography in a kind of Victorian or Edwardian style and the author has captured the style perfectly. She's got it dead on and that's hard to do. The the early part of the book where she talks about her childhood, her personal interest in dragons, her father's library, very convincingly and I think perfectly captured the life of a young girl in England at the time where girls and young women are not supposed to be interested in the sciences and of course she is and she's also very brash and very outspoken about it and it's just she's a great character and she's perfectly captured and we get to follow her as she takes part in an expedition to study dragons in a remote area and it's it gets better and better, but then about halfway through the book it turns into a silly mystery. She and her local handmaiden are sneaking around the mountains at night and in the and in the cellar hallways of the mansion and they uncover a plot of smugglers who are scaring the locals with fake dragon footprints. It is totally Scooby-Doo. At first I was okay with it because I was thinking this is just another part of the book and we'll come back to the study of dragons but the author commits to the Nancy Drew stuff and carries it through all the way to the end of the book and when it came to the last three chapters or so I just didn't care anymore. I mean Marie Brennan really created something great here and then she just lost it. If you followed my book reviews, you've seen me go through this so many times. Authors coming up with a great book and then halfway through they just stop writing and I don't understand it. I'm going to give this book a soft recommendation though because the writing style is so good and the start of the book is so strong and I know there will be people who will love it for that. The fictional science and fictional biography of dragons is spot-on but sadly the book goes nowhere. Please remember to press that like button. It helps my videos get seen and then subscribe so you can come back next time. I do science fiction book TV and movie reviews all the time and please consider becoming a patron. There's a link in the description below.