Welcome to this episode of Talk of the Town. I'm James Milan, and today I am joined by Dr. Wayne Altman. Wayne is both a local primary care physician here in Arlington, and he is also affiliated with Tufts University School of Medicine, chair of their family medicine department and a physician there as well, and also involved in a couple of other things of note that we will talk about during our conversation. I will just leave that for now. First of all, I just want to thank you for being here. I really do. Pleasure, James. Yeah, I really appreciate it. We are here to talk, as the audience is soon going to find out, we're here to talk about crises big, small to very, very large, by which I mean we have a crisis right here in town and in the surrounding areas in terms of our primary care physicians, the number of them, the access to them, etc. Then you are willing to, and I'm very appreciative of the fact that you are willing to address some of the larger crises that have kind of run through our health system, which you and I were talking before we went on air, and we both agree, we can do better, and we absolutely need to do better. So this conversation is going to be part of that. Let me just ask you to start with. I had said we want to set a larger framework for the conversation we're going to talk about. But I will just say, right before we went on air, it popped up on your phone that there's an article in the Globe today about this very thing, right? Right. Felice Fryer wrote an article in the Globe that just appeared about 20 minutes ago in my inbox, Primary Care Access in Turmoil, I believe was the headline, or something similar to that. So this is becoming more and more familiar to people, but I think pretty much everybody, this is not a news flash, because anybody who has lost their primary care doctor or has a friend or a family member who is looking for a new primary care doctor for any reason, good luck to them, because they are struggling to find folks. And we actually did some numbers in Arlington. We looked at all the primary care clinicians in Arlington. There are about 40 of them. And close to three-quarters of those 40 folks were no longer accepting new patients. And for the handful of folks who were accepting new patients, it was going to be months before you could see them. So that sounds very bad on its face, obviously. But give us a little context for that. I think you said three-quarters, I remember you sharing some data with us, 71%, close to three-quarters, like you said. How does that compare to what a normal situation would usually be in terms of people who are physicians in a community who are no longer accepting, you know, able to accept new patients? Well, I would think that every primary care practice should have clinicians accepting new patients. And I will tell you, I am a family physician at Family Practice Group in Arlington on Water Street. And our clinicians, we have 12 clinicians, and we're no longer accepting any new patients. And we feel terrible about that. We're embarrassed by that. And at the same time, we have to balance the fact that we need to be available to care for the patients that we have. Yeah, and so what, like, where to start with this gigantic topic, right? Let's start here. You were saying to me, again, before we went on an air, that when you hear from patients, they have three main concerns that come up right away, and none of them is health. Tell us about that, please. Well, so the first concern that people have is access. As we just spoke about, people are struggling to, even if you do have a primary care clinician, getting an appointment in a timely fashion is a challenge for folks. Getting an appointment with your primary care clinician is a challenge. So every last aspect of access is a challenge in primary care, and people are upset about that. A second challenge that people report is convenience. Our health care system is more set up for the convenience of the health care professionals than it is for the people accessing health care. Sorry to interrupt, and thank you for saying that, because it shows an understanding and empathy for the patient's experience that we as patients, I have to say, speaking from my own experience, and I'm generally content with my health care and my primary care physician, et cetera, but we as patients just don't realize that folks do understand that. James, about 10 or 15 years ago, I was at a meeting with over 100 doctors, and the CVS Minute Clinic was about to come into the market, and people were thinking, this might really take off. Spoiler alert, it did. And everyone was up in arms. What can we do to stop this? Something has to be done. And I raised my hand and I asked the group, raise your hand if a patient calls your office today. How reliably can you offer them an appointment today to handle the question that they have that they need access to care for? And very few hands went up. And I said, I agree with everybody's concern, but we are the problem. We are creating a market that CVS and other venture capital firms are filling with different urgent care and CVS Minute Clinic and so on. And so, especially the younger generation has basically said, we're not going to tolerate a lack of convenience. We will find our healthcare and we will prioritize convenience over quality of care, because that's how important it is to us. The final category that people are upset about is cost. That's no surprise to anyone either. Healthcare is absurdly expensive. I recently saw numbers where the average family pays $26,000 per year for the coverage of their family. That is the equivalent of a family buying a new car to quote prices, right? Every year, okay? Very few families can afford a new car every year. All right. And as you're saying, that's the average, right? That's just, okay, everybody's generally fine. We're doing checkups. We have, you know, dad has to do a colonoscopy. Whatever it is, that's just like a normal year. So we talked about access, convenience and cost as the top three appropriate concerns of patients. And yet health was not mentioned. And our data around achieving better health is not good as a country. We do not perform well compared to other developed nations. And so it's not that people don't care about health. It's just that the other three are in such bad shape. And then there's a fifth aspect of things that here we are in 2024. And embarrassingly, there are large segments of our society that get worse healthcare than other segments of our society. There are stark inequities in healthcare that are unacceptable and are shameful for us to have. And all five of these things have to be improved and can be improved. Yeah, and we're going to talk about that in a little bit because I know there's legislation that you really, you know, that I want to hear more about and that you are very connected to. But let's dig down first a little bit more into the PCP, kind of the lack of access crisis to primary care physicians. So I would imagine that the problem may be extended in both directions. And by both directions, I mean you have primary care physicians who have been in practice for a long time and are retiring. So you're losing some of the supply there. Then you may also have correspondingly on the, you know, on the front end, people just not medical school students and, you know, choosing other kinds of specialties to go into for different reasons. So I'm just speculating that those two things would be factors, but you can you just kind of share with us from your own much more expert viewpoint, you know, what is happening that accounts for the fact that here in Arlington, as you said, 7 out of 10 are just not taking new patients. What's going on? Right, so you laid it out exactly correctly. I live in Wuburn. We did the same analysis in Wuburn and the numbers were even worse. It was 89% of PCPs in Wuburn not accepting new patients. And so this is not unique to Arlington. And so we also know that one third of the primary care physician workforce in Massachusetts is over the age of 60 years old. So they're naturally organically going to age out of this job except people are retiring early. People are retiring way before 60. People are actually leaving the profession altogether at younger ages.  And people are leaving their practice to start direct primary care practices or concierge practices which take their patient panel from 2,000 patients to 500 patients. So all of these things dramatically and precipitously reduce the primary care workforce and access to primary care. So there's so much of what you just said that I want to follow up on. But one thing you said is that people are leaving this particular position within the world of doctoring, right? I've always thought and I don't know if it's been a received wisdom or sense of sorts that primary care physicians have the highest kind of job satisfaction in some ways because they are dealing directly with the patients that they're helping a lot of the time and for any number of other factors like long-term relationships that they have with patients and all that kind of thing has always made me think well that's one of the healthier lifestyles that a doctor could choose. And also one of the more, again, satisfying ones. But you say that people are leaving in droves. What's going on? Well, so let me be clear. I love my job and my retirement age I'm projecting to be about 90 because I love the work I do. But it's a real challenge for a lot of people. And so you also were talking about the pipeline of medical students coming into the profession decreasing. And that is also true. It's either stagnant or decreasing. And it's not nearly enough. Last year, for example, of the 700 or so medical students who graduated our four medical schools in 2023, 5% of them chose family medicine, 5%. Right. And if we go back 20 years, 40 years, that number would have been four times that or something? Well, it will be a little bit higher, but it's been stagnant. OK. And it needs to go higher. And so your question of why are folks leaving the profession or dropping their hours, if you also ask the question why aren't medical students choosing the profession, it's the same answer to both. Because at Tufts Medical School, every medical student does a six week family medicine rotation. We have hundreds of faculty all over Massachusetts in New England who host them in their offices. Really good folks, hardworking folks who, per the students, are doing God's work, OK? Except they see them doing God's work and then they see them struggling with the system. The job is broken and we can talk a little bit about that. But they see them struggling with this and they say, I really admire you for doing God's work and best of luck with that. I'm going to do something either more lucrative or more or just easier on me. That's right. And on my spirit. All right, yes. Let us talk more about what you were just saying. The position, the system is broken in this particular way. Tell us more about that. Imagine in whatever occupation you have where you work hard and earn a good living or a reasonable living, imagine if at the end of every work day you were asked to stay on for two or three hours extra but you don't get paid for that time. Routinely, systematically, every day of your work life. That's essentially the story with primary care. We have a system that is called fee for service which means a primary care clinician gets paid for every office visit they have. It's widgets, it's getting paid for volume and it aligns the incentives perfectly to create the broken system that we have. The way you fix that is you pay primary care per patient not per visit. In the current fee for service system where you're getting paid for volume at the end of my work day I feel a little bit tired but it's a good tired. I feel like, boy, I hope I helped some people today. This was a good day. Saw a bunch of folks, helped a bunch of folks and then I look at my electronic health record and I see 42 messages in my inbox and here's where the volunteer work begins. If you're smart as a primary care clinician in order to try and turn it not into volunteer work but to actually get paid for your work you ask your patients to turn it into a formal office visit. You either ask them to take a half day off of work and come in and see you which did they need to do that for a five minute question? I don't think so. Or you ask them to get on a video and they may or may not have the technology to manage that video. Or it's just annoying. So let me make sure I understand this and the audience understands this well. The volunteer work you're talking about or those two or three extra hours at the end of every day is really basically because people are trying to get access to you perhaps with very simple questions perhaps with something more than that everywhere in between. And they can't during the regular office hours so they're emailing you and you then have a choice of responding and creating that again just extra hours of work that you're doing. Pyjama time sometimes people call it. Exactly. That's probably the only good thing about having to answer emails as opposed to seeing patients as you can dress however you want to do it. That's true. And then what you're saying is so people the incentive for the doctors in those cases is to basically turn those email exchanges into something more formal that can be recognized the way the system works right now. That's right. Now imagine James if I was paid per patient instead of per office visit now my job is to take care of my patients. That's it. So if they have a quick question or a text back I could do a quick phone call. We could get on video so you could show me that thing on your arm real quick. You don't need to take a half day off of work to navigate all the inconveniences of the health care system to get these small and quick things taken care of. And so when you pay people that way it aligns incentives to actually promote convenience and promote better health care and access to care. So what are the main obstacles to doing to making such a transformation is it that the what I would assume being rather cynical about these things that the powers that be are doing just fine you know somebody's doing just fine the way the system is and they're not willing to relinquish what they would need to in order to improve it for others or what. I would suggest that that's the biggest barrier to any change there was forgive me I don't remember their names there were a group of psychologists who won the Nobel Prize of Economics about 20 years ago doing a study that showed that there's far more pain in losing what you have than there is in not getting what you think you deserve. And so there are some halves in our health care system who are doing really well and don't wish to relinquish any of this. Even though what I'm about to talk to you about actually is in their best interest in terms of a long term investment when I say long term I'm talking a few years that's it. Okay and excellent segue because we do want to spend the time that remains to talk about potentially something that can improve I mean I'm sure it's more than potential the ways in which it can improve it it's potential that it will happen right and that is a bill currently that I believe it is that you are going to tell us about please do. Okay so we've put a coalition together five years ago to start working on this legislation the first person I met with to discuss this idea was Senator Cindy Friedman who many people in this audience I'm sure are familiar with and the senator interrupted me warmly after about five minutes and said I get it I understand how important primary care is let's figure out how to write this bill and then we will write it and she was true to her word and in January of 2023-14 months ago this legislation was filed and the letters and numbers are s.750 we call it primary care for you or PC for you we have a website PC for you which you.org that you can learn a little bit more about it and we've been meeting with stakeholders you might say what took you so long we've been meeting with stakeholders in healthcare as well as patients all over the state to try and put this legislation together our former president once said who knew healthcare was so complicated maybe everyone but him but nonetheless it's really complicated and there are many many details that need to be attended to and this is 20 pages of legislation it's pretty complicated but we think we've got it right obviously it's a great coalition a promising coalition to begin with when you and Cindy Friedman get together right from the get go and she being having years and years of experience in the state house knowing how things work there and how what is palatable etc and then you know you and your partners of course needs to be in this in order to actually have change go forward so what you know if you if you I invite you to if you want to share any of the specific you know elements or stipulations within that legislation that would be you know a particular kind of relevance for for folks listening so in massachusetts which is a hair better than many other states but in massachusetts for every dollar spent on healthcare we spend on primary care and if you look at developed countries that have way better health outcomes than we do they spend about 12 to 15 percent on primary care which is really the sweet spot and primary care has a triple superpower James it produces better health and less health inequities for less cost you get more for less and we choose in our infinite wisdom invest in the one aspect of healthcare that gives you more for less in 2021 the national academies of sciences engineering and medicine did this huge report and basically this hundred page report concluded that primary care is the only aspect of healthcare that delivers better health and equity at the same time there is no other aspect of healthcare that can deliver those things all at a lower cost you know and I don't know some in the audience might say come on really but to me I'm like my frustration in hearing this is based on the fact that that is something that I've understood for a really long time and that we all get that message people who are lucky enough and privileged enough and educated enough to be you know accessing the resources around our own health that we can in other words the information that's available out there we get that message loud and clear it's not just having a primary care clinician it's having a personal physician because the engine of that output that we were just talking about is the relationship it's all about the relationship you can go to chat gpt and learn a great deal and get your questions answered but you might not understand exactly what they mean so to have your physician be able to explain it to you but explain it to you through an understanding of a context of who is James what's his family like what's important to James what is James's culture what are some cultural considerations that might be important to James those are the things the relationship aspect of family medicine cannot be replaced by artificial intelligence at least not in the next 20 years yeah 20 years or slash that by you know whatever the artificial intelligence manufacturers own you know ambitions are but that's a conversation for a future date that's for sure but yeah I mean to me again it has been perfectly obvious you talk about dentistry you talk about all different kinds of aspects of one's health if you take good care of yourself if you have good maintenance if you have a good relationship with somebody who knows you and also knows what is the healthiest for you i.e. your PCP how is that not going to make for a more efficient more cost effective and again less crisis to crisis kind of suffering from crisis to crisis situation as we have now quick story for you James I have a family member who was having a health crisis and was in a local emergency department and I joined her at nine o'clock after I was finished with my work in the evening and I went into that emergency department and she was one of 80 people waiting in the emergency department for care that she needed quite urgently and I looked around and I saw people anguishing and I knew that at least half if not more if having access to primary care would not need to be sitting there for 10 to 15 hours in that emergency department because I have a little bit of privilege as a physician I called around to some other emergency departments and they basically all told me no we're in the same situation you're not going to really improve anything 10 miles down the road to our emergency department and so think about the cost of an office visit at a primary care office versus an emergency medicine visit where they don't have that relationship so they need to order more tests and studies which generates more cost this is what we're doing this is the short sighted way that we're doing this so to get back to the legislation primary care for you it does a few things the first thing it does is it doubles primary care investment taking from 6% to 12% the second thing it does is it creates a payment structure for primary care that is now per patient instead of per office visit per volume it's per value instead of for volume and the third thing it does is when you go to the primary care doctor with this legislation no copay no deductible primary care has this superpower that we talked about and yet we create an obstacle course between the patient and their primary care clinician that makes no sense patients should not have to decide can I afford my visit to the primary care yeah I have to say we did not ask you here to kind of proselytize for this bill on the one hand on the other hand come on folks I mean this it's just like a no brainer because again any legislation that has any of the components that you just mentioned would have to be an improvement on what we are currently dealing with nobody I don't think nobody that I know of in my own experience is satisfied in a fundamental way with the way that things work around their primary care physician and access to the health system this seems to have real promise I certainly speaking for myself and I imagine other people I certainly hope that you that Cindy Friedman that the various sponsors within the legislature and those groups who are promoting and supporting this bill are successful at the very least because this is an important step I'm sure it's no panacea so I want to tell you one more thing James before we wrap up and that is that your viewers might be wondering how are we going to pay for this the 6% going to 12% what is this money going to be all these doctors just going to get a raise is that what's going on here and that is not the case the money is used to invest in enhanced services at the primary care office things like addiction care mental health care community health workers group visits medical scribes all kinds of things that enhance primary care and create a robust team because when you create a robust team at a primary care office that produces more capacity for them to take care better care of patients and more patients they have an ability to take care of this bill pays for itself because primary care decreases the overall cost and this bill is budget neutral for the commonwealth of Massachusetts not one dollar of tax money would go to this bill well I mean I'm not sure you can make any better argument than you just have for the value of the bill and again I hope that it is a receptive audience out there people should I assume as with most legislation you just want anybody who's listening here and saying yeah that's a good idea to make sure that they make their views known to their legislators that would be great and on from there alright I have been speaking with Dr. Wayne Altman about a lot of important things related to our health system and especially the primary care physician shortage of access and in the numbers I expect that we will have Wayne back as long as you agree for future conversations because this one is far from over but we really appreciate you taking the time to come in today to talk to us and I am sure that you will have more to tell us in the future thank you so much best of luck with that legislation especially alright thank you so much thank you as well for taking your time to join us today I'm James Milan this is talk of the town we'll see you next time


The WGU Healthcare Management Bachelor's Degree. In this video I'm going to be talking about how you can get this degree from WGU which is Western Governors University in as little as six months. And this video is probably going to save you like 10 to 20 hours of research and it might even end up saving you years of your time and tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. I'm going to actually reveal to you the step-by-step process that I have used with my private consulting clients to save them years of time and tens of thousands of dollars.  And this is something that I haven't revealed until recently when I got a bunch of questions asking me to do this for each individual degree at WGU. So I created this series to make the whole process insanely easy. Now one thing I will say is WGU is a great school but they are not the only school that does this accelerated process. There are other schools that are either competency-based universities like WGU or they allow you to accelerate through the degree in different ways. So I highly recommend you check out my video on whether WGU is worth it and I'll put that right here. But if you appreciate me giving you all this insane amount of value completely free this entire project took a ton of time go ahead gently tap that like button and let's get into it right now. Alright so step number one is you're going to want to go ahead and transfer in all of your existing classes and existing experience. Now this seems like a pretty obvious step but a lot of people actually mess up a little bit here because WGU accepts a lot more than you might think. So for instance they will sometimes accept military experience and work experience as credit. They also accept lots of different outside sources such as CLEP exams. If you've taken AP classes during high school or IB classes they'll accept that and of course if you've taken college classes and you've gotten college credit they will oftentimes accept that as well. So make sure you take your time on this step and look at everything that you've done and then send all of that into WGU and then once they have looked at it they're going to go ahead and send you a list of classes that you still have to take back. So there's lots of different reviews of people who are able to transfer in a ton of different classes online like this person who was able to transfer in 28 credits and it says yes all my transfer credits were pre-rec classes, English, math, history, sociology, etc. Now by the way you will not be enrolling in WGU until step number four. The counselor WGU may try to get you to enroll and I recommend personally not enrolling yet because this whole process is going to save you a ton of time, effort, and money right. It's going to make it easier, cheaper, and faster and the best way to do this is to not enroll until you absolutely have to at the very end in step four. So once you've gotten those list of classes back after you've transferred in your credits you're going to go ahead and move on to step number two which is you are going to take many of the remaining classes at third party companies right. So I call this the test out phase and you're basically going to be testing out of a bunch of different classes that you can transfer in to WGU using third party companies and these third party companies are study.com, sophia.org, and straighterline.com and I actually like them in that order so typically I like study.com the most then Sophia.org then straighterline and the reason you're going to be using these third party companies is because of the fact that very simply speaking they are faster, easier, and cheaper than if you took the same classes at WGU. So there are 40 total classes that you have to take in order to get this degree and many of these classes if you use these third party companies you can very easily test out of one per week and that's even if you have a full-time job a family and you're super busy. If you're not super busy then you can even test out of a lot of these classes one per day or in some cases even two per day. Now some people get very fancy with this process they'll like take three classes at you know study.com and four classes at sophia.org and another three classes at straighterline and you can definitely do that there's a lot of like strategies online but to be honest like a lot of those strategies change something that worked like three years ago doesn't necessarily work now so I just like to keep it simple and take all the classes you can at study.com since in my experience it's the one that's the most reliable it's pretty easy it's a really good user interface you actually learn things when you take classes there and it's also very easy to transfer in at the end of the day. My students have had the least amount of issues with study.com and the same thing has been reported from other people who teach this sort of thing such as Josh. So you use study.com you take the class you take the exam you test out of it you transfer it in to WGU and boom you are done with that class and by the way I will make this entire process super easy if you wait until the end of the video where I go through this step by step but if you don't want to wait until then I do have a cheat sheet which makes the whole process super easy I'll put that down in the description as well as the pinned comment below so definitely check that out. So once you have taken as many classes as you can at study.com and sophia.org you've transferred those in you're going to move on to the next step which is step three and that is you're going to pre-study the remaining classes. So you're going to have some classes that are left that you cannot transfer in and you have to take them at WGU but before you enroll in WGU you can go ahead and pre-study those classes and I highly recommend that you do this because remember the overall goal is for you to actually be enrolled in WGU for the shortest amount of time possible and the reason for that is because WGU makes you pay per term they make you pay somewhere around $3,500 per term and each term is six months and so if you can knock the entire degree out in one to two terms that is ideal and so you want to go ahead and pre-study these classes so you can get through them as fast as possible when you actually enroll at WGU. So there are two really good sources that are going to help you out a lot when it comes to pre-studying these classes the first one is the WGU subreddit now there is a main subreddit and people do share a lot of tips and tricks on there but typically there's also going to be a subreddit specific to your degree so make sure you look for that and find it and on that subreddit a lot of the time people will share tips and tricks on how to study for and pass these classes as fast as possible. The second resource which is really good is going to be the WGU Facebook groups and it's very similar to these subreddits people tend to share tips and tricks and their experiences on there on how to test out of these classes super fast and again this stuff does change stuff that might have worked three years ago doesn't necessarily work now so it's good to talk to people and stay up to date on it. There's also a ton of really good resources online of course you can look at WGU's curriculum to see what it's going to be all about you can look up stuff on YouTube a lot of the time there'll be good resources on there of course there's Khan Academy that can be great for a lot of different classes if you want to pay a little bit of money sometimes you to me will have some great classes that will cover the material really well and of course if you're a textbook type of person you can always just look up a textbook online or order one that's just a few years old for like 20 bucks then once you feel really confident about the remaining classes what you want to do is move on to step four which is you are finally going to enroll in WGU and knock those classes out as fast as you possibly can so this is where you would reach out to your enrollment counselor and finally say hey I'm ready to enroll and then you'd get enrolled as fast as you can and start knocking those classes out now a typical bachelor's degree in the United States of America takes about 5.1 years on average at Western Governor's University there is countless testimonials online of people finishing degrees in less than a year less than two years etc and of course it's going to depend on your situation if you are a very busy person you have a full-time job you got a family etc probably going to take you a little bit longer if you're not in a situation like that you can oftentimes test out of them even quicker so an extreme example of this is my good friend Josh Matacor we actually helped to create these spreadsheets together and he was able to complete a computer science degree in two months at WGU and the computer science degree is probably the most difficult degree that the school offers so if he can complete it in two months literally he was only enrolled in WGU for two months I think you can see why you know this strategy works so well now realistically if you're an extremely busy person you can still complete it in two years or less if you're less busy if you have more free time in many cases you can do the entire process in a year or less and sometimes as little as six months now when you're knocking these classes out especially for the more difficult ones like health care research and statistics as well as business simulation make sure you leverage the professors there a lot of the time people don't really talk to the professors that much and they can be extremely helpful they can tell you exactly what you need to do to study and then of course make sure you check the WGU subreddit and the facebook groups as well so to summarize the overall strategy here first step is you're going to transfer in your existing credits if you have them second step is you're going to pre-game courses using study.com straighterline.com and sophia.org third step is you're going to pre-study the remaining courses and the fourth step is you are going to complete the remaining classes as fast as you can so here is a testimonial from somebody who said that they finished the last 34 credits of the degree in a single term right so they were able to knock out 34 credits in one term and they were able to complete the entire degree in five terms even though they had a bunch of personal issues so that's about two and a half years they were able to complete the entire degree that's pretty good so now i'm going to go ahead and jump into the cheat sheet and i'm going to take you through step by step how you would do this entire process so i'm basically going to give you an example of what the entire process would look like all right so this is the cheat sheet for the business administration and health care management degree at wgu and i'll just go over it really quickly and by the way if you want to basically do the same exact process but you're on you can just go ahead and do file and make a copy the only problem with doing that is if i update this sheet in the future you will not see the updates on the copy so you'll have to check the original sheet but with that being said on the left side here you see the id and these are the id's for the classes at wgu then you see the course name right here in this column and again these are the course names at wgu then you see the amount of units and then you're going to see the study.com transfers so english 104 for instance would transfer in for english composition one so we just made this whole thing super easy you don't have to look it up it's just all mapped out and if you click right here it will take you to the wgu.com website you click right here it will take you to the exact study.com course and by the way if you want to save 30 off on your first three months using study.com you can use the code Shane Hummus they were nice enough to give me a discount code and if you use that code it will help the channel out a little bit so i would appreciate that so we're going to go through every single step step by step so step one of course is for you to transfer in existing classes so i made just a very simple example here but let's say that you took ap biology and ap economics during high school so you're able to transfer those in and then you also took communications math art and sociology in your one semester of community college let's say like you went to community college for one semester you decided it wasn't for you but you were able to complete those classes so you went ahead and transferred all of those and and of course you know the line going across is you know that symbolizes that you were able to transfer that class and and you don't have to worry about it anymore so then you would move on to phase two which is you would test out of the other classes that you can take at study.com so as you can see a significant amount of the classes you can actually test out of using study.com over half of them and so you would go ahead and do that and you'd test out of those classes and again the reason why you do that is quite simply because it's faster easier and cheaper to do it at study.com than it is to do it at wgu at this point you would have a certain amount of classes left it looks like one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen classes left total and you would want to go ahead and pre-study the remaining classes you would use the resources that I talked about earlier in the video to do that and once you feel confident about that you'd go ahead and enroll in wgu and you would knock out all of these classes as fast as you possibly can and your goal here is to try to knock them out in one to two terms and so as you can see if you do the entire process it could take you as little as less than a year and as little as less than six months actually enrolled in wgu so that's pretty awesome and then of course you'd move on to step five which is you would brag about it to all of your friends and family uh that you were able to you know get a bachelor's degree in one year and if you're really nice you'd move on to step six which is share this video with your friends and family so that they can benefit as well now one thing I just wanted to reiterate here is wgu is a phenomenal school it's a great option for a ton of people to reach out to me but it is not for everybody so for instance it is completely remote and some people have a lot of trouble focusing when they're doing their work completely remote so that is kind of a downside of wgu another thing about wgu is networking isn't necessarily going to be as easy because you're not spending time directly with other students and other people so you kind of have to put yourself out there a little bit more if you want to network so I did go over all the pros and cons of going to wgu in this video right here and I highly recommend that you check that out


To be in with a chance of winning my weekly Destiny 2 beta call giveaway, simply drop a like on the video and leave a comment down below. What is going on guys, today I am back with another Destiny video and today I'm going to show you guys how you can literally kill Saber in Saber Nightfall Strike this week within literally a second of him spawning and yes I know before anyone states it this might not be something you need to know nor probably you will even try, I just decided to see if it was possible to do and it is so I decided to make a video out of it for you guys entertainment and basically have a little fun in doing so. Also I will add that you can probably kill the boss within a second or so on other character classes but I wanted to do it on three hunters which I knew my best chances stood that way so that's what we did. Now it consists of three hunters using the Golden Gun subclass and that also beastly celestial Nighthawk helmet set up under subclass you want to make sure you are using dead eye and over the horizon.  You can see in the video that my teammates are a little slow to react but you can see you can literally kill him in under a second if timed correctly. Now like I said there isn't anything really to learn from this video it was just a little experiment we did which actually worked initially we didn't think it would actually kill him but I believe because airborne is on it just about works we did actually try it without jumping and we didn't quite kill him so airborne definitely does the extra damage here. Now doing these experiments in game is something I love to try and do so if you have any you want to see me attempt be sure to let me know down below in that comment section but for today guys this is it how to kill the nightfall boss in under a second. Hope you guys enjoyed the video if you did do smash that like button I do appreciate the support and it really helps out subscribe if you're new around here and enjoy daily destiny content hit that bell button next to that subscribe button to get email notifications of when I upload and remember to be with a chance of winning my weekly destiny 2 beta cold giveaway simply drop a comment down below but guys hope you enjoyed video and I will see you on that next one


All right, good morning, and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that be of interest to libraries. Encompass Live is broadcast live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's okay. We do record the show, and it is posted to our website in our archives afterwards for you to watch. And I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can see all of our archives. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone who you think might have interested in any of our shows, they can sign up for upcoming sessions and go back and watch any of our recordings for the show. Encompass Live debuted in January of 2009, so we are in our 10th year of the show. So there's quite a few archives there, lots of recordings for you to go back and watch. And we cover a variety of things here on the show, book reviews, interviews, demos of services and products, we do mini training sessions, basically anything of interest to libraries. And we do cover all types of libraries here. The Nebraska Library Commission is a state agency in Nebraska for libraries, providing training, consulting, education, grants for all types of libraries across the state. And our webinar series reflects that. We have sessions for public libraries, academic, K-12, museums, correctional facilities, basically anything that's library, we have something for you on the show. That's really our only criteria for all our topics is that something library related. We do have Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes do presentations and sessions for things that we are specifically offering here in Nebraska. But we do bring in guest speakers from around the country sometimes. And that's what we have this morning. On the line with us is Natalie Buzan. Good morning, Natalie. Good morning. And she is the director of the North Riverside Public Library District. This is in North Riverside, Illinois. And she's been on the show quite a few times over the years here and there. First, I think became aware of us and we became aware of her with our Big Talk from Small Libraries online conference. Is that correct, Natalie? Very true. It's like a bad penny. I just keep coming up. It's terrible. I know. Oh, it's great. It's always something new that you have. That's awesome. Yeah. For those of you that don't know, Big Talk from Small Libraries is an annual online conference that I do, a one-day conference, all done online. The same way as this show is for Small Libraries, specifically with presenters and speakers from Small Libraries with a population served 10,000 or less. So all of our presenters are in there. So if you're interested in Small Libraries or are from one, that would be something for you to take a look at. It's the last Friday of February every year. And we just did it a few months ago. And Natalie's been on that and she's been in Compass Live. And this is one of a new session, a new presentation, I think, at least for us from you, about reaching out to your collection. And I'll just hand it over to you, Natalie, to take it away and tell us all about it. Sounds good. Hello, everyone. Good morning. I am probably going to ask you guys to chat in, chime in. If you have any questions, just stop me. If I ask a question, please answer because I like this to be as interactive as I can. I do not have my webcam on because it is seriously depressing behind me. I, it's just beyond depressing. But let's, like I said, there's only one good thing coming out of this. That means that hopefully my cake topper will not melt before it gets to me from Florida. That's the goal. So we are talking today about reaching out through your collection, um, libraries of things, unusual collections, lending stuff at your library. It's been talked about. It's been in the news. It's something that you can definitely do, but there are a lot of things to think about when you're doing that. So let's take a little bit of a look at people who are lending things. I did a poll on, um, the ALA think tank on Facebook asking people if they could chime in on this. So I have lots and lots of different responses for you guys. Oh yeah. It's, it's amazing what libraries are doing out there.  So we all know what you're doing and give us an idea of how that's going. And then we're going to talk about some funding sources for you guys. Ideas about cataloging and how we can address some marketing issues and some legal issues because of course in this day and age, we all have to worry about the legal issues associated with lending out. Oh, I don't know. A glass fusing thing. Unfortunately. So the American libraries magazine did this wonderful picture in 2007. And they were trying to highlight the fact that libraries are doing this. And I, I think the library of things was actually coined by a library in Amsterdam. It's somewhere in the Netherlands, but it spread very, very quickly. Just the, the title of it. And libraries all across the U.S. are embracing this. We started doing this when I was a director in Michigan and just kind of have expanded it from there. I haven't started doing it at the North Riverside Library yet, probably because I've only been here two months. But I am planning on getting there. I have already started poking and prodding some of my staff members here to work on it, but it's also a mindset because you look at this picture and you see people loaning out taxidermied animals or sewing machines or Santa suits at the whole gamut there, right? But how many of your board members or how many of your staff members would look at that and say, no, just, no, libraries don't do that. Or that's not what we're here for. Or the myriad of other things that I've heard from my library boards over the years. I don't know how many of you have had that issue in the past, but I have pretty much every library I've been at. This is the fourth library I've been director at now. And it's a slow, steady process of convincing our library boards that libraries are more than the quiet place with books and movies. And that's it. Well, first we had to convince them that we could have movies here, but that's been a while. So they're okay with that. And except I have that one board member. There's always that one board member, right? On the plus side, a lot of boards are a lot more progressive these days. And I'm hoping very much that you all have that. My board here is very concerned with a lot of other things right now. So I'm hoping to get them on board with this very shortly. So do any of you loan out Santa suits? Not that anyone has said. Nobody's going to fess up. I love that. I love the idea. I see that there that that's people need that once a year thing. Sure. I have to admit that we bought a Santa suit at both of my libraries in Michigan and in granted, we did use it for Santa that came to our library, but we ended up loaning it out to people in the community who needed it too. It wasn't, we hadn't officially cataloged it, but we did loan it out unofficially. So it was kind of in process of becoming a catalog thing. Does anybody loan out anything fun or different? Yeah, we do have some people that start typing in what they loaned out. Let's see. One place does literacy kits from early learning through fifth grade. Oh, nice. What do those have in them? Good question. Yeah. Can you let us know, Marianne, what's in those actual literacy kits for you? And we'll share that. Yeah, that's great. In our Omaha Public Library, they do seeds, watt detectors for electricity, toys, video games, another library does, of course. Our Blair Public Library and Technology Center here in Nebraska loans out. Cake pans. That's a very common loan. We love cake pans. Yeah. Those kinds of things that you can like make, you know, all the crazy cakes, a different design. Like here's a dinosaur shaped cake, which nobody can really make on their, well, okay, professionals can make freehand, but us common people. I was going to say, I think, I think my soon to be mother-in-law, she is absolutely fabulous at doing things like that. I just stare and she's like, Oh yeah, you can do this. I'm like, no, no, I can't. I will cheat with a cake pan from the library. Absolutely. Okay, guys. So here are a few that I pulled up from the things that people had sent to me and it, it basically comes down to a lot of people have gotten these through donations, it seems. I was talking to one library that, not this one that loans out Halloween costumes, which I love that idea, but another one who had a costume shop that went out of business in town and the library was offered their leftover stuff that hadn't sold. It'd be a good tax write off for them and whatnot. Yeah. But they were trying to figure out how in the world do we do this? Do we, do we lend them out? Do we charge for them? Do we limit it? This library limits it to kids and teens. And what are the costs associated with this? And that's one of the things that I was going to talk about later, but actually I'll bring it up now. Um, you always have to remember the repair costs and the maintenance costs of things like this. So the library cast, the Halloween costumes, it was an issue of, do we, it's same thing with our Santa suit at the library and the reason that we hadn't catalogued it yet, but we were working on it. How do you clean that? Do you clean that every time? Do you leave it up to people to clean that? How do you go about that one? And then there are just some wonderful fun things. So people are really into instruments. It seems like I talked to people who do guitars, ukuleles seem to be everyone who's doing instruments is doing ukuleles. Um, my last library, the river valley district library on import Byron on the Mississippi river, they had, I had found out just before I left that one of my staff members was in the ukulele club at school. I didn't know this existed, but they came out to our Christmas walk and did a ukulele themed Christmas production. Um, kind of fascinating. I was really, really impressed with her and her group, but it kind of moved us to wanting to do things like that. And I think that's what it comes down to in a lot of ways. It's really nice to have these things, loading art, learning, loading cardboard, cutouts, learning cake pans, those don't require any specialized knowledge at all, but when you're learning, loading out ukuleles or bongos or xylophones or a portable piano, I don't remember which library that was, but that was, that would be a little bit more than I want to go because of the fact that we don't have people who know how to maintain those here and we don't have them in my community who know how to maintain them. So that means that I'm going to have to find somebody outside of our community. If I'm lucky, I can find a volunteer, but not necessarily. On the other hand, I've had four xylophones donated to the library since I started here two months ago. I don't know where to go with that. Let's, let's, I don't, I, I, I, I, I, I don't know where to go with that, but I either, people don't want to have a garage sale or they really think that we need a xylophone. I don't know. You just never know. That's, that's okay. I really don't. I just go with it. Um, so it's not that our community doesn't think that we need these things and we've had a lot of people willing to provide these things, but it's a matter of, you have to make sure that you can maintain them and keep them in good condition for everybody to use. I love the top corner here, pairing up our fishing poles with books on fishing. We did a fly tying kit that we paired up with fly tying books that talked about how to make them and how to use them and how to properly cast and things like that. These aren't things that take a huge amount of space and at least for the fishing rods, there aren't things that take a whole lot of staff knowledge because pretty much everybody knows how to use a fishing rod. Right. At least I hope so. I'm crossing my fingers. Or you paired up with a how to fish book. That is a possibility. That is always a possibility. The, what helped us with the fly tying kit because we did have a lot of questions about what is this or what is that or how do you use that? How does this all go together? Was pairing that up with a series of programs that we did. So we did a six week fly tying class. They could check out the kit and they could do the fly tying class. Obviously we only had one kit and we had multiple people showing up, but a lot of them had their own tools or they could share tools from the kit. And that helped us publicize it, brought out our books like fishing books and fly tying books that don't get that much use. Not, not surprisingly, they tend to sit on those nonfiction shelves and well, not come out very often, but doing things like displays like this where you can check these things out or classes where you can teach people how to do, I wouldn't do casting classes at my library. Not going to lie. That just sounds scary. That's not indoors. Maybe, you know, you take a field trip. Yeah. Yeah. I can see that. Although North River side. So I went from two very rural libraries where, yes, I had water nearby so I could definitely do that too. I'm like 20 miles from Chicago now in a tiny little area with only 6,000 people in my village, but it's not tiny, but not so much access to water or rural areas where we can actually do things like that. I love the idea of the power tools and all the tool libraries, but it comes back to a maintenance issue for me. We've had some of these things donated. We are working on this, but do you put these together in kits? Is anybody who's on here right now loaning out tools? That's what I was going to ask. Is anybody have any tips about, yeah, doing power tools? So I know I've heard of it being done, but not just beyond the fact that, yeah, that's the thing that we're doing. So if you do have done it, let us know. I do have the librarian who did the literacy kits did explain more about theirs. Do you want to hear about that? Oh, definitely. So for the literacy kits, they have, it depends on the age level. The pre-K and below have board books and learning toys, and the older ones have fiction books and workbooks, and then older learning games with cards and puzzles, et cetera. Oh, very nice. A combination of things. And she's trying to put together a quest to make STEM kits for ages 8 to 18. So you put it in the older, you want to get past the literacy level, but she's looking for funding for that. Now, we had just started STEM kits at my last library at the River Valley District Library. Kathy, our children's librarian, was in charge of that. She got a grant from John Deere, actually, and we had asked them for some funding to do something like this.  If you have a manufacturer in your area, a lot of times you can pitch STEM kits to them, and they will. It's the same thing with tools. We pitch the idea to ACE hardware, or you can talk to Home Depot and ask for returns that are in good condition or different things like that. A lot of them will partner up with you to come out and do a program and to lend out some tools. We also worked back in Michigan. We were working with, just after I left, they did a program with a local plumber who came out and did basic plumbing, how to take things apart, put things back together, how to fix your kitchen sink. Right? It's great advertisement for them. It's a great possibility of donations for you. And it's a way to pair. Again, you're pairing some of those guides and things that you have with the materials that you can lend out. This has been relatively interesting. I did volunteer for one of these one time, and it was kind of fun. Lending out people. The Human Library Project is, there are a lot of libraries that are doing this. It tends to be in larger areas, but some smaller libraries I have talked to have been doing this. You get a group of people who are willing to talk, just talk about themselves. So, which is scary, quite honestly. So, you have to find the right type of people who are willing to answer any questions, who are not going to get offended, who want to sit back and talk to people. And this could be, the idea is you shouldn't judge your neighbors by how they look or how they act, or people in your community, it brings attention to the fact that people in your community are all different. They're all unique.  Right? So, I was your book. You could pair me up with what books I pick out that I think relate to me. So, maybe I pick out the books on furniture refinishing or how to start a, how to write grants. No surprise there. Or how about if I picked out the books on how to distill essential oils, because I do all of those things. Or what if you picked out books on coming from a broken home? That fits with me too. And they wouldn't know that unless they started talking to me. So, you get a chance to sit down and talk to people in your community. Anybody can sign up for this. Usually you ask people to participate for a set amount of time and anybody can walk up and quote unquote check out your person, talk to them. They get a chance to share what library books they're into. They get a chance to share what they're about, what makes sense to them. And you get a better idea of your community. Other people in your community get an idea of your community and so do you. I think that was a fun idea. Yeah, I think our University of Nebraska Omaha has done that, if I remember correctly. It is fantastic. Here, yeah. It's just been, it's really eye-opening when you sit down to one of these and you get to talk to people. I saw people who have my uncle. So if you walk up to my uncle, he looks like a stereotypical Harley rider, the big heavy beard. He's got the chaps and leather he wears all the time. He is a big guy, tall, broad shoulders, big guy. Sweetest guy ever. He will tell you about how he does Harley runs for to raise money for cancer. He took care of his mom for eight years while she had cancer and go on from there. But again, it's one of those. Don't judge a book by its cover. Yeah, and that's the thing too I like about them is that you will sit down and talk to someone that you probably never would have before just because you don't run in the same circles. You don't do the same things as they do, but you're curious about it and you can talk to all these different types of people. Yeah. I love the idea of pairing this up with books that make sense for that person. Having that person go out and pick up books that write that they can talk about that makes sense that that show them. So it might give people an idea of different things at your library and different people in your community and brings everything together. So your mission statement and ultimately this all comes back to we can lend out as many things as we want, right? There are libraries that are lending the sewing machines, they lend Netflix subscriptions, basically real cruise. They lend out spiralizers. I had just gotten I did a spiralizer in door Michigan. We had carving kits like wood carving. I've done the microwave glass fusing. I wasn't kidding about the glass fusing. We did that. But if it doesn't fit your community and your strategic plan, then it's not really worth developing. You want to make sure that you're fitting your strategic plan. If you don't have a strategic plan, I put a I put a very nice little guide and the notes section on this slide. So don't worry about finding it later. It's there. You're good. And make sure that you mention that Natalie. I'll just jump in and let everyone know at the end of when the recording is available for this, we'll also have the slides as well. So if there's anything that she posts up here that have URLs or things like that, don't worry about trying to scribble it all down. We'll have the slides for you as well. Wonder if it will show me. Oh, you probably can't see that. Can you actually? Yes, it did come up. Yep. Oh, good. Yeah. Yes. Your science. Yeah. Wonderful. So the strategic planning for small libraries. I will actually pull that up so you guys can see that too. Oh, through air so cool. I love air so and they are actually presenting in Illinois this year. Yes, that's where the conference is. So very, very excited. I am crossing my fingers that, like I said, I've been here two months. So I don't know if I'll be able to go with everything else that's going on, but it's a very easy step-by-step guide. It goes through the big question about why you would want to do this. And then it's a matter of getting people on board, creating a community that is receptive to doing this and making sure that you have staff members or volunteers or board members who are with you and working with you to do this. Because honestly, you can't do it alone. As much as I would love to say, this is one of those things that you can just sit down and write, you can't. You really need their input on that. Hey, it went away. All right. Although I seem to not be full screen now. Oh, well, this will still work. So a couple of years ago, this library, two, three directors ago, three, no, four, four directors ago, this library put together a strategic plan with a fantastic director that they had. And it came down to a few really key mission statements that they wanted to address and they wanted to satisfy curiosity with lifelong learning. They wanted to stimulate imagination with the reading, viewing and listening. They wanted to have a comfortable place. They wanted the library to be a place that people wanted to go, but they also wanted our website to be a place that people were comfortable with visiting. They wanted to make sure that people could connect to the online world here and create early readers. And what was nice is under each of these, they put a couple of goals. So I know that in the relatively near future, we want to expand out and have binge boxes here at the library. And we are trying to key that in to fit our stimulate imagination with the viewing section. We also want to make sure that we can key that into early readers and make sure that we have some literacy feature, literacy films that are all put together in one kit. Is anybody doing binge boxes? Anybody doing it? Go ahead and let us know. We did have someone do a session about that. Yeah, I think that was me, actually. You, okay. Because then someone asked, I'd asked me about it previously. So. Okay. So very quick update. Binge boxes are a box. Oh, somebody just said yes and they go out a lot. So we do have someone from here that is doing it. Yeah. That's fantastic. I have done these at both my other lie, three of my other libraries, and they're just basically a hard plastic box that you put four to six movies and try not to do TV series, because that's just not a good idea. But I know we always have checked them out for one week. So can you imagine a couple TV series and it checks out for one week? Oh, no, no, no, no. Not a good idea. But it gives people the opportunity to check out whatever you think is a good set. So maybe it's six Star Wars movies altogether. So you don't have to go searching around. Maybe somebody has the original number four and number six checked out and you wanted one through six and you can't get them now because you have to wait for that person to bring it back and then they're late and, you know, it's just frustrating. Or maybe it's a we want to do one on this is how the brain works. So we have a series of nonfiction. Maybe they're short movies. Maybe they're long movies, but a wide variety of type of movies that feature how the brain works or how learning works. Or we have some. This is how you learn your shapes or different things like that. Quite honestly, they're looking at putting together Disney Princess movies right now because that was super, super popular one at my last library. But that's one of the things that we're looking at doing with our alternative things to fit our mission statement and our goals. One of our goals under satisfied curiosity was making sure seniors have the skills that they need to continue learning learning new things and address their self directed personal growth. So we're looking at putting together some boxes that have different craft things paired with this is how you sell online. And we're also instituting some new classes on technology, how to use different types of technology, how to be familiar with it, how to use your technology. It's a matter of bringing everything together and fitting it into our mission statement very directly. And honestly, if your mission statement doesn't fit what your community really wants, you need a new mission statement. That should be key right there. What does the community want or need? Yes. And then we go right back to let's do a new strategic plan. Oh, somebody did ask it was binge boxes like when you're binging a TV show. Yes. And on this case, you know, you spend a whole weekend watching one series type thing. Yeah. Yes, I'm not going to lie. Hallmark Christmas movies were probably our number one check out ever. Ah, OK. Followed very closely by the Hallmark mystery series and Disney princesses. Those were probably our top ones, but our nonfiction ones did all right to, which I was very happy with. So I guess the question is, are they affordable, right? We talked about donations.  We needed a priority list and we're still working on that. I've been here two months. I'm getting the staff together to find out who would be responsible for things like this and talk to them about creating a priority list of what do you think should be the first things that we do. And it's not necessarily a matter of, well, part of it is part of it is the matter of these are the things that we can get some grant money for in our community. These are the things that we can reach out to companies in our area and get some donations. These are the things that we know that people want to donate to the library. Let's not talk about Xylophones. Also, let's not talk about embroidery hoops.  People will bring you dozens of embroidery hoops. Thank God for Pinterest. That's all I have to say. But you need a priority list. So you can make this affordable if you know where you're going and make sure that you can definitely tie your priority list back to what your patrons are interested in and what they want to see. And then reuse, renew, recycle. That's what I grew up on. And then I added in upcycling when I started refinishing furniture because that's what the new term is. But make sure that you ask people for donations. A lot of these items are like the cake pants that we were just talking about. They're things that you use once a year, maybe use it once in its lifetime. Somebody probably bought it because they made that Barbie cake for that four year old's birthday and it was the most amazing thing ever. Actually, my best friend's mom made both of us a Barbie cake for her 16th birthday. But let's not talk about that one. It's one of those things that you've got. It's sitting in the basement and you just need to convince people, hey, why don't you share that? I know the garage sales are really, really tempting thing, but library's tax is deductible. You should do that instead. And then there's the how do we do this? How do we? How do we display these things? The picture that I have down here with the lovely lady that has the box. How many times do you think you can loan out a cardboard box before it comes back in? Let's go with less than pristine condition. Needs replacing. Yes. I have two cats. One of my cats's name is Kelmowski. Kelmowski is, you know, that stereotypical gorgeous long haired gray cat. She also has a problem. She loves to chew on paper. Yeah.  She also likes cardboard boxes a lot. I may have brought home library things that we had in their original containers. And shortly thereafter, we realized that investing in plastic containers, you can go to big locks. You can go to the dollar store. They have plastic containers that are not super expensive. Granted, they're not the highest quality. But on the other hand, you're going to be trading these things in and out as things check out or they get purged out or different things like that. So if you've got the money to invest in high quality containers, fantastic. If you don't, you'll still have something that's plastic. It's going to last a whole lot longer than your cardboard containers ever would. But it's one of those things that's really easy to forget about. So please don't. Advertising and marketing is another thing that helps people when you're trying to justify whether something is affordable or not for the library. You go through and you look at say your database, you look at how many times people have access to overdrive, right? How many times did they check materials out from you? And that can give you a good idea of the value. You can multiply that out by the average cost. You get an idea of the value that your patrons are gaining from the database that you purchased. Same thing with the library of things. So we need to know how many times these things are checking out. So if you have kettle balls, I think, right? Aren't those the things on the top? Yes. Yeah. And that picture there. Yeah. I may not have used those in a while, but let's go with it. So you've got your kettle balls. You had a nice little introductory one session class on how to use them because you had somebody in the area who knows how to use them at your library.  And you put it up on your Facebook. Now the question is how much is it checking out? So when you put together your newsletter or when you put together that poster for the gym, you can tell people that we have these items here. So we know you're just taking introductory class. Why don't you come to the library and check these out? And then when you're making up your final year end report, I don't know how many of you do year end reports for your community, but I found that it's really nice to put together to give your community an idea of how much value they're getting from you, especially if you have a vote coming up. Yes. But even if you don't, making sure that they understand that you're one of the few entities, governmental entities that people can see their money coming back to them. It's not something that's going into wastewater treatment where you don't know how much is being spent where or you don't know how that's coming back to you. They can see exactly how much is coming back to them every time they check things out at the library. And this is another one of those things where you can say, OK, we have 15 items in our library of things. They checked out 123 times this year. The average price if you had gone and bought those things would have been, I don't know, $10 a piece. And we multiply that out that would be what? Over a thousand dollars. That's what I'm going with. Actually, I don't know what numbers I just gave you. I'm sorry. That down. It's a math problem. It's too early for that. It's just an example. It was it was an example. So. You can go with something like that and be able to give people numbers and people understand and love to see numbers. They they love to see the value that they're getting back. Partnering with other organizations is a great way to do outreach and to bring attention to your collection and your library of things together. So like the kettle balls on the top, maybe I've got somebody in the community who's doing one exercise class at the church a week, right? We my libraries back in Michigan. There was a little tiny church that did Wednesday mornings. They did Zumba and Thursday somebody else did a general exercise class. So we partner up with them. We do a one day class to advertise. Well, it advertises them, but it also advertises. Did you know that you can check out these kits on exercising at the library instead of having to buy your own materials? Because maybe it's January 2nd and you have good intentions about exercising all year round. But let's let's be optimistic.  That's what I'm going. Exactly. Yes. Try it. Yeah. If you're not sure if it's going to work for you, that would be a great cheap way, you know, free way to do that. Yeah. Also really good to advertise on January 1st. So cataloging is another one of those tricky things that's difficult to do. A lot of cataloging software now will let you put in kit or will let you manually enter different things. It depends on your software, how much control over it you have. But make sure that each item that you're cataloging while you're prepping for cataloging. We talked about putting it in bags or boxes. You can see here that they have a wide variety of items that they use to hold their their collection. We have started purchasing things like this. I don't know if you can see my mouse. I'm guessing the clear plastic bag down here. OK. And they are zippered. We can have them imprinted with our logo or information. It's very identifiable, very easy. If you aren't going to purchase something like that, I think they run about four dollars a piece. And I have the link on the notes because this is something that I liked. And I'll probably add links to the other things that we have used in the past. If you don't want to use something like this, that you can have imprinted with your logo and your information, make sure you either have laminated tags that you attached to everything or you have stickers that can go on some of these boxes that you can attach to things. Because it's just so difficult for people to keep track of these item times and it's really difficult for them to remember where they go, which has been really interesting, especially when you're checking out items that are in a suitcase or a bag or something else that just kind of blends in with all of their stuff. Mom gets home with her three or four kids, everybody throws their stuff in a corner. They forget that that backpack is actually library stuff.  Because we kind of need it back. Only checked out for a week. May have happened a time or two, but everybody is always really helpful about that. And I don't. I haven't had any kits go missing. I have had parts that were misplaced, but we always got them back, except one of the SNAP circuits. We had to order some new parts for SNAP circuits. But besides that, we've been really lucky. Yeah. And that actually is mentioned that because someone did ask a little earlier and I was just waiting to see if it was going to come up or not. And I think this is just a question in general with anything like you lend out. How do you handle breakage or damage to some of these things? So you have you generally have your policy for replacement, right? So if somebody completely destroys it, you tell them they need to replace it and it will be ax them out. And that's one of those things that I have under legal issues. So I'll just flip forward. Making sure that you have release forms for all of these items and it can be a generic release form that you just write in what the item is and what the amount is that the replacement would be. But making sure that people are aware that these check out, just like if you checked out an e-reader or a book or a DVD, you wreck the case, you wreck the actual item, then you're going to have to pay for the replacement. So get it, get your policies in order before you start doing these things. Yes, and I do have a couple of suggestions on here from different organizations that have done this. But you can find sample policies all over on library of things or lending out unique items or different things like that. It's not very hard to do. The other thing to think about is age restrictions on those release forms. Even if kids are going to use them, making sure that the parents are aware that they are responsible for it, not the children. They are responsible for it. So we had, I mentioned the microwave glass fusing kit. Glass is hot. Glass is dangerous. It's not it's not something to be treated lightly. And we, although we knew kids were going to be using this primarily to make a pendant or a key chain or different things like that because it's a small item, we made sure that only ages 18 and up could check it out. We didn't care who was using it. That was their responsibility. We made sure that they understood that the release forms, but only certain age groups could check it out. Kind of like our, we had a wood carving kit with chisels and different things like that same type of thing. So make sure that you have your barcodes attached, instruction labels, make sure that there are some type of instructions that go with these things. Almost never are kits self-explanatory. So I brought up snap circuits a minute ago. Snap circuits, if anybody has used them before, you can attest to this. They are the easiest way to see how electricity works I have ever seen. Just so user friendly, they are fabulous. But the idea is literally you have these pieces and they are snaps on either end and you snap them together. And you you see the path of electricity. You can turn it off and on. You have fans. You have different gadgets that light up all sorts of different things that happen. But you have problems with people understanding how this actually works. You mean if I touch this, I'm going to get zapped? Yes, you attached a battery. You are going to get zapped if you touch this. So making sure that they have an instruction manual and and things like that is kind of nice for them have an idea of possible combinations. So giving them some instructions to follow, like if you attach this, this and this, this will happen. Give them a miniature lesson plan. Also give them the warnings. All of these things that you're going to pick up are going to have some type of warning. Maybe it's not intended for children under three. Maybe it's a this glass is 400 degrees. Please don't touch it until it cools off. It could be anything in between those two. But make sure that each one of your kids has the warning information for what's in there on the kids. Software systems for cataloging. I know that we were using Sierra and Millennium back in Michigan and that was very user friendly for adding kits. We are on Searcy Dynex here where I am at North Riverside and we have kits in there. We're working on how to. So each time you catalog something that's called kit, you can add in what's in that kit. And same thing in Sierra. We our goal is to make sure that that is as detailed as possible. So we have our fly time kit. We threw in a book on fly time. Here's the title of author. We also have the fly time kit has nine pieces that are in it. Here are all of those pieces and it comes in a wooden box. So our staff know when they're checking it in that yes, it's going to be in a wooden box. It's going to have nine pieces. It's going to have a book with it and it's going to have its carrying case or box or whatever we happen to put it in that case. It was a little clear carrying case like this one. If your software system won't let you do it, you can go old school and you can do check out cards or you can do things like Excel.  Our friends group had a lot of the old library cards that people would just write their names on and we would keep them and it was it was fun. I don't know exactly what they're using that for.  It was it was interesting. OK, so I talked about the warnings on containers. Copyright infringement is also an issue, especially with things like C libraries that has been going around. If you're using heirloom seeds, you should be fine. If not, you have to be slightly careful. Because of copyright infringement coming up. Photo release forms are not a bad thing to have if you are planning on making sure that people are going to be photographed with your items. And actually, I am pretty much out of town from what I'm seeing. So no, that's OK. If you have any questions, please let me know. You've got my email there. You've got my phone number. You can get a hold of me any time you want anyway. All right, sure. All right. Thank you very much, Natalie. Oh, and I see you have a new name there, new last name. That's what's going to be. That's what's going to be in May. So I figured I would put it on here to begin with. Start working on getting that out there. Yeah. Yeah. I went through that. When you get married, yeah, it's a thing. It's not easy. I am only hyphenating for work. I am actually taking his name, but I figured I'd hyphenate for work for a couple of years so people got used to it. Absolutely. All right. All right. So thank you very much, Natalie. Anyone does have any questions? We do still have some time here. It's only 10 55 a.m. Central Time by my clock. So if you have any comments or questions for Natalie, type them in or any thoughts on things that you're doing, as she had asked earlier. Someone did ask, I think you said you're going to have this in the notes where you bought the personalized clear bags from. I think you said you were going to have a link to that. It's coming from for imprint, actually. OK. That's where those are coming from. But you can find them from other vendors. That's not a problem for imprint is the name of the company they use. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Let me see. Yeah, there. Yep. So you can. They are really nice company to work with because they will let you order a free sample and they will send it out to you for free. So you can actually see the quality and decide if you like it or not. It's not going to work for your purposes and everything too. Yeah. Which is really nice. Yeah. I think being able to see, you know, you can guess, well, it says the dimensions are this and this is how much we need. We want to put in one of these. Let's hope it works when it gets here. Well, the other problem we were having is, OK, we want to do this. But where are we going to store them and how are we going to store them? Yeah. This gave us a chance to see them and actually try to put them in our holders that we're looking at or see where we want to hook them. I also have two additional slides after this that have lots of answers that I got. Oh, well, you said you had asked online for what people were. Yes, from there from that. OK. The WIG library I thought was fabulous. Oh, yeah. Rock Island Public Library was actually right next to us at River Valley when I was over on the Mississippi River. And we all did cultural passes to museums and botanical gardens, art museum, Children's Museum. Where else did we have? I think we had somebody else too. And those went out like hotcakes. I think here in Nebraska, I've seen libraries doing things like tickets to the local baseball games or hockey teams, hockey, you know, not well, I suppose you could do, you know, NHL and, you know, national professional teams, too.  A lot of times if you contact those organizations, they I know in Michigan, we went with the White Caps, the West Michigan White Caps would give us a whole stack of free tickets for our summer reading program that we can get. Right, right at the end, yeah. All right. Well, it doesn't look like anybody has typed in any desperate questions right now. So these slides you have are on your, oh, I see you got on your Google Docs. OK, they are and I will send them over to you. I'm sorry, I jumped through a whole bunch of stuff there for everybody. But really, if you've got any questions, just send them on over. No problem. Yeah, send me the link. And when the recording goes up, as I said, the link to this will be included and also those notes that you see that she's been looking at will have those other URLs to other resources and things that are available for you. All right. So I'm going to pull back presenter control to my screen now to wrap up for today. So thank you very much, Natalie. This is great. I was glad to see all the great ideas. I know this has been a more common thing happening in libraries, definitely doing these sharing lending out anything, you know, whatever people come in and ask for what that you come up with. Or as you said, if you get a donation of xylophones, figure, let's lend them out and see what happens. You know, it's just been fascinating. In Michigan, I started doing these about four or five years ago. And both of the libraries that I've worked at here in Illinois, neither of them have done this at all. It's interesting because some of the libraries yet someplace is like, well, of course, we've been lending cake pans for 40 years and other completely unaware that this is a thing. Yeah. But it's getting out. Yeah. And some people are thinking of different things as different like the human library or the, you know, passes to the zoo or the baseball games or whatever. It's all that's all things that are just not the traditional that people think of libraries about that. We can be a resource for. All right. So thank you, Natalie. Thank you, everyone, for attending this morning. The show has been recorded, as I said, and if we go to our Encompass Live website here, if you just Google or use your search engine of choice, Encompass Live is the only thing that comes up called this so far, our fingers, and you'll get our website. We can see our upcoming shows, but our archives are right here underneath. There's a link to the archives and today's show will be at the top of the page here and we will have a link. Let's see what we had last week. Yeah. Just like this one was last week's show, link the recording and a link to the presentation on Natalie's Google Docs will be here. So you can watch that should be available sometime later this afternoon, as long as YouTube cooperates with me in the processing and uploading of the recording and everyone who attended this morning and registered for today's show will receive an email letting you know when it is ready. I'll also be posted out to our social media and mailing lists. While I'm here, these are archives, as I said, the beginning show and cover slide premiered in January 2009. So this page does have our archives going back all the way to the beginning. I'm going to scroll down here.  So you can get all of our archives going back to the very beginning if you wanted to. We do have everything here, everything's on our YouTube channel. Recordings are there, links to slides, handouts, websites are here. Do be aware that when you are looking at some of these older shows, some things may be old and expired. Some of the information may be outdated, of course, because it's been 10 years. Some of the links to certain websites may not work. We don't have the always keep up on all of those. We try to if we find out. So keep that in mind when you're going back. Everything is dated though. So you can see when it was actually originally broadcast and know that was from that time frame. Things are different now, but for historical purposes, it's all still here. I'm going to scroll to the top again now. So we do keep them all there, even though they are old. We are librarians, so we archive everything. And this is just another one of those things. You can also search here if you want to do a search on the any any any words that are in the title, the description, the presenter's name. You can search the entire 10 years of it, or you can search the most recent 12 months if you're just looking for something we did very recently, the most recent years worth. So that is our archives. And Encompass Live is also on Facebook. If you click on our Facebook link here or from any of our pages, you get to our Facebook page where we do post when our shows are starting up reminders. Here's a reminder to log in for this morning's show on the fly when the recordings are available. We post them on here. So here's a recording notice from last week. So if you are big on user on Facebook, give us a like to keep up with what we're doing over there. And I hope you join us next week when our topic is introducing the Nebraska Authors Database. This is a resource that has been available for a while, but now it has become an online database, Nebraska Authors.org put together by our Lincoln City Libraries. And Aaron Willis from Lincoln City Libraries will be here next week to talk about this. This is a database of biographical information, everything about authors from Nebraska. So sign up for that one if you're interested in hearing about the new database. It actually goes live on Sunday. Yeah, the 22nd. I'll just check my calendar and then we'll have the show a couple of days later. The URL is available right now, but it's not officially launching until Sunday, the 22nd. So I'll hope you join us for that show in our future ones. Other than that, that wraps up for this morning. Thank you very much, everyone, for attending. And we'll see you next time on Encompass Live. Bye.


Three game-changing tips to make the best turkey ever. Turkey is super lean, which is why it dries out easily. So you can cook the turkey and butter before cooking and then keep applying butter as it cooks. Or you could try my family's secret trick and wrap that bird in bacon, because bacon. This involves marinating your turkey and saltwater for anywhere from eight to 18 hours. Then you take it out the brine eight to 12 hours before cooking. You can throw in some herbs, spices, or sugar in there for some extra flavor. Start cooking at 450 degrees and then reduce the temperature to 350 degrees after 30 minutes. The initial high heat ensures that the skin gets crispy and then cooking it low and slow should retain the turkey's juiciness.