Hello, and welcome to the Nebraska Library Commission's Public Library Accreditation Workshop for 2023. I am Krista Porter. I am the Library Development Director here at the Nebraska Library Commission. In my department, Library Development, I'm in charge of the accreditation program, so I'm who you will deal with throughout this whole process. In my department, we also handle public librarian certification, board certification, e-rate, any of your continuing education needs, our basic skills program, youth services, grants in library development. So that is what we do here, and that's what I'm involved in. Some of you, I see, I've looked up everyone who is registering today and joining us. Some of you are up for a renewal this year, that's great. Good to get on top of things. Some of you in future years, and that is awesome too. It's great to get a head start on this kind of thing. It can take some time to gather what you need for some of the accreditation requirements and just to see where you're situated right now and looking ahead to that. So it's great to get a head start. We may have library directors, board members, community members here. That's awesome. Welcome, everyone. It's good to have lots of people involved in the process, not just the library director. So hopefully if you are the director and are intending today, you are welcome to, after this is over, share the recording of the workshop with anyone else who may be helping you out with getting up to date on your accreditation. We also have some people here possibly who are not been accredited yet. The library is not currently accredited, and that's great. We'd love to have new libraries join the program and become accredited. We do have about 270 something public libraries in Nebraska, and at the moment I believe 183 are currently accredited. So there are still plenty out there. We'd love to have new libraries joined. So in the workshop today, it's going to be good for everyone. If you've gone through the process before, it's great to have a reminder of how things are done or of any changes that we maybe have put into the program since last time you had to do your accreditation.  That is a three hour workshop, and we will take a break about halfway through. So it's okay.  We'll take a break for everyone halfway through the session. All right, so I'm going to start here on our, this is the Nebraska Library Commission's website, nlc.nebraska.gov. And if you go there, you'll see here over on the left we have menus. And pull out menu here that have pop out menu, extra information on them. And we have here accreditation and certification are together on one pop out menu. And this is because they are related. We are going to talk about all three of these things today. Sorry, I just want to mute myself for a minute or so there. Firetruck just went by loud loud sirens and didn't want anyone have to be listening to that and struggling to hear me. All right. So on our menu here you see accreditation and certification pop out. And they are here together because they are related. Board certification and librarian certification fee are part of the requirements for your library to be accredited. I'm not going to talk about all of them, but we are going to talk about accreditation first. And some people do confuse the terms here. Certification accreditation, you and I get emails or phone calls sometimes it's going to be confused what they're talking about whether it's their their personal certification libraries accreditation. My predecessor here Richard Miller used to describe it as people are certifiable, but buildings are not. So your board is certified your library board is certified your library director or any other library staff are certified in your library is accredited. So people get certified the library gets accredited. So we are going to go to the library accreditation page first. I just want to show you here there are links to some of the sections with about certain board library board certification and librarian certification. And we'll go into the details about all of that. We get back to talking about those. But for library accreditation we have a link to the main page the application form that we're going to look at the basic guidelines. Looking up your libraries or any libraries public library creation status and your community needs response planning that is required for this. So I'm going to go to the library accreditation website, and you can see here at the top it says accreditation process starts July 1. And that is correct that is when I will send an email out to all of you up for re accreditation or anyone who's qualified to be accredited, letting you know that you can go in and start working on your application on your online application form. However, there are things you can do before July 1, and that you may need to do in preparation for when that process does open up. And that's why we do our workshops a couple of months ahead of time as we are doing now. So the first thing I do want to explain about public library accreditation here is this is not a national program that is created or dictated by any national organization. Not from the American Library, ALA, the American Library Association or IMLS Institute of Museum and Library Services at the federal level. This is not a national program run by then any of them it's done at the state level. So we at the library commission created this program. It is ours and we are in charge of it. There's no one telling me above me what to do with this. Not all states do this. So if you come have come from to Nebraska from some other state you may not know what this is about at all because your state does not have accreditation or certification for the library boards and library staff. Some do accreditation, but not certification. Some do certification, but not accreditation of their libraries. It varies all across the country. Like I said, there's no organization telling everyone you must do this in the state. Each state does whatever they want to. So if you talked to your colleagues in other states about this, they may not have any clue what you're talking about. Because they don't have they don't have it as all or their program may be completely different from how ours works. So this is specific just to Nebraska and we here do do both we have our board certification, library and certification and accreditation program. All of these programs are voluntary. You are not required to participate in any of them, but there are certain benefits you get because you have participated. Okay, so there have been a few changes made to the program also recently just last year. The current incarnation of the credit well I'll go back before that public library accreditation was first set up here in Nebraska in the late 80s. And it was a and it has changed over the years they made some modifications to it of course as times have changed. And the most recent change to it was done in 2013 when we went to a points based system. Before 2013, the accreditation process they were three levels and you had to meet all the criteria for the lowest level and do all of these things that required before you could attempt to be at the second level. Then you had to meet all of those requirements before you could work and being at the highest level. If you didn't meet all the even just one if you missed just one guideline at the very lowest level, you didn't get your accreditation at all. They decided this was the team of librarians library staff and library regional system directors got were gathered together to do a reworking of the program in 2013 to make it easier. That was really cutting off a lot of libraries who are perfectly good libraries doing doing great work in their areas and their communities, but just due to one thing. They weren't getting their accreditation. So they changed to a points based system where every guideline you can earn a certain number of points for. And if you get the minimum number of points you get the lowest level accreditation you're in more points next level and so on. Each community in the state is different and each community has different needs and each library has their own strengths and weaknesses. And so if one library is really good at doing one thing and this other library is good at doing something else, they should both be able to earn points for those things. You might not earn points for the thing that this other library is good at but you're earning them for your good at and what you know your community needs. So it was much more equitable to have this point system rather than a hard line of you must be open this many hours, you must have this many materials you must. So it's a much more flexible program. So that was changed in 2013. As of now, almost every single library in the state has been through that process at least once, most of them twice in the new version. And we've learned a lot about the accreditation program through that. And I had been talking about for quite a few years that I wanted to do a sell another self evaluation of the program, they made the changes in 2013, and I'm using them for a while, but we hadn't really looked into it to see is it working. Is this what we want to be the information we want to get from the libraries, are they happy with it is actually helping them in doing what they do. You can come up with a plan, but when it goes into practice, you never know how it's going to actually turn out. So we did do this finally last year in January of 2022 I brought together a public library accreditation review committee, which was made up of library directors. Some of them had been at in the involved in the planning in the reevaluate we changing of the program back in 2013, somewhere new had not been involved, and all of our regional regional library system directors were involved as well. I'll wait a couple of meetings and did a self evaluation and review of the program we went through the application form, question by question. And we went through the community needs response plan process step by step to see what should be changed what modifications would be good. And as I as I go through the workshop today, I will point out things that have changed in case maybe you've been looking at this years ago and wonder hey something's different. I'll point that out. One of the major changes was that is right here up at the top of the page here is that public library accreditation is now good for five years. Previously, the accreditation period was three years, and we heard from many libraries over the years that that was not enough time between having this valuation done not enough time for things to change in their community for the demographics to be different you know their census data to change drastically to come up with new goals and new programs and new things that they might mention in their community needs plan. The needs of the community hadn't changed a lot in three years, and it was just too soon so I was getting a lot of repetitious the same thing and every, every, every time a library accredited. So we decided to extend that change that from three to five years. We actually fell into that are automatically due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Back in 2020, we were in March, I was just starting to think about getting the new pro the accreditation process going for that year, and then the pandemic hit. And I decided libraries did not need to be worrying about accreditation with everything else going on in the world that they were dealing with this was not important enough to worry about. I gave every library a year extension. So from whatever their whenever they were do everyone got an additional year added on to their accreditation in 2021 came around things are still still bad. And so with the pandemic. So I gave everyone another year extension. So every library got to your extension on their accreditation because of the pandemic. And then in 2022 decided, okay, looks like people have settled into how they're running things the library. Yes, we do still have the COVID-19 pandemic going on as we do today, but people have figured out and settled in how they work with it now. So in 2022 we did start up the accreditation program again, but I bought this group together to do that self evaluation first. And then the first thing we did was put it to five years. And so everyone ended up with five years anyways, who were due back in 2020 originally, and everyone else received even more time. When we had it at three years, I had three groups of libraries of about the same number of libraries in each group that I would take care that would be up for reacreditation each year. We went to five years, I had invited into five groups. So we have about the same number of libraries that I would be working with each year, somewhere between 35 and 40, it is depending on the year. So when we did switch from three to five, many libraries also had their accreditation extended again, just in order to fit and not the same number of libraries in each group. So some libraries may even for this time around have like a six or seven years before they're due was just to get everything balanced out. You all have been everyone has sent emails letting them know what their accreditation expiration date was. And you can also look this up on the website. You can see the link here and as you saw it wasn't that pop pull out menu to where you can look up accreditation status of any library in Nebraska. The city library name, what level they are at when they expire in which region library system they are part of these links here will go to a library's website if we know what they that they have one. What your accreditation year is you can't if you don't have that email from me from before, just go to this page here we keep it up to date, as anything changes. So everybody will know when they are due or for re accreditation if they're currently accredited for the libraries that are not accredited, it's just blank because they haven't done it yet. All right, so that three to five years was the biggest biggest change. There's also a pretty substantial change to one part of the community's response plan that we will talk about when we get to that. Just a teaser, you don't have to do a SWAT analysis anymore. Yay, I know lots of people struggle with that strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats, we change that. So, we'll talk about that when we get into looking at the community's response planning later on. And there are also some other changes updates and clarifications made to some of the guidelines in the application form. In our discussions we figured out and from my from the team that the review team we had together, and just with over the years as I worked with libraries. Things that I knew people were struggling with. And so there's some minor changes and clarifications in there. And the application form that we'll talk about too. So, the first thing that I try to tell people and that some people ask me when they are doing this for the first time or being re accredited is, why? Why should I go through this process? Why should my library be accredited? Why should I go through all of this work? You may have people asking you, your mayor, your city council, your library board members may be asking you as the library director staff. Why are we doing this? What's the point? This is a lot for you to do. Is it even worth it? And of course I think it is. But the main purpose of public library accreditation is to set minimum standards, benchmarks that libraries reach. And it shows your community that you are keeping up with the times. And they know that compared to other, they can see compared to other libraries, how you are doing. And it just shows that you are working to keep the library as a good, useful place for the citizens. It is something as they're here to be really proud of and to celebrate. Tell everyone, spread the word when you do get accredited or if you come to get bumped up to a, if you earn a higher level even. So it's, the standards are also created by a task force of professional librarians. Your colleagues came up with these standards, decided this is what is the minimum to be a good library in Nebraska? What do we want a library to do to earn accreditation? And what can they reach for with these benchmarks? And these standards. So you can also tell people this is this is my colleagues and other librarians who have discussed this and come up with all of these criteria. You also can show that how you are spending the money and the services you are providing and what what you are offering at the library is what is needed in your community because you've gone through this process to figure that out. You can show how you compare to other libraries where someone sized years are even completely different from yours and show them that this is what other libraries are doing. So we probably should be doing. So bragging rights really saying, hey, we're accredited. You can share this with your stakeholders. Anyone involved with giving you money or at least are advocating for the library. You also receive some physical things. We do send you a certificate, an actual document that you can hang up on your wall. I know many libraries do this and they always want to make sure they have the most recent one. So the certificate you can post up in the library. We send you a little graphic and online badge. A little thing that says Nebraska Public Library accredited and what years it's for that you can use and post on your website sharing your on your social media.  And we have window clings that go out. You can put in your window. Our regional library systems provide those. So you can have something right in the window of your library when someone just walking by on the street can see, hey, this is an accredited library by the state of Nebraska. Awesome. So beyond all of that money. Budgets are tight to budgets are important. And we know that there are certain things that you are eligible, certain funding and monies that you are eligible for as an accredited public library in Nebraska. If you are not accredited, you are not eligible for these. The first one is state aid to public libraries. This is based on your population and you can only receive the state aid funding. If you are accredited, there is another program called dollars for data that you may know about that for any library that just submits that submits the public library survey every year to Sam Shaw. And but is not accredited, you do get you can receive dollars for data funding monies, but that is less than what you would see as state aid if you are accredited. In addition, we have some incentive payments if you reach the second or third level of silver or gold. You can get an additional $200 if you're silver and 400 if you're gold. This is money that you can do whatever you like with state aid, just money that we will send out to you in the beginning of the year, early in the year. Also, you are eligible to apply for the grants that we offer here through the Nebraska Library Commission. So that's our ce and training grants internship library improvement grants and youth grants for excellence. So which apply for all of our grants here the commission your library does need to be accredited. Now I will mention that last year was the rules were waived for some of this. We received funding here at the library commission from the Institute Museum and Library Services through the American Rescue Plan Act, ARPA. And that was also as a result money that came as a result of the pandemic going on. And we were we had to have all of our any money we're going to be giving up to libraries had to be eligible. Any library in the state had to be eligible for it. So our only criteria last year was that you are legally established library did not need to be accredited. So for the library improvement grants and youth grants for excellence, we did use ARPA funding to fund those last year. We had something like $2.4 million. I'm guessing remembering so last year for one time only, we did you did not need to be accredited to apply for our grants. But we did not have that money again this year that was a one year at the one time thing there is not a new rescue plan act money or a new act or anything coming through this year. So we're back to our regular rules, starting in 20 with our 2023 grants which libraries applied for last fall and have received or are receiving right now. So for 2022 grants, you did not need to be accredited. But like I said, that was a one shot deal. Unless we get money again that gives us those requirements. We'll do that again. In addition to our grants, there are some other state agencies, state organizations that have decided to use our accreditation level or accreditation process as a requirement for use library accreditation as a requirement for their grants. Nebraska's Department of Economic Development has community development block grants, and the rural USDA agency in Nebraska has grants and loans as well and both of those have decided to use as one of their criteria that a library, a public library, if a public library is applying, they must be accredited. For both of these as you see here I noted there for community facilities. So if you are looking for construction type grant monies something to relate to construction, these are two grants I highly recommend you look into. So if you need are doing building a new library building or adding expansion onto yours. Your current building or updating like your computer lab anything that has to do with construction and modifying the building, putting in ADA accessible doors, those kind of things. Excuse me. Those are two grants that you can apply for the grants that we give out, we do have because of the money where it comes from can't be used the commission gives out cannot be used for construction type things like that, but those other ones can. So, receiving all of these funds, you do need to be accredited if you are not an accredited public library you cannot apply for these grants, and you did not receive this at the higher state aid funding. There are three levels of accreditation, bronze, silver and gold. And as I mentioned earlier, the accreditation program is based on earning points and we'll see how you earn all those points when we look at the accreditation application form. There is a total of 275 points available, but gold is the highest level you can reach at 250 there's not like gold plus or platinum or anything. If you reach 175 you get bronze 200 points silver and 250 gold. And when this and I will tell the story that I was told when this was they were first coming up with this bronze, silver and gold levels in 2013. Someone didn't make the joke actually that the Olympics were happening at that time. And they said, Oh, we should do bronze, silver and gold like the metals. And they all said, Oh, actually that's a great idea. So they changed the levels and they call them bronze, silver and gold. So that is where that came from. So the points that you earn are for varying things like I said at your library that you may do. And it just makes it a more equitable program. It reflects more accurately what is happening in each unique community. So if you earn points for one thing, that's because that's something your community needs and you're really good at. So you get those points, but some other community doesn't need that particular service. So they don't earn those points there and something else. And but overall, everyone can still earn points in what they're good at and get up to whichever level they can reach. And I already showed you how you can look up your library's accreditation level right now or any other library. If you have any questions, don't forget type it into the question section for anything you want to ask me. If I'm going too fast, if you're confused about anything, if I'm not, I haven't mentioned something that you thought I would mention. Whenever you think about it, just go right ahead and type it in there. So as I mentioned at the beginning, and it showed at the top of this page, the accreditation process officially begins in July of each year. July 1st, I send an email out to all libraries who are due for reaccreditation this year and any libraries who are not accredited have submitted our public the public library survey and the supplemental survey that we have here at the library commission. Those are the surveys that you work with with Sam Shaw on using bibliostat collect. So I'm sure all of you have dealt with him before. But if you submit those surveys, he lets me know and then all those people who have submitted that also are invited to become accredited for the first time. So the process starts in July, then you have to submit an online accreditation application form where you add up, you check off boxes for earning all your points and a community needs response plan. This is a separate document that you will write up or maybe update a current one that you have that you would send to me. Do it in Word, PDF, whatever works for you, and you can email it, mail it, scan and fax it, whatever works for you to get it to me. Both of those things are due by October 1. And so that's a deadline to submit both of those items. And then at the very latest December 31 is when I will have wrapped up evaluating all of the applications and plans and let you know what your accreditation level is. I do not wait until October 1 to start looking at these. As soon as I receive an application and a plan and I have both of those together, I'll start evaluating them and reviewing them and looking them over. I do need both of those things to start that review because there are things in the accreditation application form online, some boxes that you will check off that refer to things that would be mentioned in your plan.  So I look at both of those together to make sure if you mentioned this thing in your plan, make sure you checked it off on your application form. And if you check something off of your application form saying you're doing this thing, I will check your plan to make sure you said you were. I may reach out to you with questions if there is something missing from your plan or missing from application form that I know should be done or something you checked off that I'm not sure about. I could reach out to you and we will have a back and forth and updating the application form, updating the plan until we come up with something that is correct and useful and what we both want. And before I finish up the evaluation. So even when you submit both of those things, they are not locked in stone and can't be changed. We can make up of course I can have you make modifications to your plan and your online application form even after you do your final submission. We can still make changes behind the scenes if we determine that you should have checked something off and earn more points or if you had unfortunately checked something that you shouldn't have. We have to undo that things can always be modified until we come up with our final answer. So you could on July 1 when I send the email if you're really on top of things, complete your application form and email me your plan, and within a week or so, you know, give me time to look over a thing. You could know what you're accredited that you're accredited and you're good for the next five year period, possibly by by beginning of July. But it could happen anytime between July 1 and December 31 depending on how much you have to work with libraries. Accreditation is done on the calendar year so your current accreditation in is good through December 31 of whatever year you're renewing. So we work on starting the next cycle while you're still currently accredited. Any questions about the schedule or levels or anything I've talked about so far. So there are some requirements to apply and to maintain your library's accreditation. As I mentioned, you do have to first thing you got to do before we even reach out to you about being accredited or re-accrediting is have that public library survey and supplemental survey done. It's usually open up in November and then the deadline is usually sometime in February. So that is already done before we get into accreditation in July. So you have to have done both of those. If you miss doing your survey for one year, you may lose your library's accreditation. So you don't just do this the one year you're due and then not worry about it for another five years. You do have to keep up with submitting your survey every year and you have to keep any of the things you've said you do in your application and these 12 minimum qualifications I'm going to get into. You do have to maintain all of those throughout the time of your accreditation of your library. If you lose any of those, I will work with you and we'll talk about what's going on. Was there a major disaster like the flooding we had in 2019, gave a lot of libraries extensions and let them slide on things then. We'll talk about why you may have missed something and if we will give you a pass on that. But if not, there will be, you could possibly have your accreditation revoked. So public library survey, supplemental survey, then there are 12 minimum qualifications that you have to meet before you can submit the application. I'll open that up over here so you can see that and we'll get into the details of this in a few minutes here. But these are the 12 things and this is the beginning of getting into your app, the online application form. You can see there's a big red box saying the process won't start until July 1st. You can't do this just yet because it's locked down until July 1st. As soon as it's July 1st then we will, I'll send you the email, it'll be made live and you'll be able to go into it. I do have a version of this form that I'm going to show you. That's a demo that I can get into behind the scenes because I'm doing it for this training to show you everything. But we'll get into all these details in just a few minutes here. And then the other requirement is having that community needs response plan. This is something that used to be called the strategic plan. So your previous version of this may be called that or you may hear people talk about the strategic plan they had to submit for accreditation. A few years ago, I changed the name of that. That was before this self-evaluation thing I did last year. A lot of libraries were confused. A lot of staff was confused by this or intimidated by calling a strategic plan. And it really wasn't what we were looking for.  What we're looking for here is just something more focused and just a part of what you do at your library. And one of our other regional library system directors, Scott Childers, he's the director of the Southeast System said, well, I've been calling it as this community needs response plan because that's really what it is. It was easier to explain it. And I light bulb one off. I said, that's awesome. I'm going to, can I borrow that? Yes, we're stealing it. We're changing the name. So it is now called a community needs response plan because really what we're asking you to do is look out your community, see what's going on, what needs they need, and is there anything you can respond to? So community needs response plan much more reflects more accurately what we're at, what it is and what we're looking for. But you may still see strategic plan mentioned and you may have a previous one that's called that. This is something, like I said, is a separate document. It's not something online that you submit. You'll write it up yourself, however you want it to be, and you will then send that to me. And it says your email, but I'll accept fax mail to it. Just get it to me, however, works for you. So those are the minimum qualifications for this is what you need to do before you can actually apply. You got to make sure you have that survey, both of these surveys submitted. Make sure you meet these 12 minute qualifications and you've got this community's response plan that you're getting, you send to me. We will get into the community's response plan in the second half of the workshop today. These, the guidelines in our application form are community based and that's why we have you look at your community and right at the separate plan for that. And so we're going to look at that in the second half today. As I mentioned, the application form, it is not live yet. You can't log into yours yet. But we will look at a demo form of that version of that. We do have though a preview application that you can look at if you want to see ahead of time what the questions will be. This is just a static form. It's nothing you can click on. It's not your form to submit. You can't even do anything live with it. It's just a static page showing what the questions are going that, that will appear when you go into your live form. So you can see here this is exactly what it will look like when you're going to live one. And, but if you try and do anything and click on anything, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm checking, I'm clicking my mouse. You can't actually do anything with this. It just shows you these are the questions that will be asked and how many points they're worth. So this is good to look at ahead of time to see are there some things we can work on to earn more points. If we need more points to reach that bronze level, or if we want to earn more points to get to a higher level. So you can take a look at this ahead of time. The preview application is always available for you to look over. All right. So the accreditation application form we will get into. And like I said, look at the demo of that next, but first I want to go back and go into these 12 minimum qualifications. So that open over here somewhere. Yeah, there we go. And go over these with you. Please do ask any questions if you do have anything that you're confused about or not sure, as I'm explaining it here in the application form because we're going to get into some of the details here and in talking about Nebraska statutes. And things like that. So as you can see here, it says you must meet these 12 minimum qualifications before you can even apply to be accredited for this to first time or the rear accredited you have to still be meeting this. Many of these requirements and some things that mentioned the form are come from Nebraska state statutes. There are certain Nebraska laws that libraries have to follow. And we have a question mark here and yellow, which is a link that you can open up. And this is a help page with links to anything you may need to learn no more about on the minimum qualifications. And if you scroll down this page and we'll look at this more closely in just a minute or two here, we get into the actual the rest of the accreditation form itself. So we have links here to the Nebraska statutes, federal laws, Open Meetings Act laws, information being certified, et cetera, et cetera, all of these different things we have a help here. So if there's something you need to know, know more about or you're confused about, you can always open up that and look at that. When you were actually going through your application. So the first thing you so these 12 boxes you have to check off and once you check them all off then it let let you access the online application form. So first thing is you need to be legally established by Nebraska under Nebraska state statutes. There are this is chapter 51 is the main chapter part of the Nebraska law that refers to public libraries there's a few things elsewhere in the laws to that relate to libraries, but this is the main one. And to be legally established, you had to have an ordinance a resolution something that came from your municipality, whether it's your city, village, township, county, stating that we want to have a public library we're going to create a public library. This is something that could have been done last year if you're new or 100 years ago, if you know your ladies book club decided to become a public library, just something that came officially from this from your municipality. And you have to have a library board that is made up of at least minimum five members, that is in Nebraska state statutes that public library boards have to have a minimum of five members. Those two things really legally established. I will say it is not required that every public library in Nebraska be legally established, you can have a public library in your community that is volunteer run that doesn't have a full board. It's just, you know, for just, you know, the community wanted to come together and have a library and that is perfectly fine we welcome that you were happy to have as many libraries that this is the state needs. You just do need to go to be sure you follow those legally established in order to become accredited and to do some other things with the library commission that you can look into on your own if you want to. But yes, public libraries volunteer libraries are perfectly acceptable it's not a problem. It's not illegal or anything you're allowed to do that, but you do need to be legal on order to just go into the accreditation process. And the next qualification you do need to comply with all Nebraska related library laws, any other local laws in your community that may be that may affect you from your community and any other federal laws that like that may affect this would be things like statutes open meeting act laws confidential confidentiality of library records of Americans with Disabilities Act. All of these various things are things that are related to you as a library that you do need to make sure you are in compliance with and various federal laws, secure safety, things like that. You do have to have that library board, it could be governing or advisory depending on the size of a community, having the minimum of five members, and that you do follow the, there are certain like I said certain state statues that refer to library boards and how they are run. And you have that the board has to follow the Nebraska open meetings law. And we have links in that help page about that link to the open the actual open meetings law statute here so you can read up on that. We did just a year ago, we did a one of my weekly and compass live webinars about the Open Meetings Act, and we're doing an update on that coming up. On July 19, if you want to watch that, and we are so doing a new session on June 21 about Nebraska library laws. So June 21 and compass live on Nebraska library laws, July 19 and compass live on Open Meetings Act. Scott Childers and I are doing those two sessions. So if you want to more in depth information about laws in Nebraska library laws and then specifically open meetings act. Do sign up for those they'll be recorded and you can watch them later too. The next two sex requirements here are about certification that we had mentioned earlier, both your library board and your library director are required to be certified. And this is certified through the Nebraska library commissions program. So I'm going to go back over here to our main Nebraska library main page here and we're going to go into looking at board and librarian certification. And you can see here for each section we do have a main page for each of them, there is an application form for your board to be certified and an application form for your library director or any library staff to be certified.  How you can submit your continuing education credits for your board and submit them for your library director or staff, they're different forms. And then we also have some great guides we put together with Holly Duggan who's our CE coordinator and previous staff have worked to put together a library board manual and a director's guidebook. These are both great resources, basically how to guide and how to be a library board and how to be a library director and how they work together. So I highly recommend taking a look at those two documents whenever you need more information about what are we supposed to be doing. So I'm going to start with a board certification because it's first on the list here and go to the public library board certification page. So the purpose of both of these certification programs is to keep you effective as a board member and or as a library staff person. The library board, it's to make sure that you know what's going on as far as being a library board member that you're up to date on any new things going on in the world of libraries. We know library board members come on and off sometimes they're like a limited time that you can be a board member so new members will need to keep up to date on things. This is about lifelong learning and professional development, keeping up to speed on what's going on in your, the area you're supposed to be an expert in. Each library, your library board has in the library board periods are for three years certification periods. This is still three year. So you are an in that three year period, your library board has to do 20 hours of continuing education credit of continuing education work submit 20 hours. Now this is 20 hours as a whole, not 20 hours per person over a three year period. So if you have the minimum of five board members, you may have more. Each board member has to do four hours of CE in three years. Easy, not a problem. I recommend spreading it out over those three years. So you're not trying to rush through all of them at the mean you're up for re certification. As I said, you do have to apply for certification. So you just submit this form first to let us know that your board is working and doing CE that's related to being certified. You may if you submit certification reports to us and we don't know why we don't have anything showing that your board has officially decided to join the program. We don't have any way of applying it to to your board. So do this certification application first. Then you can start submitting CE activity. There is a CE form where your boards will use to submit anything your board members attend. You just do the library name and you can list multiple activities on one form. Your board can submit this library director can submit this whoever what I love about this form to though is that you can list multiple board members attending the same activity altogether. You don't have to list it like a four board members did something you don't have to list that activity four times you list it once and then you list all the four members here. And that's something to be aware of to when we're talking about earning continuing education credit. If all of your board members for example attend the Nebraska laws and compass live we have coming up. You list that they attended that you list all of them and they each earn an hour of credit for attending that so if all five of your board members watch that one and compass live show they've earned five hours of CE for their board. They're a quarter of the way done from just one hour of them all sitting together and watching that Web. You can check your library board certification status. There is link here for that similar to looking up your library's accreditation status. This is ranged by city by default but you can change it to name system expiration date it tells you if their board is certified when they expire and which regional system they're in. These if a library has expired and has not kept up with their certification that's what it's in red and you can see the dates are old. These links here go to the library boards certification record unlike the one on the accreditation page or went to the just the libraries website. This is where you look at the record so you can see here for Ainsworth. They are halfway through what they need for CE tells you they've got currently have earned 10 they need 10. Their research really a recertification is due September 30th 2024. So they have until September of next year to earn those other 10 credits. And you can see here it lists the things that they've attended when it happened and how many CE they earn. And I think this is the initials of whoever attended. We also have down here a list of who we have and we know your current board members. This is based off of what you would have submitted to us in the supplemental survey, the L.C. Supplemental Survey. If any of this is incorrect, let us know and we will update that and fix it and have the correct names here. So your board can always look up here and check and see where they're at and how many hours they might need or if they've met them all you as a library director can come here and check. Public information I just this is not something hidden away. You can always double check here and see how your board is doing. So what can you your board do to earn these credits all sorts of things webinar workshop conferences online in person recorded any version of that you can earn CE for you earn half a CE for anything that goes minimum 20 minutes. Something has to be up to 44 minutes year and half a CE once it goes past 45 you earn the full one CE up to 89 minutes. Anything that we provide here through the library commission or through the systems is eligible for boards to attend. Beyond that it has to be something that's related to what you do your job as a board member. What things will help you do to be you perform your duties as a library board member. You may be a school teacher and attend professional development and CE that's related to doing your job as a teacher and that's great. But that has nothing to do with being a board member at your library so you can't submit that kind of CE for this. If you have questions about what was eligible and if it does count contact Holly Holly dug in our CE coordinator and she can to let you know if she'll accept that or not she's in charge of this. We also have a lot of links to a lot of board specific courses and trainings in here that you can have your board watch. Trusty Academy courses and short takes for trustees. These are through United for Libraries which is the American Library Association section for friends foundations trustees which are library boards here in Nebraska. We pay for a statewide subscription to United for Libraries anything they offer on the library commission pays pays for that and all library staff and board members in Nebraska can attend and use anything in the library United for Libraries website for free and no cost to you we cover the cost.  So the trusty Academy has some of these courses working with a library director everyday advocacy equity diversity inclusion etc etc all the kind of things that a board may do. Short takes for trustees are shorter ones a little 8 to 10 minutes each so you would watch these and then have a discussion about it afterwards to fulfill that 20 minute minimum of receiving CE for anything. So these are things that you could add a board meeting decided we're going to go through the first one of these maybe just go through them at a time and start earning our CE for this. So if you watch what it means to be a trustee talk about it all five board members do it. They can each earn that half a credit and that's two and a half CE that you've earned for that particular item. We also have links to some great resources that other states have put together and put out there that are that you can watch. So many of Wyoming have their own trustee and library board videos out there so you can watch any of those. And then other encompass live sessions that we have had over the years that would be eligible as well specifics and compass live sessions. Well this is just highlighting specific ones that are board focused so if you want to really make sure your board members are learning things about that Holly has pulled together a lot of those here. United for Libraries also does lots of other events they have a monthly learning live webinar series that's got lots of things reported related. They do an annual virtual conference I believe there's one coming up 2023. We'll have to see about we'll get an exact to sure when I think it's in August each year. But these are all things that you can attend that come through United for Libraries. Okay, and we have a question here great about library board. The question here is the board just completes the continuing education continued hours mentioned and there's no other form to complete. Right the board first you have to just sign up using this form saying yes we want to be part of the certification program. And then when you submit any of the doing the continuing education. Things you submit the activity on this form letting us know you attended something. Anything that you attend through the library commission we track that for you, like today if you had board members attending anything live. I've got a list here where I've checked off all of you that are here and I pass that on to Holly. And Mary Bible our assistant to record all of that but anything you attend that's not run by the commission or that's recording. Use that form to submit. And then a second question here did United for libraries still publish a newsletter. I believe that they do and if you go into their and you do have access to that as part of the United the statewide account that we have here.  Okay, I think I threw all of this. Yes. All right. And bottom of this page or some FAQs that explain a lot of what I just went through went over with you. The library certification so to be accredited your library board doesn't need to be current on their certification. Any other questions about board certification before we go on to librarian certification. So I'm going to go over to the public librarian certification page here, your library director also needs to be certified in order for your library to be accredited. Other staff can be certified as well, and you will earn extra points for them if they do become certified libraries. Library boards is professional development, keeping up with what's going on in your profession, knowing what's happening and just keeping, you know, on top of things like that. You also just submit application to the program. So we know that you are submitting CE to us for the purpose of being certified. So you have to submit this form first if you haven't done it yet. The first thing you do need to do. And then you will get a certificate that will be sent to you. And this is also a three year period that your librarian certification is good for. There are different levels of certification based on your education. So if you have a library science degree, you end up with the levels that have that little L to L. If you don't, if you have any other kind of degree, you just receive that level.  We know that not every library staff person is not every library staff person in Nebraska has attended library school, or even intends or has the desire or need to attend full library school and that's perfectly fine. We are happy to have you all working in libraries. But if you want to be accredited, we have our basic skills courses that you will need to take in order to earn your certification. The basic skills classes are basically the how to be a library staff person. The most important things you need to know, clutch and development, communication, intellectual freedom, etc. There's six courses that are required to take. And then you can choose out of these 10 courses, seven electives, depending on what you're interested in, or need to know more about. We have a schedule of our courses, basic skills courses, they're done throughout the year. And they're always at the same time of year and in this order. So you can plan what year you might take these courses if you need to. As I said, the certification period goes for three years. So over that, if you do not already have some sort of library degree within that first three years, the first three years of your certification, you have to do basic skills classes. So you'll have to do those six required ones and seven electives sometime in the first three years. Once you do them once, you don't have to do them again. After that, you just have to earn CE credits. So I'd say look at this schedule and decide what year you might be doing which ones. You may know that in July I'm going on vacation this year, so reference isn't going to happen in 2023, but you can plan to do it in 2024 or 2025. These basic skills classes are actually open to any Nebraska citizen who is working in a library or thinking they might work in a library, planning to work in a library. They are free, there's no cost. They're all done online through Moodle, which is an online learning management system. Some of them are self-paced as you can see here and they last a month long. So you have a month to do all of the work in our communication and intro to cataloging ones. All the other ones are two weeks and they do have an instructor that helps you move you along through the class. So if you do need to do basic skills classes, here's the information about that. If you're just interested and want to take one, you can as well. As I said, they're required if you want to be certified and don't have a library's degree or schooling of any kind.   You're welcome to take any of these and you can take them repeatedly if you really want to just for your own education. We do update them regularly of course as things change. So if you took one of these like 10 years ago, you might want to take a new one again to see what the update is. For librarian certification, you do need to do 45 hours of CE credits over your three-year, over during your three-year certification period. If you are doing the basic skills classes because you do not have the library science degree, your basic skills classes count towards that 45. So you don't have to do the basic skills plus 45 hours. Any of those classes you take will count towards your total of the 45 hours. So for librarians doing certification, it's 45 credits over a three-year period. So you only need to do 15 hours a year. That shouldn't be bad at all. For accreditation, your library director is required to be certified at a certain level and the levels are based on your library's legal service area. And if I have the help page, there it is. It was here somewhere. The director, depending on the legal service area of your community, you need to be at a minimum of these particular levels. So 500 to 2499, level one at a minimum, et cetera, et cetera, 10,000 or plus level five, having a master's in library science. What can you do to be certified? Oh, here we go. How do I earn? You can take a page on earning CE credits, a whole separate page for the public librarian credits. Similar to the library board, webinars, workshops, conferences, in this case, you can take courses for college credit. The same rules apply for timing, online courses. If you teach something, if you present, you actually earn double the CE credits. So if you go to the Nebraska Library Association Conference and present, you're one of their sessions. You go to the Association for Rolling Small Libraries Conference coming up in Wichita this fall.  You submit that to us. You earn double the CE. So you can earn teaching education for both learning something by attending a workshop and teaching other people something. New question here. Do other staff members need to be certified? No, there is not a requirement that any other staff members be certified. Only the director is required to be certified. If other staff members are certified, you can earn more points in your certification. And just like the board, as far as what you would earn CE credits for, it's things to do with being a library director. And there is a specific form to submit, a different form to submit your CE activity if you are an individual doing the librarian certification. So if you attend something we're doing here, like you're doing today, I will submit it for you. If you attend something else or if you attend a recording of something, you would use this form to submit your CE to us. There is a CE record review or you can check and see where you are at your certification. I can't show you this because I'd have to log into someone's account and I don't have that info. But so you can as an individual check and see how many hours you've done and how many hours you might need. There is a password you'd use. Use a look up here or you can email Mary Gible and she'll help you as well. You can look it up yourself. I'll also note here that when you submit your CE to us, it does. This is, it is not an automatic thing where it's just automatically added to your, instantaneously added to your CE record. It is done manually by Mary to go in and look at all the forms she's receiving and then add them. So give her at least 10 days to get your record updated. If it's been like a month or more and you still don't see that reflected, just send her a quick email. Things do get lost in the shuffle. She's very, very busy with a lot of these things being submitted. She does our CE for boards and libraries and sending out certificates for everything. So just send her an email and say, hey, I sent this one in. Did you get it? Just make sure she didn't miss anything. For both the board and librarian certification, like I said, for the library accreditation, you will receive a certificate in the mail showing that you are certified as your board is certified and a separate one showing your director or any of your staff are. Another thing to brag about hanging up on your wall. I know some libraries are very, want those always up to date and sometimes they've lost the most recent one and they didn't get it and they want to get an updated one. So they have all their sort of certificates up on the wall. The library is accredited, the board is certified, the director is certified. Great thing to brag about and show off and show what your library is doing. All right. Any questions of any other questions about board or librarian certification? What questions do you have that I did not mention yet? Or anything that you're confused about or you're wondering about about certificate. Either those certification programs. All right. So the next qualification of the 12 minimum before you even get into the form. Sorry. You have to receive local funding from your municipality, city, village, township, whatever. So you have to have actual budget money coming from somewhere. You have to have done the most recent public library survey and supplemental survey. I talked about that. You have to have paid library staff during all scheduled hours of libraries open. Now, I will mention here, we do know that sometimes you do have volunteers who come in and help out of the library or library board members will come and help run the library sometimes for special circumstances and not be paid for it. If the library director or staff has to go off to a conference like NLA, National Library Association Conference or ALA, or has to go to a meeting and they don't want to close the library and they bring volunteers in. That's perfectly fine. You can still have volunteers come in and help keep the library going. They just can't be your regular staff. So it would be like for special cases here and there is when you would have unpaid people come in and help keep the library running. And that's perfectly okay. The director has to have an email address which is used and checked regularly. Now, this may sound like something weird to say to have as a criteria, but we had a lot of trouble in this in the past and we do still have some library directors that are not regularly checking their email. So we're making that a criteria. This is how I reach out to you. I send you an email on July 1st when I have questions. I send you emails and you have to respond to those. If you don't and you just leave it empty, you may not get a credit. If you don't respond back to me and answer my questions on the email, that may be it. You do also by state statute have to make your basic services available for free. You cannot charge for basic things like borrowing materials, providing reference services, information, answering questions. Also providing the internet and no charge to all users. That's the next one. This is in the state statutes that you have to do this for your residents who supply your tax support, meaning the residents in your legal service area. This is something that someone asked me about in a previous session about what about when we have people that we have people pay for a non-resident card to use the library. Is that okay? Yes, because those people are not residents that pay your tax support. That's why you're having them pay for a card and they're a non-resident user of your library. So it's perfectly okay to have people who are outside your tax area whose money goes to run your library partially and charge them to get that card and then to use your library services. That is okay. Also this is just basic services. If you do need to charge for sometimes supplies for a craft show, a craft event or something, you have them pay for the supplies to the filament to get something out of your 3D printer, the vinyl from your cricket, whatever. All of that, it's okay to charge for those special things. Just your basic services, circulation, general reference, intranet that has to remain free for your residents. And the last item here is you have to make an annual report to the governing body whoever is in charge of your library. And this is something for state statute as well that's supposed to be done by February of every year for the previous year. You may make other reports throughout the year to them and that's fine. But like a general annual report for the previous calendar year is supposed to be done by February of the next year. And you can see here now that we've checked off all the boxes, it says based on this, since you've said you agree to do all these, you meet the minimum qualifications and you can apply for accreditation. And then it will ask you to type in a username and password. You use the same Bibliostat username and password that you use to do your public library survey. We are not going to make it come up. Remember another password, we don't want to have to do that. If you don't know what yours is, we do have a look up here. Also, when I send that email on July 1st, I do include in that email what your library's username and password is. And when you enter that in here, then you'll go into your library's specific application form. So we're going to pop back over here and talk about that application form. It is organized into those five categories, governance and planning, resources, services, cooperation, collaboration and communications. Some of the questions are prefilled by the information that public library survey, so you don't have to re-enter it. You can look at that preview application like I showed you earlier if you want to see what these questions are. And we're going to go through the full application now as you can see everything that's in there. Before I jump into there, I'm going to talk about some of the questions that are done as peer comparisons. Previously, there were things like you had to be open a certain number of hours minimum. You had to circulate this many materials, you had to weed this many materials, et cetera, et cetera. That was one of the things that we got rid of when they changed to this point system. So in addition to earning points for certain things, we also have certain criteria that are done by peer comparisons. We compare your library to other libraries that are in communities as the same size as yours. So this is rather than being just like if you didn't earn enough hours, you don't get that. It's okay. You just have to see, well, what are communities in my same size? How many hours are they open? Am I close to theirs? Great. Your peers are 15% above or below your legal service area. If there's not enough in Nebraska, which for many libraries there isn't that are close to your size, we do expand out and use peers from other states like Iowa, Kansas, et cetera. We get all of this data from those libraries, public library survey data, public library survey forms. All of that information is public. So you can always look up your public library survey data for Nebraska libraries on our website. We can look up other states. So Sam Shaw pulls all that data together for me and gives me who the peers are. Now, we did have questions. We have had questions over the years and concerns that just looking at size of community was not correct for some libraries that, well, they're the same size as me, but they have three times the budget. How can I possibly compete with that and be compared? And we understand that. We did do some experimenting last year when I was doing this self-valuation and we did run some numbers of adding in other criteria like budget or staff. And it didn't really change who your peers were. He still had the same peers coming up. So we decided to stick with just rather than making it so complex and all these different numbers that we've got to figure out and track, stick with the public legal service area. But we do look at these as well. We don't just blindly say that that's the only thing we look at. We do then look at all other things that are going on in this library. So we do notice this one library has a crazy budget way more than anyone else's. They are skewing the numbers off for everyone. We're just going to remove them from the comparison. So it is, we do massage it afterwards. If you have any questions or concerns about your peer comparisons, you can contact Sam. He can give you the data for your peer libraries so you can see what they did answer for theirs as well and see what they said for all of these things. These are the only nine criteria that use peer comparisons. If you meet the average or the median, which is a value line in the middle when all the numbers are together are arranged in size order, you meet that you were in those points. So it's a much more equitable way of looking at what your library is doing, comparing you to libraries that are the same size as yours. So now we're going to go into the actual application form. So you were at, close this preview there. So you are here. When you receive the email from me, you'll be able to click and go into the accreditation application form. You'll click off those 12 criteria that I just did. You will get here, put in your username and password, and then you'll go into your library's application form. This is the form for Beatrice Public Library that I'm just using as a demo. I am not going to actually submit it for them because I don't want to do that, but we're going to see how the form works. So at the top of the page here, we have a yellow box with some basic instructions. It tells you here first that there are certain indicators for the questions that we have imported the data from your public library survey that you have submitted. Green check, you need the red, the guideline, red X, you don't. I'll scroll down here and you can see here's the green checks and the red Xs. These are not things that you can click on and change yourself. So those are not ones that you can change. These are ones that you can click on and check yourself. I will say, as far as these go, if something has changed since you submitted your survey and now you like, for example, if this was a red X and you did not have a friend's group, but since you submitted the survey because it was due back in February, you now have one. We can change this behind the scenes for you. So just let us know that actually we need, you know, we have a friend's group. We've set it up and we will go and we'll change that. And you'll change, we can change the green, the red X to green checks that you can earn those points. You can also see your peer libraries for all those peer questions that we mentioned. So here are the ones for Beatrice. You can see we only have one library that's similar in size to them, one community. So we did have to pull in data from Iowa libraries. So you can just see here in your form, who are your peer libraries? If you want to investigate them, if you want their actual public library survey data, contact Sam and he will send that to you for your peers. We also tell you what the different levels are. There is that yellow question mark also throughout your application form like there was on that first credit qualifications page page that will give you some help for some questions you might need. If you need any help with some questions. You'll see up here on the upper right, there is a total points box that kind of floats along as you scroll through the form. So as you check and uncheck things, you can see that it will change. So if I check this having a community's response plan that 77 went up to 87 uncheck it goes back 87 down to 77. So as you go through here, you'll see how you're going, how many points you're earning, you can see where you are in the levels. For each qualification, we do have after that how many points it's worth, you can see how many you're going to earn as you check on each, check each one of those. At the very bottom of the form, I'm going to quickly scroll down there, we do have a submit button and a save and resume later button. So if you get interrupted while you're in the middle of filling out this form, as does happen oftentimes in libraries, or if you realize I need to go check something or look up something before I can finish checking the boxes, save it. And when you come back, all the previous things who had already checked off will still be there, it will save those, and then you can continue until you're totally done and then submit the application.  So make sure if you need to jump off of it that you do that. You also see here your point total is at the very bottom of the page as well when you're done. So we're going to go up the top here. So the first section of your application form is governance and planning by the first box gets checked for you because you checked off those 12 minimum qualifications on the first page. The next one is about having your community's response plan. This is something that I used to say you had to have it approved, but that was wrong, because I can't approve your plan until I look at also your application form. So I change this so you just have submitted one to me, it does not have to be approved yet. We will look at them both together and then see if they get approved. If you don't check that and try and check something else, you'll see a pop up a warning will come up saying that you have to have a community's response plan or to be accredited. So it's prompting you to make sure you do that before you go any further. So I'm going to check that off. You can also have points for reviewing the plan annually, which you really should be doing, making sure that it is still valid is still useful for you. Then, and you can tell us when you most recently looked at the plan. Next up is policies. Previously, this used to say that you had a policy of this kind, but I kind of changed the wording to say that you have included these topics in are included in any of your policies. So if you have a policy that says it's a customer feedback policy, but you do have a way for live anyone to give you feedback. There's a form they fill out whatever it is. So you can just check off any each one of these you check and I'm just randomly clicking I don't know which ones the address desert doesn't have. And you earn a point for each one of those that you have, whether you have a policy or it's mentioned in some policy. Oh, I should mention here about the community's response plan review. Someone did ask about this previously if you are doing a accreditation for very first time and this is your very first community's response plan. You cannot have reviewed it annually because you only it's your first time doing it. So doing it doesn't count as reviewing it that's creating it this would be after you've had one for a number of years and then you look at some of these that we did add in here we added some some policies that weren't there before. We added feedback disaster planning book challenges and considerations that something libraries are dealing with a lot now want to make sure you have one of those. We also have here, if there's something we haven't listed here that you think is a really important policy that you have at your library, you can add it you can add up to four additional ones and just let us know what it is. What is having a technology plan a technology plan is something different than your community needs response plan or a strategic plan. It may be part of that it doesn't have to its own separate thing. This is how do you keep track of the technology in your library, how do you know when you need to update your computers and you have a plan for this that every five years we are going to update. We have we have a bank of 20 computers every five years five of them get updated so that we have a rotating and always had some some new ones out there, something like that that's an official plan for that. And when you've most recently revised and looked at it you can tell us that our next ones here do you have a friends group or a foundation. This is information that you give us in the supplemental survey that is in addition to the public library survey. These are automatically checked off for you. Part two is resources, the resources to run your library income staff facilities etc. And this is where we get into our first peer comparisons so you can see here for local income it gives the library's income, what the peer averages and the peer median. And as long as you meet either one of those don't have to meet both one or the other. You earn the points for that so they got local income, they're not open as many hours as their peers. They don't didn't earn that one schedule of open hours reflects an attempt to meet the needs of the community. This just means are you asking it's always a good idea to see when do they think you should be open when they like you to be open. It doesn't mean you have to change your hours to meet those what they asked for. There may be things that you just can't do we can't be open seven days a week, you know, eight hours a day. We can't be open every Saturday night, but at least you've asked the question, and then let us know when you did that. And as your library building meet all federal state and local codes for safety, I would hope every library does. We do have, as I mentioned that help here it pops up a new window, and links you to things like accessibility safety guidelines for you to refer to to see to make sure that you do. Excuse me, those are the next session is staff expenditures on staff, equal to or greater than the average or median so this would be salary benefits etc. And then this is where we have your library director certification this has to be checked in order for you to be accredited. This also reminds you here at what level your director must be certified we in the help it does. This help actually bumps you pops you out to the librarian certification page. So you can quickly go there and see what you should be doing. And then here is where that additional library staff is that you did ask about. If you have to infer this library based on legal service area, they must have at least four staff that are also certified they only have three of them. So they do the other certification, but they decided not earn that. Then we have number of library personnel that they have also prefilled from your. This is your peer when your peer comparisons and then financial resources for education and training. So this is having a line item in your budget for to pay for any registration fees or any travel costs for your staff to be attend any training or professional development and giving them time off to do that. If you have something like that is something you would enter in your public library survey. Technology is the next section. Do you have an integrated library system. And is it online. Do you have broadband internet access at speeds adequate to meet user needs in your library. This is something that is of course very subjective and is your opinion. Do you think it's the speed is fast enough or not.  In this case you just need to be honest with us about what you think is it adequate or not. And you'll notice many of these guidelines that you're checking off yourself and earning points. It is a trust thing. I'm trusting you to answer these questions. Accurately and not give false information on the form so I am you know. Thank you at your word doing this is on the honor system that you do think that your broadband speeds are adequate if you check that. Do you have Wi-Fi in the library that came from the whole guy survey. Do you have a telephone service with an answering machine. The basic technology accommodations for persons with disabilities. This would be things like a screen reader or adjustable desks physical things that help anyone with disabilities use your library. And then another subjective question and adequate number of computers for your library. And this would be something that you may mention in your community's response plan or in your technology plan either one for your collection. Does it reflect the mission and goals of the library. I would hope so whatever your mission statement is in the goals. This is something you will have mentioned in your community's response plan to. How do you how much weeding have you been done as you reported in your public library survey. Does the library staff use online websites to provide information so going out on the internet and make running searches and finding information for them. What is your annual expenditure on materials as a percentage of your full operating expenditures that's a peer comparison annual circulation of items peer comparison turnover rate and collection size. These are all being compared to your peer libraries. Next section is services. What kind of services are you offering to your community. Do you have any outreach programs and services. So this would be going for people who don't come to the library so doing story time at the daycare center delivering books to homebound patrons or to the senior center. Having a book. Bookmobile. Do you do interlibrary loan for you borrow books through interlibrary loan for your customers. And then some more peer comparisons that come from your survey data attendance for program and programs. How does that compare to your peers. And then do you have specific programs that programs that target specific audiences like we have a teen program for this. We have a program for seniors that we go out and do. And then you list them here. This is something that would need to be mentioned in your plan and this is where we talk I talk about comparing your application form to your community's response plan. If you check this box and say you're doing these things you should have something mentioned in your plan that matches up with what you wrote in here like if you say you go to teens seniors, whatever that's got to be mentioned in your plan and I'm going to compare that. Do you use the databases that we offer through the library commission this is Nebraska access. So free databases that any library can sign up for you just got to. We pay for access to ebsco host databases for any citizen of the state. So does your library use those. If you look at our website for Nebraska access you can get password and data and connected to that. And then in addition to that you have any other databases that we don't supply that you are paying for yourself. And here Beatrice has ancestry Chilton mango etc etc and they list this all came from the public library survey cooperation and collaboration. This is working with other organizations in your community, trying to get out there and figure out what's going on and doing things with them and letting them know that the library board is there. The library is there to work with all sorts of organizations. So you see here is nothing here that gets pulled from your public library survey this is all questions for you to answer and check off the boxes and earn the points for. So does the library director or a board member attend at least to municipality whatever you are village city county township whatever your municipality is at least two meetings a year. This would be could be included that reporting giving them your annual report, but at any time are you just attending just report what the library is doing or just be there. So they know that the library exists and is a thing they should be paying attention to. Staff participate in community organizations to keep the library engaged and invisible out there in the community. And here we have some help and the help guide it does talk about what organizations are we referring to that would count for this. So this would be things like Rotary Kiwanis. Any of those service organizations. This is is in church groups being in a book club but those more community based things. Your board members may belong to these groups, they may have a membership, but this is specifically about and that's okay but that doesn't count for this guideline. This isn't wanting your library staff to be getting out there and participating. Do you have a teen board a teen library board tab there's sometimes called teen advisory board. It's very it's difficult in some libraries to get the teens to come in and use the library. Some of you do it great, but sometimes, you know, the young families families bring in the young kids, your story time and all the time and do all that seniors and older adults definitely come back and use the library but sometimes you lose that teen group. And many libraries have started having a teen advisory board where this whole separate group of teens that they say you tell us what you want to do you tell us what the teens are into. What would be a good thing to good way to bring them into the library or something they would want to do. Do you as a library cooperate with other local entities for shared services. So this isn't just going to their meetings but actually having a program so working with the parks and rec department to put in the story walk in the park so the library provides the books, the parks and rec provides the space that's doing a shared service. So this would be something that as it says here in the help they're identified as co sponsors of the program so people know that the library is doing something with this other organization. So this isn't you know the daycare comes in and use the library that doesn't count they're just using the library's regular services is some sort of special extra program that is being done. And then you would list who you're working with. Do your board members or staff participate in advocacy efforts. This could be something local or national on the American Library Association or every library both have events and programming about that Nebraska Library Association has their annual advocacy day usually in March to where you come to Lincoln and talk to your legislators about libraries. So you can have up to five people either board or staff members do that. And then do you are you in any resource sharing groups any group purchases that you do overdrive these are just some examples the overdrive group for ebooks on a brass card for sharing for a library card to use other libraries. Pioneer consortium. So you had any sort of group sharing like that. And the last section is on communications. How do you spread the word about what the library is doing. So do you have on your website, your mission statement vision statement whatever it is, and your policies listed so everyone knows what they are and can access them. Do you provide you and this this is this here and the next one about providing public interactions on website very basically using any sort of social media. These are things I'm going to go check. I'm going to go look for your library's website and I'm going to see can I find your mission statement and I can find your policies on it. If I can't, I'm going to reach out to you and ask, okay, am I at the wrong website maybe do you have a new site that I'm not aware of. As there's somewhere else you're posting these things let me know where to find this information so that I can confirm that you were supposed to have that that it was okay for you to check off that item. Same thing with having any sort of social media, a website blog Facebook Twitter, Instagram, whatever the newest one they come up with is. Do you have those do you pop post to them at least monthly. I will check and see did you do something within the last month these are kind of places that have to be constantly of regularly updated. Sorry, I won't say constantly but regularly updated social media is not static. So, look, and I will look and see if you are doing that. So if you list here we have a Facebook page we have a Twitter. We have a blog and I go and look and you don't have one or you haven't posted something in like six months or a year I'm going to ask you about it. Do you use other things are not internet. Internet's great social media is great, but there are other ways you need to be marketing as well still radio ads something in the newspaper flyers a poster in the, in the window the beauty shop whatever anything that you do that's not social media. I'm going to call it our analog will call it. Do you have any updated exhibits and displays so new book display women's History Month, have someone who has a teacup collection come in and put it in a case and show and talk about that. Do any sort of those kind of interactive displays. Do you have a bulletin board that the public can use. So not just someplace where you post the things are going on in the library, but something where you invite the public to come in and use the library as a community space to share information. So, someone, a teenager can put a babysitting services law or someone could say lost dog, whatever anything that they wanted you and let the public use. You report on the library, usually, usually monthly but it can be whenever you happen to be on their agenda, but more regularly to your municipality, Village City Council, whatever county. So this is separate from that annual report that you're supposed you are required to do in February. This is just other regular reports and letting actually reporting and saying here's what's happening in the library in the last month or two or whatever. Those reports go on your website somewhere. So do post those. And then do you communicate some way with business leaders and civic organizations same kind of thing as going and being on the agenda item for your municipality being on the agenda item for the Chamber of Commerce meeting or the local business group or the Rotary Club or something regularly, you know, some going to some group and talking about the library or, you know, speaking about how the library can work with them or just updating them on things. And that's the bottom of the form. It automatically fills in the library director's info and you've got your point total here and at the side so with all my random clicking they got 240 points that gets them to silver. Yay. At this point you could submit the application and I will get that and that's fine, or you can save and resume later if there's still some things you want to change or update on here. All right, so that is the application form. Any questions about any of the items any of the guidelines on here. What did I not mention that you were wondering about. It's a guideline is there a guideline that you're confused about and don't understand what it is referring to. All right, so that is the application form. And now we will go and look at community your community needs response plan. As I said, both the application form and the plan both need to be submitted to me. They do not need to be submitted at the same time. Do your application if you submit your plan to me and then your application later that's fine. You do the other way around as well. That's fine. Do remember you've got that first item in the application form that you do have to check off say you submit your plan. So you can do your plan first to me and then later on do the application form. The plan. If you are working on it and you want me to look at a draft, I can do that and review it. So we can have a lot of back and forth on working on your community's response plan before you submit the final version of it and that's perfectly fine. Our regional library system directors are great also at giving you advice and working on your plans with you so you're welcome to reach out to them about that or also about any of your accreditation application form requirements. So I'm going to go to the committee needs response planning page now we have a whole separate page all about the needs response planning because there's a lot to go into this. But I don't want you to be scared off or think that this is something you cannot do. Lots and lots of libraries have done that as I said we've got 200 and some odd libraries in the state and 183 have gone through this process and are accredited. You may have a previous plan as I mentioned it may be called a strategic plan if it's if it's older. So if you have a previous plan you do not need to start from scratch and write a new one. You can take your previous one and just update the parts of it that are old. Things would be any demographics you're reporting in your community profile telling me you know census data projects and programs you may be working on. It's a description of what your community is like when what's going on in your community what people need those kind of things you'd want to be updating but you do not have to start from scratch. If you already have one pull out your old one and just update it. You can't find your old plan if you don't know where it is you misplaced it or you're a new director since the last time it was done and you don't know what the old director did with it. Reach out to me I should have a copy of everyone's plan here and I can get that to you that you can then work off of. All right so the whole purpose of the community needs response plan is looking outside of the library at your community seeing what their needs are and responding to them serving the unique needs in your community. So I believe that the reason for having this as being a requirement to be accredited is that the concern that some in some communities this is not being done. We know what we need to do as a library we do the basic services we know what libraries are supposed to be for here for and we do all that but there may be things you're not aware of that are going on. So you need to look outside the library walls outside the normal library thing that is done things that you do and find out what's going on and seeing if there's some of those things that you can do something about. There's gonna be lots of needs in your community that the library can't do a thing about and you're not responsible for them and that's totally fine. But you will come up with things that you can do. And this is going to be something doing this process is going to is going to come up with things think I think you didn't learn in library school or in basic skills classes thinking outside the box. Something non traditional something that the live the community needs some examples of some things that libraries have done is a loaning out. Right on detectors in their community because that was something that might be going on that is an issue or a concern. City offices maybe offer that may offer this but they're only open like nine to five and if somebody works nine to five how do they get one of these libraries can be potentially open in the evenings weekends have the library be a distribution point. Another community I know did. Like rat traps mouse traps those kind of things there was a lot of life the city was doing a push to help clean up the vermin in town, and they were offering these as a for free, but only open certain hours, so the library became a place for those kind of things to be handed out things like that, possibly holding meetings even just being the space the many people think of the library as a nice neutral space, a safe space, and you need to have a community discussion about something in town instead of going to the town halls, meetings, the library can be we're going to have a focus group we're going to have a meeting to talk about the need for a dog park. People are just taking the dogs anywhere and everywhere. They can just become chaos, or we need a splash pad be something for the kids to do in the summer they are they are running wild, things like that, and you can be the space that you can't help put in a dog park or splash pad but you can host the community meeting and be that community space for them. So these are the kind of things we're talking about thinking outside of traditional library services. Your plan must be up to date, meaning written or updated within the last five years. So if you have something and your plans, the your plan needs to cover a certain number of years. So it will say this plan covers, you know, 2022 to 2027, five years. And so that covers the time period we're in now, you can just say hey here's the plan I did before it's still good. I don't need to do a new one. And that's fine. And that's especially now that I changed around everybody's expiration dates. People's plans are not going to match up even if they used to before. So look at what you have of it extends already covering the day or in just send me that and say hey we have one and it covers these years. You're good. You don't have to do anything new. But if it doesn't, if it's something old that became expired, then you would need to do a new one. Okay, there are seven basic elements, seven parts that need to be in your plan. And we're going to go into a detail about all of these. I just wanted to briefly show you what's here on the community's response planning page that you can use to help you write these write your plan or update yours. So pop back up to this in a second. We have some webinars that you can also watch other ones that we have done or have provided that can be of useful census data for finding demographics about your community. After the last census was done in 2020 and 2021 we had census staff come and do census Bureau staff come and do a webinar for us. Community engagement working out in your community, the good presentation we did about that. And then two things here that do stay strategic planning in their title. Yes, and I did say we changed the name of ours from strategic plan to community's response plan. But the process for doing strategic planning some of the some of that work can definitely be helpful for you. So watch those if you would like to. We also have examples of other libraries plans here in Nebraska. So these are ones that I have pulled out that are really good examples, good plans. So feel free to look at these, please do use them of it as a template if you need to do a new one or if you just don't like the one how yours looks now. Use it as a basis as a template for yours in the same format but just make sure you update it change it to your library's info. There is no requirement on the length of a plan. You'll notice some of these plans are three pages long. Some of them are 2030 pages long. It just depends on what is you need to include in yours how detailed it needs to be. What information you're providing as long as these seven elements are in there somewhere. You're good. There's no minimum length. As I mentioned, we did make changes to part of the plan and eliminating that SWAT analysis as of last year. So we do have plans here that are pre 2022 so they have that SWAT analysis still in them. And then I've got some new ones from last year that were good ones that were submitted they've got here as examples too. So you'll note that'll be a difference between the pre 2022 and the new ones they do not have SWAT they have a different way of analyzing. It's okay if you like to do SWAT and you want to it's it's not required that you don't you know if you do a SWAT I'm not going to say oh that's bad. You still we're still talking about strengths and weaknesses and opportunities and threats going on but we're talking about in a slightly more open way. So look at any of these examples and then we have a lot of resources and guides here worksheets you can fill out how to guys to help you work through each part of the plan. Until you can come up with an actual communities response plan that you that you like that works for you and that is acceptable to me. So let's go into the seven required elements. The first thing is a library's mission statement. This is something hopefully you should have. It's just your it's a one liner or a small paragraph about why is our library exists what are we here for something you should review every now and then. It's make sure it's still valid and is actually reflects what you're still doing the library. There may be sometimes some new things you would want to add to it and mention that weren't in there before you might want to tweak the wording or something. We do have a how to guide here about mission statement down here on that first section. And there we go. This over and oh yes. Okay. And we have some examples near public library. It's just one sentence mission of the public libraries to inspire lifelong learning advanced knowledge and strengthen our communities. Very nice and very nice. But some are longer here's some from some other libraries. If you want to see what other loans have said, but just something short. That's your main reason for being or your library. Then you need to do a community have a community profile in your plan. This is demographics. This is the statistics what makes your community unique demographics from census data and I'm going to show you how to get into that and look up those actual numbers. These are demographics from anything that may be available from your community from your municipality if they have anything like that. This is where you also write up more of a paragraphs about how our community is founded and so and so year and we have this many businesses and this is the school district where the kids are in it and these can be a business these places offer internet and there's this kind of recreation and these businesses in town this new factory in town this one's left that kind of just a you know that give me a picture of what your community is like. And I'll shoot like I said I'll show you the details of how you can get some of that data. The third element is an assessment of the community's needs. So this is not the library's needs or what the community needs from the library. This is what the community needs. And sometimes this is hard to get your head around that as you're coming from the library's point of view because you're looking at this or to find out what does my community what's going on in my community what can the library do about it. And that's ultimately what you're working towards but when you do this assessment you're just saying no library not thinking about that what's going on in the community what is what bad things are happening what good things are happening and doing some research on that. And like I said a lot of these things are going to be nothing you at the last library can do anything about and that's perfectly fine. You're just going to find again you're going to get this big list of here's all the things people are saying that we need to do. And that's a problem. And you're going to prioritize those see what's what people are most concerned about and then see if any of those and see if any of those are things you can do as a kind of narrowing it down. Here's all the things wrong happening that people think we should do. Here's the most ones they mentioned most and then here are the two or three that actually hey library can help out with that. The fourth criteria is that this is the change when we switch from the SWAT strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats to analyzing the library strengths and resources barriers to completing anything and opportunities for improvement. So we made it a little more a little broader. This is something that was very this is the hardest part I think for libraries in doing their community's response plan. The most difficult thing that they struggled with the most and what we did with the previous criteria was the strengths and weaknesses were about the library where the library strengths for the library's weaknesses. And then what are the opportunities and threats from outside the library. So for the opportunities and threat opportunities and threats you cannot mention the library at all. You're just looking outside the building and trying to figure out what's going on out there that are opportunities and threats in our community. And that's not always how it works. Things are not that cut and dry and hard lined and a lot of people had trouble. Not mentioning the library when they talk about these opportunities and threats kept getting tossed in there. And so we realized when we did this evaluation of the program last year. Why does it have to be that way. Why does it have to be so cut and dry. It's they're so intertwined and that's the whole point you are involved in the community.  So you're talking about the library strengths and resources, any barriers and any opportunities for improvement and not just related to library but also related to the community. And we've got some nice guides that will help you narrow down that as well. Once you have all this data, your demographic data, assessment of what the needs are of the community, what our library is good at, any barriers they're having. Then you can take all that and think about it and analyze what's going on, what this means. What are the most important things going on and is there anything the library can do based on all this data that we have come up with. We notice in the census data that there is a huge increase in young families in the community. Since the last time we looked at the census data, that's something we should try and focus on some new programming for that. Is there a need for a discussion about having a splash pad or dog park in the community. Let's reach out to Parks and Rec and talk about hosting a meeting. In case we have the meeting room. Let's work with them on that. Those are the kind of things that could come up. And what you're going to do is come up with some specific goals, things you're going to specifically do that you came up with based on all this data that you gathered and when you analyzed it. Now, as the library, you're going to do lots of things. You do lots of things, lots of programming, lots of resources you offer, lots of things you do. In this plan, we want you to come up with two to three specific things that you're going to tell us about that you're going to do based on all this data you gathered. Basically, you're showing me that you've done this research, you've looked at it, you thought about it, and you realized, hey, you came up with some new ideas about what you could do with it. These could be continuing with current goals, current things you're doing, but expanding them. They could be something brand new. They could be modifying something you're already doing. There's no real rules about it. You're going to tell me about three specific things that you are going to try and do based on this data that you gathered. Like I said, your library is going to do lots of things. Just tell me about three of them and make sure that it is because you gathered this specific data. And then the last thing is a plan for evaluating your plan. So you are going to, this community's response plan, it's supposed to be a living document, something that you refer to regularly, a guide for you. It is not something that you do now that you put on a shelf and you come back to it in five years because you're up for reaccreditation again. You're coming up with these goals, these programs. This is going to be the start of things you're going to have to do. So it's something you're going to have to look at and go back to and say, at least once a year minimum. And once you come up with these goals, you may then get into the nitty gritty and specifics about, okay, now how we're going to pull this off? Let's go off and do that. But you'll go back at least once a year you should and say, okay, we said we were going to do this. Did we do it? And if so, great. If not, why? What we're wrong? What do we need to do to try and make it happen? And so you're going to have an evaluated plan that explains how often you're going to go back, who's going to evaluate it, what's going to happen when you do that evaluation. So those are the seven required parts that need to be in your plan in some way. And you will see them in all of these examples. So now I'm going to pop down here. Do you have any questions about any of those elements before I get into the details of how you can get all of this with our help guides? Let me do your questions section. Whenever you think of anything, if I say something that's confusing to you or something you want to know more about, just go ahead and type it in there, please. I want to answer all your questions that you might have. Okay, so we have, as I said, worksheets and help guides and resources here that can help you do each part of this. And the first thing we have right up here is we have a 12-step program that can help you go through this process. Now, this is just one way to get there. You do not have to use this, but if you're just wondering, I don't even, I have no clue where to start. It's not the only way to get to and ultimately having a plan, but it is something you can use as a guide. You just kind of broke it up into individual steps, establish a planning team, complete a community profile using census data, gather information community using focus groups. You can see then these refer to different worksheets and guides that we've put together that are related to each of those steps. So this can help you kind of break it down into small bits and make it easier to come up with your plan. So you're not so overwhelmed by, I have to do all these things. Just break it up into small parts. So this is if you want to use this to guide you through. And if you have no clue where to start, you can do that or you have to use it if you're fine just kind of jumping in and doing it yourself. So the first thing you need to do is bring together a planning team. Who is going to work on this? Now, do not do this alone as a library director. That is not necessary and is just going to make it more difficult for you. You want a group of people to help you do this plan or update this plan if you have a previous one. We did have an issue a few years ago where the previous director at a library had done this all on their own. They had done the research, come up with a plan, written it up and submitted to me. And no one else in the library was involved and nobody knew how they came up with this, how they came up with these goals. Nobody even heard about these things. And then the director had left, they had gone on to another job. And the rest of the staff was then when they were up for re-accreditation, they were left floundering and wondering, we don't even know how they came up with all of this. What do we do? You want other people involved and you don't have to take it on yourself. You don't take all of this on your shoulders on your own. You shouldn't have to. You want help with this. So you could have a library staff member, someone who, you know, ask your staff who'd like to be involved in this project and help us with doing this. A library board member, bringing one of the board members who might be really interested in making this happen. People from the community. A person, someone who is really involved in what's going on in the community, they maybe will do a lot of volunteering with the library. They may donate funding. You know, bring in someone from the outside, because this is talking about what we're doing for the community. Bring in a community member.  Now, of course, depending on your size of your community, you may not have the resources to have a lot of people. It says here 5 to 12, depending on the size of who you have available and who is interested in participating and what you need to do. And you will have to work with making sure these people will work well together. So that may be something for you as a library director to focus on is who do I know that will work well together or bring some good ideas to this. But there's still maybe some conflicts and things you need to come to a consensus about what we are doing and why we're doing it and what the answers are going to be on this plan that we put together. We have some other resources here about project management and why you do planning that you can look at. But we also have this plan to plan worksheet. Open this up a little so you can see the whole thing. Another thing just like that 12 steps that we put together that I showed you that can help you keep track of what you need to do. What are you going to do? Who's going to do it? And when they're going to start target date to finish when you actually finished and if anything need to be reviewed about it. So everyone doesn't have to do every part of this plan. You can assign someone to just look up census data. So census numbers demographics assigned to a board member running a focus group of the community assigned to a staff member. Whatever different things you're doing you can this is just a sheet that you can use print this out and use it to help keep track of things. Your target dates and finish dates. It's okay if things don't meet you don't meet the deadline. So this is just for your own general reference of we didn't have this done. Well, of course, minimum by October 1. But let's have it done within a month. Figure out the demographics. Okay, get me the census data so we can work on that. So putting it all in writing here and having a way to help help you keep track of it. So this is a worksheet you could use to do that if you want to. So your community profile is the next thing that you're going to gather. And this is the data, the numbers. Obviously, census information is going to be your prime resource for this census data. We just recently had the decennial census census done in 2020. So that's great. We have really current up to date census information. So you can go ahead and just go right to your census data for your community and use that.  If you do want to find something more recent than that, the census does do what they call their American community survey in between censuses. So if you and they do this in five year blocks and over here. It's working on it. Slowly. So if you want something where they've gathered data in between censuses between the big census, you can go here and use the American community survey data tables and you can see they've got economic housing comparison of estimates over time. So you can see how things have, you know, the trends over time. So you can look at this as well if you want to. The reason for going and find the actual data is you may have an idea of what's going on in your community or a board member or people in the community may say, oh, we know there's no young people here. We never see them. There's no minority population of any sort in our town. I haven't seen any around in my neighborhood or we have tons of them. Oh my gosh, there's so many seniors and so many old people. Everyone is aging, you know, the baby boomers, everyone's getting old. But with this data going to the census, you can have the numbers to back up those assumptions, verify what people claim are happening in town. And this is something you have to back it up when you do say, actually, we found out that there are not a huge number of old people. There's young families. And here's the census numbers to prove that. And that's why we're doing a storytime in the daycare centers. That could be your thought process. So this is where you can find all that data. This is why you want to find those numbers. We have a worksheet here that you can use. And this is just a blank one where you can fill in the, you see all this information from the American Community Survey or from the census data, wherever you get these numbers, you can print this out. And this is all the type of numbers you could get. You don't have to get it all if you don't want to or can't find it. But this is just giving you a list of these are the kind of information and numbers you can find from the Census Bureau on education level, language spoken, family economics, community economics. The last part here, cultural characteristics of this community. This is something, as you can see, there's not numbers, but you would have to come up with cultural and recreational activities that are popular in your community. Just write them down. So this is a blank one that you can use to fill in your library's data. We also provide you with statewide figures. Sam pulled this together for me. And this is from the most recent public library survey data and American Community Survey. He went out and did this this year. So if you want to compare your community to the state as a whole to see, you know, prepared to the state, our community is this. This is the statewide numbers for all of the numbers that are in here. Of course, the things like cultural and recreational activities, that's not something that we can provide for you. But all the numbers are here for this statewide data based on the most recent census information that we have. So I'm going to show you the census website here. A few years ago, they came up with a new page where they redesigned how we access all census data. A little bit to load up here. Here we go. It's data.census.gov is the URL. And this is where you can access anything they have gathered from the census. There are tables, maps that you can put together, graphs, bar graphs, all sorts of things in here. There's so much to dig into. They also have training resources, FAQs, quick start guides, videos to show you how to use and navigate through the system. There's that webinar we did here in Nebraska too. Go ahead and watch that if you want to learn more. If you really want to learn more about getting into the census information. But I'm going to go up to the top here. And you start just right here in their general search form. And I'm going to use Beatrice since we were looking at their accreditation application form. And you see here, I just typed in Beatrice. That was it. And there's multiple ones. There's one in Alabama and Nebraska. Depending on your city, just typing the name like that may come up with the one in Nebraska, but you might have to add in city or town or whatever, or village to have it come up with the Nebraska one. So just play around until you find yours that pops up.  There we go. And this brings up, starts with a whole list of tables that you can go and look at race, demographic and housing estimates, agent sex, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Maps that you can look at for those same things. And then pages that are specific to Beatrice that you can dig down into. So all these different maps and tables you can look at. Over here on the right, which I really like that they do down here as related searches where they have, let me try and see. Yeah. That's much easier to read, isn't it? I don't know why it's so small on this page, but they have these related searches where they for you will dig down into the different categories. Beatrice city, business and economy, education, employment, health, et cetera. So if you're looking for Nebraska Beatrice income and poverty, if you click on that, it'll take a few minutes here to run through and pull up. And this one is bringing up maps, income in the past 12 months, median, median, poverty status, earnings, et cetera, et cetera. You can see the last 12 months is using American community data. So you can click on any of those. Let's go back up here to get into those specific subsets if you want to look at those. What I also really like is this profile that they have here. For every community there is this where you can see it's the general data, total population, median household income, housing units, et cetera, here. If you click on that, it goes into the profile specific to your community. And so you've got some of the general numbers here, employment, families and living arrangements, race, housing, health, et cetera. You've got bar graphs of things, comparing maps, all these different ones that are specific to your town. So this is really, I think, the easiest place to find a lot of these numbers that you may be looking for. And you see it tells you where these numbers are each from. This is from the 2020 census. This is from the 2021 American Community Survey, five-year estimates. So data done since the census. So I highly recommend looking at this profile. Our search bar is now up here at the top as well. So we can do other searches if you want to. Now your community, your library may serve patrons and people just from your city, but also from nearby cities possibly, nearby communities. If they don't have a library, they may come to yours. You may serve the county as a whole. You may be the county library officially or unofficially. So you may want to look up other communities' data too. So if you know that a lot of people from the next door in the town over come to your library, look up theirs. And find their information. And so that you have that data as well. You want to know who are your users and what their numbers are. Not just, well, we are the city of Beatrice. So I'm just looking at Beatrice numbers. That's not who's coming into your library. You can also look up your county. So here Gage County, Nebraska. I can do that. So if I'm the county library and I get the same kind of thing as. There we go.  There's so much data in here. I'm assuming it's the only page that's really slow like this. There we go. Now we have the Gage County information. So their population, all the tables and things for Gage County, those same related searches, but for the county, and then a profile for the county. So if you know that people from the whole county are coming in, look at those numbers too. And all of this data is what you are going to report to me, whatever you've decided to, to that is important in your community. That's what you are going to put into your community's response plan that you submit to me. Any questions about census data? I can answer some things. I know the basics. I highly recommend watching their thing, their resources training or the webinar that we did previously with the Census Bureau staff. The next big part of your plan will be assessing the community needs, gathering information about what's going on in your community and what people are thinking about. We have a worksheet that you can use. We have a worksheet here of the different kind of things that you could do. You don't have to do all of these things. These are just a whole bunch of ideas, examples of what you can do. The goal is what's important. The goal is to find out what's happening in your community. Now, if something like this has already been done, don't do it again. Don't do it and reinvent the wheel. Many communities have themselves done a community needs survey or some sort of study and asking the community, hey, what do you want from your city? If anything like that has been done, I'd say within the last five years, just use it. You do not have to go through any of this work if someone else has already done it. If you are a community or your county or somebody has done this about your area, just use something that's already been put together and look at that report and use that to analyze and decide what you're going to do and find out what's going on in your community. So don't redo something that's already been done. But if it has not been done, these are ways that you can gather this information. And one of the things that is hard sometimes for people, so you could bring together focus groups, do interviews with people, do surveys, and I'll talk about some of the details of these. But some people who come to these focus groups or who you talk to are possibly going to be confused about what you're asking for. They see the library is asking me these questions. They want to know what I think about the library. But that's not what you're trying to find out here. You're trying to find out what is happening in the community. The discussions are supposed to be about the community, not the library. You happen to be the library hosting these discussions or asking the questions. So I recommend starting off with a few library questions, maybe, just to get it out of their system. Let them get that done. And then move into questions about the community. And we have here some sample community questions that are the kind of things we're talking about. How satisfied are you with living here? What do you like most, at least? Would you recommend someone else live here? What's the most critical issue facing the community? All of these kind of questions are the kind of general questions is what you're really wanting them to talk about. So let them talk about the library for a little bit. But then steer the conversation to these questions. So you can hold a focus group. This would be basically just a open call for anyone to come in and we're having a meeting to talk about the community and what's going on. You can specifically invite certain people to the focus group if you wanted to be more smaller or more focused. There are some things you do have to pay attention to with running a focus group. We do have tips about running a focus group here that will be helpful for you. Some things that might come up as, you know the people in your community, you may know someone who will monopolize the conversation, talk over everyone else. Certain people may be quieter. You need someone who can facilitate this who can work with those kind of issues. Make sure that people not speaking get their chance to talk. So someone who can negotiate that kind of thing. Bribing with food is highly recommended. We will be offering coffee and donuts to anyone who comes to the library this morning to talk about what's going on in our community. That kind of thing. If you don't want to do a general open focus group, you could do what we call a key informant interview. So specifically talking to a particular person or a particular group. It may be better than a focus group or a survey because you can get really one-on-one and personal with people. Superintendent of the school. Parents who are big users of the library. Church leaders. Anyone who, you know, has an in and what's going on or has a real stake in the community and cares a lot about it. You can pick who's going to be in the group. It does not have to be open to anyone and everyone in this case. And you want to ask them something more direct than just the general focus group questions. Like what does your group need? What does the school need? What does the church need? What does the parent group need? Get them to really focus specifically on them to get a little more in-depth and personal and really dive into that. You can also just do a survey. Survey monkey, something like that. Online in paper. This could be something anonymous. Maybe some people feel better giving anonymous questions, not sitting in a room with a bunch of other people. Put it in work with the Chamber of Commerce or a local utility company to put it in the bills. Here's the survey. Or here's just a small flyer that says go to this link and answer the city's the library survey about the community. Church newsletter, school newsletter, post defliers, else out and about. And then just walking around, your own observations are perfectly acceptable in a good way. You know, you can just see what's going on and just write it down.  And then you're going to keep track of that in some of you or your staff. And then on the second page of this, take all this information and try and prioritize it. How things are mentioned most frequently down the list, however long it ends up being, the ones that are mentioned least frequently. So the top 10 to 15 most commonly mentioned things either that are bad happening, good happening, what they think about what's going on in the community. So that can help you down what you're going to do with all these about these needs. We also have some key informant interview example here. So when you're getting into those personal questions, some specific things that you can ask what are the problems facing our community, your unemployment, what has happened that makes you think and these are this is an example of doing that interview with the actual question and answers that could be that you could receive. So some more examples of questions that you can use in the sample questions and interview example. So you've got your demographics, you've got what's happening in your community. Now you're going to take stock. This is what used to be the SWAT, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. And we are changing it to we have changed it to analysis of the library strengths and resources and analysis of barriers and opportunities for improvement. And we have a worksheet here to help you do that. And you'll see a lot of starting up here is things having to do the library, but then on the second page it gets into things just in the community itself. So strengths and resources in the community, barriers in the community, opportunities for improvement. So from the community's point of view and from the library point of view, all of these things. Now you're not going to fill in every one of these boxes. This is just a nice sheet that you can print out and use as a guide. And it can be brainstorming. Just do a brainstorming meeting with your staff or your board or give this to your staff or your board members for themselves to fill it in. Same kind of thing. They can submit it anonymously if that's helpful. And then you can refine it a little later and see what is everybody talking the most about. Similar to the community needs. You want to take what you know about the library in your community and fit it into one of these boxes, though. We know that our volunteers are great. They are real strength. And we're doing great with them. Or they are, we have them, but we don't know what to do with them. That's an opportunity for improvement. They keep volunteering and we just don't know what to use them for. Is the technology in the library, the computers, t