John Klima is our presenter.
He is the assistance director of the Waukesha Public Library in Wisconsin.
He is an author, an editor and he also posts and publishers on the LITA blog.
I'm really excited for you to hear from John today.
We hear from many of you that juggling all that you have to juggle at libraries is a real challenge and John is a juggler and is going to bring great practical tips to you all, as you all do your work in managing libraries and library staff and library technology.
So, welcome, John, and thank you so much for being here.
>> John Klima:  Thank you for having me.
I know there is a fair amount to go through and I hope we'll have something to take away that you can implement for yourself once you get back to work.
So, we'll get right ahead and start here, I hope.
So, first, I just wanted to give a little bit of a foundation of who I am.
I'm the assistant director of the Waukesha Public Library.
We have a population around 72,000.
The service population, around 100,000.
We're the largest library in our system.
We have libraries in our system that are significantly smaller.
The smallest library is less than 1,000-square-feet with 1,300 residents and 1,  3,000 cucollection sites.
There is a variety of different levels of size and technological need.
We have the luxury to have my position as a stand-alone position and I don't have a desk to sit at and some things I know people on this webinar probably do.
I think we can still do some things that will help you at.
I have one full-time person that helps me do a lot of our implementation and we'll be talking about the things we do together here as we continue on.
I'm sure this is true for all of you.
I wear a lot of hats.
And, it becomes difficult to try to keep them all straight and find time for all of them.
Of course, my main duty is the assistant director and all these other things come in.
I do website support for a lot of these groups so that becomes time-consuming.
We're in the middle of our community read so there are new programs and events posted every day, so that's taking up some time.
I'm trying to work on other projects.
And it -- is that true for all of you?
This is sort of a rhetorical question.
I assume that all of you have more than one thing that you do.
So, we want to make sure that we get you set up.
So, a big function of handling all these different hats you have to wear is define and schedule your time so that you define when things have to be --
unclogging toilets, of course.
So, you want to set up what the tasks are that you need to do and get them on a schedule and that will -- that's the only way I can get all the things done that I get done and starting -- 
tools for communication and the first tool I'm going to talk about is Outlook email, whichever you're using.
We happen to use Outlook so that'll be my example.
A lot of things I do in Outlook are similar.
So, this is a screenshot of my inbox.
I have -- I get almost 2,000 emails a month.
A lot of them are newsletters, sales letters.
We get up a lot of Listserv things.
I use -- we can create rules and kind of put those messages into boxes so all the Listservs I have go into boxes.
I have a folder down here and all those messaging come down into the different folder so I can look at them later.
I was doing a bad job with that, but I'll talk later about how I fix making sure that -- sorry, I'm seeing that my voice is muffled so I'm not sure what to do.
>> Jennifer Peterson:  I'm wondering maybe if you should dial in on the phone?
>> John Klima:  Okay.
>> Jennifer Peterson:  Okay.
I'll keep talking while you do that, just to let folks know that, thanks for letting us know and it's great to hear some of you chimed in what you're library situation looks like and it's really good to hear -- I know that depending on where people are in their library system or if they're a stand-alone system, this can vary.
It's always fascinating to me to see the parallels in -- in process regardless of size.
I know sometimes it's a matter of managing more relationships even outside your library, depending on your role.
So, that's interesting, as well.
I'd also love -- I mean, you know, those of you that know me know that I love to see an active chat so I will mention if you have specific challenges or elements of your work that you're looking to provide or refresh around or any of the specific obstacles that you're finding to your work, don't hesitate to chime in.
Like I said, you all have answers to each other's question, as well.
>> John Klima:  Can you hear me better?
>> Jennifer Peterson:  Yes, that's a lot better.
>> John Klima:  Sorry about that.
Ial  -- to manage all the email I get, I create a lot of rules and I use those rules to put email into folders.
For things that I don't need to look at right away or things that I get a lot of emails from.
I used to get a lot of email from our city help desk so I created a rule that put all those emails in place because I used to get an email for every email that got sent in.
It can handle a lot of mail coming to them.
I can set it aside and look at it later.
I used to get hundreds of messages and I've fixed that problem for myself.
I'll show you, later, what I did to do that.
Then, the other thing I like about Outlook.
You can drag messages to your calendar and create meetings, you can create appointments and I use this a lot.
If someone sends me an email, saying can you follow-up on this, I'll drag it to the calendar and set a due date on my calendar and a pop-up reminder.
You can do the same thing in Outlook with the task list or to-do list.
You can drag emails to that.
You can see over here in the corner, I have a number of items flagged for follow-up.
And, yes, there are a lot of red items because their time has past.
So, that's one of the coolest things I like about it.
You can do the same thing -- if you're using gmail, you can create calendar items from messages directly and if anyone can confirm or if you have a different email system you use, I suspect you can do the same thing.
You get to my calender in Outlook, it looks like a bowl of skittles.
I use the calendar a lot.
I do color-coding so I can see when I have tasks up and tasks in a particular area and conferences so I know the Wisconsin library conference is coming up, so we might be light on department managers so I need to make sure I'm available that week so if people are looking for help and support, that I'm around.
It is a little bit of a terrifying thing, but I've gotten used to it and it's the way I work.
This is the new version of Outlook that makes the colors more brighter.
It used to be more subdued than this but it has become frightening.
Another thing we use for communication here, we have staff blogs.
Other libraries we worked at, we had notebooks that would sit at desks and people would write in them and it was unwieldy if you had to go back and look at something.
We have staff blogs.
We have circulation reference, TechServices and children.
They have accounts.
They are able to check and this way, they can pass information across shifts and days.
We have some part-time people and it's nice to have a place where staff can go when they sit down at their desk, they can pull up the blog and see what has happened and what to be aware of.
We also have quite a few staff that don't have email, don't have computers that they use.
Our staff blogs are running on WordPress.
I'm going to stop watching the chat window.
We have a lot of circulation staff that are part-time, they don't have an email account, they don't have a computer they sit out so we communicate with memos and whiteboard messages.
We have different things, a whiteboard in circulation where they write down areas that need more shelving than others.
I have a whiteboard in my office.
My children like to draw on it so I have a little lady that my daughter drew for me.
I keep a four-month white calendar.
It gets confusing because I don't redo the whole calendar.
We're in October, November, December and January is up on the board already.
This is sort of to give me a four-month view of what's coming up, what's happening and I can kind of make sure I'm planning things properly if I need to do longer-term things.
Another thing that we do, we have meetings.
We do three formal staff meetings, march, June, September and we do a full staff day in December where we close and this kind of updates the staff on the general outlook of the library.
We have a new circulation manager and she has a meeting with her staff every week and holds a couple small meetings throughout the day to make sure we catches all the different staff to keep them up-to-date.
That is partly as she learns all the things her job entails and they learn how she works.
Sometimes you just have to talk with each other.
We'll talk about meetings a little bit more.
Now, sometimes you need to work with people.
And you need to collaborate.
One of the tools that I like quite a bit is called Trello and Trello is a way to sort of -- 
you can do project management with it but it doesn't quite have the date functionality so these are personal ones I have.
Each of these is a board.
So each project would have its own board and inside those boards you have a card, so each of these is considered a card.
And then in each card, there are lists and so this is the Trello.com/inspiration is where they have a bunch of public boards that people have shared and you can see, this is an editorial calendar.
The whole concept is to move items from left to right.
So, you start with an idea, you move it to research.
You might have to put it on hold, then you need to write it and then it goes to the editing phase.
You can do -- multiple people can work in the same Trello board and they can be assigned different cards.
They can be assigned tasked.
There's a link to a [Indiscernible] and they developed their use of Trello through a series of tweets and that's in the links.
Trello is something you can share with anybody.
It's a free service.
There is a premium-paid service, but most people are using the free version and this is a nice way to kind of -- if you've got a large project.
Like, if you're doing an rfid conversion or some shifting of collections, this would be a nice way to keep track of bigger tasks.
Sorry, I clicked and it didn't move.
Dropbox is another thing.
I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with it.
There's a lot of services like Dropbox.
It's a cloud-based storage.
This is the book fair.
We have a lot of community partners.
You can see, we've got 23 people that share this folder and this way, it's an easy place for all of us to get to all the files we have for financials, for information about authors, information about the program, past programs, ways to get into the different social media accounts and the people on the planning committee, executive committee all have access to this so we can share files easier than sending them via email.
This way, you know everyone has access to the files.
Our circulation department uses Dropbox to share different files in the same way.
Although we do have network folders that they use as well.
So, they don't use Dropbox as much as they used to.
People mentioned Google docs.
A free Dropbox account gives you two gigabytes of space.
Google Drive gives you 15 gigabytes of space.
But that keeps track of your gmail space and photos so it's not 15 gigabytes for documents and it tends to be Google-based documents, although you can share other documents through it.
Our children's librarian uses this to share their desk schedule.
It is easy to get to on any machine, on any device, like an iPad or an android phone.
Google Drive is a nice way to share files and then you can even -- I know they share some stuff with the school district that way.
Google Drive is independent of our network so that when schools are trying to schedule visits from the librarians, they can go in and see what days are scheduled already.
And we'll talk a little bit about task management.
Feedly is the service that kind of took over when Google reader was discontinued a number of years ago.
Feedly is a place for tracking blogs.
Feedly keeps posts for about 30 days.
But if you want to keep something older, you can tag it to save it for later.
You can -- you can see down here, you can create folders where you save things for different areas and different types of boards that you want to make.
I am -- there's a premium version of Feedly that connects directly into Evernote, which is this right here.
I am using an online service called if this, then that, to move stuff from Feedly into Evernote for free.
So, then when we get things into Evernote, it's another place where I can keep track of things I want to look into more, make my own notes, add different types of files together and this, I use more personally to keep track of things that are happening in the field and make notes for myself to follow-up with later.
Now, Habitica is probably my favorite recent app and it's it's what's helped me through the summer.
We have four new department heads come on this summer, so it's a lot of change-over.
Habitica let's you do you to-do list.
You have habits, which are things you want to do daily.
I have step counts and different things in there.
You have dailys, which are tasks that you do every day or every week.
So, for example, here, I have to check the LITA Listserv and that's how I get it back on track.
I have each of my direct hires here where I can make sure that I check in with them every day and then your to-do list shows up here.
Items start out as yellow.
As you don't get them done, they turn to red.
So, red is bad.
You gain experience when you finish tasks and with your dailys, if you don't complete them, your hero here loses [Indiscernible].
If you do a bad enough, your hero can pass away and die but then you can start over.
It's actually collaborative so you can create Habitica accounts with other people and you can create a quest.
So the quest could be the project you're working on and everyone has different tasks to complete.
The project comes in the form of some sort of a monster that you have to defeat and you all work on it and you get special items on in quest.
There are rewards I can purchase for myself, based on different things that I accomplished and you earn money, as well, within the game.
You have pets.
I have a wolf and a dragon.
There are tons of different types of pets and this has become something that I really care about this little guy and he's not doing good, but that makes me want to go in and make sure I complete all my tasks and get things done.
It's really helped.
I get to the day and I see, I didn't check in with Caroline, and I check in with Carolyn, which is great for me and Caroline to make sure she has everything she needs.
My little guy gets health and he does well.
Like I said, you can do these things with other people, which is really cool.
From left to right, top to bottom, we've got Outlook, Trello, Google Drive, WordPress, if this, then that.
You can view -- where is it?
This is something where -- 
Jennifer, can you help?
I forget how to have people do the checkmarks.
>> Jennifer Peterson:  Oh, sorry.
I should have probably had a slide for it.
But, let me just quickly give people access and I'll talk you all through it.
>> John Klima:  I'm going to check them while you're talking through it.
>> Jennifer Peterson:  Okay.
So, those of you on the line, first, go to the top left corner of your view and you'll see there's a little marker there.
Go half-way down the menu that appears and on the box or the square, click on the little additional submenu and then you'll go down to a checkmark and find the checkmark down there.
 Excellent.
It looks like you're finding it.
>> John Klima:  I'm going to let people play a little bit and check and get a sense of the things people are overusing.
I didn't really talk about Facebook or Twitter but those are things we do here at the library.
We have an instagram account.
We don't necessarily use those for task management, but those are things that we have to find another way to fit into our task and get them all done.
And so, you know, you do -- 
between your calendar and maybe Habitica or different things you set up your to-do list and your schedule and you can make sure that you're posting on Facebook or Twitter all the things you need to do and of course, a lot of those social media platforms communicate to each other so if you post on one, it'll post on the other ones for you.
The nice thing about all these tools I'm talking about so far, they all have free versions.
Those are the versions that's we use.
I know they're -- typically, a lot of them have a paid version that offers different premiums.
But, I haven't found them worthwhile to investigate the money.
Outlook, obviously, we pay for it.
It's a city.
I feel like some sort of an email client is necessity.
It is making use of the calendar so you know what things you've got going on and following-up with messages you get.
I'm going to -- 
>> Jennifer Peterson:  Just a second.
Before you move, I want to ask you a couple of the questions that came up that people were answering each other's questions.
I know you mentioned that WordPress is the blog you use for your staff blogs and then there was -- when you were talking about calendars, I think it was when you were talking about the four-month calendar.
Is that shared with everyone and do you put that information into, like, Outlook, as a shared calendar or a Google shared calendar, as well?
>> John Klima:  So we share our calendars via Outlook so you -- 
it's not really intuitive, but you give permission to someone to have access to your calendar and then they have to come and get the permission so it's not just an automated, I give them permission and it shows up for them.
My Outlook calendar has more detail than the whiteboard four-month calendar.
That hangs on my wall and anyone can come in my office and take a look at it.
It's my one full-time staff person and me that look on that.
I put time on for department heads on there to keep track of what we have for staffing for a librarian in charge in the building.
The whiteboard is a shared physical object.
I like to look at the calendar and see all the things.
I had a paper one that was 12 months and that was too much to keep track of.
So, then, I had to keep taking it down and moving things around.
The four-month one was a nice solution.
You could do the same thing with paper and an electronic calendar.
I like having something I can write on and kind of look at a bunch of things at once.
It gets difficult in Outlook or even Google calendar to look at more than one month at a time unless you have a really big monitor, which I don't have a huge monitor.
>> Jennifer Peterson:  The other thought -- and I know, you know, this is a lot of -- it's overwhelming the number of tools.
In terms of prioritizing and deciding which tools to use with how many people, have you found that some sort of maybe of hard lessons learned that you could share in terms of where you came to realize certain tools worked well for you on your own and others worked well -- I know you're going to touch on some of that in the next segment.
Can you talk more about -- even the time you set aside to experiment knowing that there are always are new tools that maybe would work better for certain purposes?
>> John Klima:  I'll touch on that a little bit coming up.
I'll speak briefly right now.
Again, I use the word luxury, I have time built into my schedule to be able to look for these things.
It's not something I do on a daily basis or a monthly basis.
I follow a lot of blogs and people talk about things.
I have a lot of friends in the tech industry who are constantly trying new things or the company's moving to new things and I key an eye out and if there is something I haven't seen before, I look at them.
Most of these have a free sign-up version or a trial so you can give them a go.
But that's pretty much it and then a lot of stuff, I'm kind of doing for my own purposes to keep me organized and then using more of the library-provided tools like Outlook to communicate with staff, children's department here has made good use of Google Drive and Dropbox because they work with a lot of outside partners and that works well for them.
For the most part, for sharing stuff with stuff,  it's a lot of tools and I bring the information to the staff in meetings or little follow-ups.
>> Jennifer Peterson:  
Excellent.
I'm taking the tools away from folks, so you can move on.
>> John Klima:  We're going to talk about time management.
This goes in hand in hand with the calendar.
So, we're going to do -- you'll probably guess where we're going from daily.
So, things that I do daily, I really liked the concept of inbox zero and I saw it a few years ago.
You don't let messages sit in your inbox and your inbox should be at zero at all times.
I can't do that.
There's no way I can keep my inbox at zero.
But I try to do my best.
I try to have 50 or fewer emails in my inbox at any given time.
I would like to keep less than a screen's worth but I just can't keep up with them.
So what I do to help keep the volume of email in control is I set times to check email.
I check email when I first get in and after lunch and those are the big times when I spent time looking through email.
I get it on my smartphone so that's kind of a cheat because on my smartphone, I'll see, seven messages have come through on this topic.
I try not to spend a lot of time on email because I could spend my whole day there.
It's nice that I don't get a lot of phone calls.
But, if I do either, I answer the phone if I'm here and try to get back to people within a day because typically it tends to be vendors trying to set up times to bring things or do repair work.
On Habitica, I've got the staff check-in so I try to talk to three that directly report to me every day and make sure I know what they're working on, what's going on, if they have questions for me.
I do a building sweep, sort of a -- just like the email when I first get in, I walk through the building before we open up and make sure everything's going fine and there aren't any surprised.
After lunch, I do a walk-through and check in at the reference desks and make sure everything's working fine.
We have an adult reference desk and a children's refance desk.
And just sort of make sure that I know what's happening throughout the building.
Every week, we try to catch up with people who are involved in the projects that I'm working on.
If it's not one of the three direct hires, I try to stop to everyone.
Everyone works different schedules.
So I make sure over the course of the week to talk to everybody and have some sort of a conversation.
On Monday mornings, I meet with city I.T. and we talk about larger changes to the network and bigger things like that.
We do a department head meeting roughly every Wednesday.
And we don't have a full department head meeting, I'll have a meeting with a couple people I work with.
And then for me, Friday afternoon's tend to be kind of quiet so that's a day where I go through my notebook, go through the notes and go through the things I said I was going to go through people and file stuff and get it off my desk.
Sometimes, we've got the book return that isn't working and I'm trying make that happen.
These are things I strive for.
Every month, we have a board report and I go through my calendar to see the things I worked.
Go back through my sent email and see the types of things I talked to people about and I look ahead at the next month and pull together statistics and get a sense of where the library's going, things like computer usage, printer usage.
I look at our circulation stats.
And then I update those whiteboards and like I said, this is -- right now, kind of ugly looking because in this corner here, we've got January of next year, but I don't feel like rewriting the whole thing every time a new month comes in.
At the end of this month, I'll erase October and write.
I know my staff person looks and sees different things that are going on.
They write in finance meetings that's  that I have to attend for the city and that way, people know my schedule.
Every quarter, we assess our big projects.
Whether they are done, how they went, we can do sort of a success or fail review with the staff.
We have the big community read.
We have a meeting in late November, early December, and talk about how did this year go, what book do we want to do for next year?
That's 10 months before the next one.
We are assessing and looking at the next year.
I formed a technology committee here where I have a representative from each department in the library and that's meant to give all the different departments a chance to voice their needs, their concerns, their dreams and desires.
So, if they see, I was at this library, they were doing this cool thing, we can start to look into that and see if we can use it, circulation might say, we're having tons of problems with our barcode scanners.
Okay.
That's something you're able to make work but it wasn't something that was enough to cause me to come down and take a look at it.
So we can take a look and see if that's a problem and those types of things.
And then, every year or a couple times a year, I try to take a nice chunk of time with my full-time staff person and we look over our software, what we need to upgrade and look at the replacement schedule for public and staff computers and conference attendance and go over our major I.T. projects that we have going on in the building.
This year, we implemented new public printers and we're in the midst of converting to rfid.
We did all of our tagging and we're going to have new [Indiscernible] and our self-checks converted to rfid at the end of the month, beginning in the November so we're in the middle of that.
That's been a big project we've been working on.
And some final thoughts.
Maybe try to get a little humor.
We've all been great listening to me go on and on.
Due dates are closer than they appear.
Try to get your deadlines from your vendors.
I know sometimes, for some reason, vendors don't want to give you a date for when things are going to happen.
Get it in writing, get it in an email.
Give deadlines to staff.
Keep  people up-to-date.
We have a guy coming in October 31 to install new security gates.
If he has a problem and has to change that, we make sure we communicate to everybody.
We did this five-week implementation project that we set up to do the promotion and the marketing so we can let the public know, hey, how you check out books is going to change.
Those weeks are just flying past.
So I know that you can sit there and say, five weeks, that's a ton of time to do this and all of a sudden, everything is here.
Meetings.
I don't know if any of you have seen the new loony tunes show from a couple years ago, daffy duck found out that porky pig was on the city council and was trying to get special favors and decided to run against him and got on the city council and daffy's in the city council, listening to people talk about speed bumps and speed humps and I was laughing so hard.
It was the dumbest thing they'd ever seen.
It reminded me of meetings I've been in.
I've been trying to not say things in meetings if all I'm doing is repeating what someone else has said.
It's really hard.
I like to put my opinion out there.
But I really -- I think about, like, is that what this person just said?
Then I can say, I agree.
And that works great.
And it's sped up meetings a lot and we're trying to do that as a group.
Another thing we've implemented, if there's eight of us in the meeting, if there's something that only involves two of us, they have a separate meeting outside of the department head meeting so that we're not lengthening the department head meeting when they can talk independent of the group and that's helped a lot, too.
It's helped because we've got some new people in who have lots of questions about how we do things and we can give them the time they need, whereas, you know if children's needs maintenance to prepare for a big kids event that s coming up, those two people can talk to each other after the meeting and that has helped a ton.
I just love this image.
I'm not going to read it to you.
Hopefully, I found one clear enough for people to see.
This is communication.
I had worked as a software developer in my dark past and just weird things happen.
My boss wouldn't let me talk to to the end users and I kept saying to him, how am I going to know what they need?
What they're going to work on?
Maybe what they want to do, we already have in the software.
It's the same thing when you're working with a team, making sure everyone understands what's happening so if someone comes up to the front desk and says, what's going on with your book return, you don't have someone that says, it's a piece of junk or it's purple and it smells like lavender.
You have the same message for everybody.
I do a lot of walking around and talking to people, which is good for my waist line, but it's good to make sure everyone has the support they need, everyone has the types of help because if I don't know and talk to people, someone might not realize we can solve their problem.
So that's just sort of a little funny thing to think about.
And, you've all been involved in things like this where you're talking to a sales person at a conference and you say, hey, can you product do X?
Sure, it can do that.
And then, it can't.
For example, our book return, we didn't realize that that hardware required you to scan your library card to start the process of returning a book.
It was in their proposal, that we agreed to, everyone missed and that's our fault and we have to work with the company to see if they're willing to change the way their equipment works so we can have a product the way the public expects it to work and that took a lot of effort and there were a lot of starts and stops and problems.
But, you know, in the end, because we kept up the communication, we got what we were looking for and it's working the way we wanted it to.
Now, again, I have the luxury of, you know -- I'm the single person in charge of the technology, I don't have to go to someone else for approval and I don't have a desk.
That's great when they are looking for things.
That's not true for everybody.
You might have to go to a director or a library board and so what I would recommend -- 
kind of the thing I like to see from people is, you know, you see something that's worked at another library and you can bring to me the report of what this other library did and how it was a success and the steps they went to go through it as a community, as a field, we all are very helpful.
When we started letting people check out hotspots, WiFi hotspots, I talked to a bunch of different libraries that were doing it and got a ton of publisher files and PDF and things we could adapt for us.
If you are looking to try something new, you want to make that presentation for your manager, for your director, for your library board, talking about what it is you want to do.
How it benefits the organization and kind of -- if there's a cost, what the cost is, both the initial cost and the ongoing cost.
We've had a lot of conversations about the ongoing costs of things.
It's one thing to add another staff person, but what's the ongoing cost?
We want to add a new front-end loader and what's the cost of having that?
And, you know, when we did a request for proposals for our rfid system, we went to other libraries in the state and around the country that are the same size as us and have those and got their rfp's and adapted them for ours and it made the process a lot smoother and you have a professional connection, someone you can talk to and they'll communicate back to you and it's a nice thing to build up.
That's kind of the end of my presentation.
Hopefully, people got something out of this and now we can do some more questions.
>> Jennifer Peterson:  Excellent.
Thank you so much, John.
I think you have definitely given people a lot to explore and it sounds like some folks definitely are familiar with a lot of the tools and I really --
I want to acknowledge a couple things that really jump out at me.
Your committee approach for your technology work, I think, is really, really smart because I think the representation of people across the organization focused on that role of being the conduit, both for bringing their team -- their particular departments priorities to that committee is empowering people to be that conduit is a very important piece.
In the same way, I'd say empowering people to be part of the learning process.
You know, we talk a lot about being a learning organization and exploring these tools.
Like you said, it's making the time to do that.
But even assigning people, saying, well, hey, you seem interested in this, why don't you check it out and bring back your thoughts and recommendations or inviting people to -- overall, to reflect on the tools and the processes.
You demonstrate you are eager to bring folks into that process.
So, I just want to ommend you on that, as well.
There was a really good question about managing budgets.
Do you -- do you have a specific tool you use for budgets some staff hours?
It would be great to hear how you and your library do that.
>> We use -- a lot of the departments use excel to keep track of our cost throughout the year.
The city uses a tool called mumis, which is a financial piece, it does our payroll and the budget for the whole city and we have a dedicated bookkeeper here in the library and it's wonderful.
I've been at places where I had to keep track of the budget on my own and there's always that, oh, my goodness, did that come through?
Do you have to contact the city financial person and they've never met you before and wondering why you are asking these questions.
We have a person internally.
Certainly, the last half of the year, every month we start talking about where are we in the process.
We kind of let the first month be a free-for-all because you've got the budget to spend.
We have January through December.
It's more of when we get to the end of the year -- we had a power outage here that blew out a 100-watt circuit breaker in the building that damaged our air handler and that ways expensive.
We lost a projector and our children's program room and a bunch of other equipment and we haven't had a problem like that before.
But now, these are all new expenses because it's not something you're planning on doing.
And I kind of -- I oversee just the technology budget and that's where the full-time person and I go over our replacement schedule.
Talk with the vendors.
I try to do longer-term licensing if I can because you tend to get better pricing, even though it's a higher up-front cost.
A lot of this is -- we work hand in hand with the city to help with things.
>> Jennifer Peterson:  Yeah.
That's a good point.
And I think a lot of libraries do.
But certainly, those that are more on their own, feel free to chime in, too, if people have advice for those folks.
There's some other really good questions.
Let me circle back.
There was one question in terms of projects when you were talking about rolling out specific projects.
There was a question, do you have a specific project project manager?
Maybe you?
>> When it's a technology project, it's me who's the project manager.
Outside of that -- we kind of work -- the department heads tend to be project managers.
We had additional shelving for our teen area and so we had -- 
that's one of our new department heads, the head of adult services.
They see where they are physically going to place the shelves and making sure all the books got taken off the shelves so they could move things around and I just -- I was there but I was more of, you know, if someone had a question they didn't know how to answer then I could make that decision.
So.
It's a lot by department.
I remember my first month here, I had something come across my desk and I wasn't sure what to do with it.
There wasn't any one else to take it to so I had to sit around and figure out how to fix it.
That was a nice realization.
>> Jennifer Peterson:  There was a question about troubleshooting -- about hardware troubleshooting.
Is there someone at the city or on staff that does the troubleshooting or do you have a contract?
>> John Klima:  So, we have a couple different things we do here.
We try to do all the first round of troubleshooting internally between myself and my one full-time person.
We have a lot of experience working on computers.
A lot of the problems aren't as complicated as they could be.
If it moves beyond just a single computer and gets into a networking issue, we work with city I.T. because they do a lot more network and then recently, the city has decided to set up a third-party help desk service and they work great.
And a lot of times, people will call them with minor things and they're able to help with just all the things that maybe we would do internally but maybe we're not available.
They'll call the help desk and have help with that.
There is a lot of infrastructure that not a lot of people have.
>> Jennifer Peterson:  That sounds ideal, for sure.
This may be a little bit -- 
touches on some of the other aspects of your work in terms of technology for patrons.
But, in terms of making recommendations for new technologies in libraries that you do make available to different patron user groups.
How do you recommend making new technologies in libraries available to all age groups of users?
So I think it's more around the age question.
And I know that you talked about -- that you circulate some technology, but access to the technology in the library.
I don't know if that's a question exactly.
Can you talk about that a little bit?
>> John Klima:  Usually things like that, we will have a meeting either with just the affected department or could be something that we'll bring to our department head meeting and get the opinion of the people.
When we decided to circulate hotspots, that's going to affect technical services, they have to figure out how to handle it.
We want to talk to reference because they'll get questions and children's, as well.
You want them to know how this service works and what -- how the patron can check it out and use it.
We tend to make most things available to most of the patrons.
So, we are a two-story library.
The children's area is on the second floor.
We have public computers up there and public computers on the first floor.
And we try not to have adults up on the second floor unless they're with children or looking at material.
What happened with us over the last couple of years is, our school district got some grant funding and they're providing an iPad for all students k through 12.
It's more than 10,000 iPads and so our computer usage plummeted because the kids had their own computer that they could carry around.
As a parent, I just got an email this morning, telling me about a couple apps that they're adding to their bad list because they were being misused by some students.
That's a huge program they have to deal with.
I meet with people in the school district, at least once a year, to talk about sort of the high-level -- what are you doing with your program?
What can we help support it?
There's some things we've had to allow through our firewall for the internet.
It's sort of a basic things that we're preventing from coming through.
But something gets blocked and we need to get through and make sure that the students can get to it if they need stuff for their homework or assignments they're working on.
>> Jennifer Peterson:  Wow, that's really something else.
That is a huge scale.
[LAUGHTER]
 again, another indicator of all you juggle and relationships you manager internally and externally.
So it's always refreshing to hear people talk about the reality of what that kind of work looks like and I know that based on questions that came up in chat and comments that people have shared, your people are here, definitely.
So, I know we're at the top of the hour and I want to thank you so much for bringing all of this great work to a webinar and John's offered his email here for you to connect with you if you have other questions or want to bounce other ideas off of him.
I know that you've all way -- 
there's been some great open-ended questions for people to answer each other.
So, hopefully, people feel comfortable, maybe connecting, on Twitter.
If John has thoughts about any of the other questions that came through, we'll add those to the event page so you can see his thoughts on those and I'll be updating the event page once the recording is available and letting you all know via email when that's available.
And as you leave the room, we'll send you to a short survey and we'll provide that survey summary to John so it's great feedback both for him and for us in our ongoing programing efforts and I'll send you all a certificate before the -- within a week.
So, keep an eye out for that and again, all of our sessions are recorded so feel free to share with your teams.
It could be a great conversation starter, discussion piece for you all, as you explore ways to do your work as your library.
So, again, thank you so much John and we'll certainly follow you on the LITA blog and thanks for bringing everything to us here today >> John Klima:  Thanks for having me >> Jennifer Peterson:  Everyone, have a great day and thanks to our captioner, as well.
Have a great day, bye.