I am going to go ahead and get the recording started. I am thrilled to introduce today's presenters. We have Gail Bruce, the director of the Laurel Public Library in Delaware, and also the ARSL project participant. And Betha Gutsche, who is the WebJunction program manager who has had the great pleasure of working with these libraries on this project. I am going to pass the ball over to Betha and have her get started. Welcome, Betha. >> Thank you, Jennifer. Thank you, everyone, who is here today. This is pretty much my favorite topic to talk about. Smart spaces and community places. Welcome, everyone. Let's just get started. So, we are going to eliminate a little bit more about winning by the smart spaces process, and then we will hear from Gail and how she implement of that process at the Laurel Public Library so that practical application happens and then we will take a quick look at the toolkit that WebJunction has created so that you can potentially create smart spaces at your libraries. So, first, just talking about what we mean by the smart spaces process. At this came out of that small libraries create smart spaces project, which spanned over four years and involved a total of 30 small and rural libraries and communities all around the country. I am going to focus on the success of the process and not so much the details of the participating libraries, but you can find a lot more information at that link that popped into the chat. I really like to get started by giving you a glimpse of what dramatic transformation might look like and the following two examples are from libraries that participated in the first round of the project from 2017-2018. Looking, first, at Glenns Ferry Public Library, located in southeastern, Idaho. It serves a population of just over 1200 people. Very rural and an agriculture centered economy. The space that they targeted for transformation, as you can see, it housed DVD and VHS tapes, tall shelves blocking the natural daylight and kind of beige and gray color scheme. So, after transformation, yes, this is that very same space. It just turned into this bright, inviting space where active learning takes place, and it is really a space for all ages, not just for young kids. Hooray, we have Jennifer trail here who is the amazing library director who spearheaded that whole project at her library. Welcome. And then we go across the country to Cornwall Public Library in upstate New York. They serve a population of over 12000. They discovered that the teens in their community didn't feel they had a space where they could gather and do things. No surprise, because if you look at the photo on the left, that upside down book pillow thing and a couple folding chairs and that little desk, that was the teens face, while the photo on the right shows some prime real estate being occupied by the reference desk. After going through the smart spaces process, they ended up with this warm, inviting, colorful space. You can just see the smiles on the faces of the community teams. They feel like they have ownership, and they get to activate the space with the kind of programming that they want. You can read all the transformation stories of all 15 of the libraries that participated in the first cohort at that link in the chat. That brings up the big question of how did this all happened. That is really the smart spaces transformation story. I think we are all familiar with the field of dreams illusion, the idea if you build it, they will come. What we have discovered many times and many places is that if you do not build what people actually want, they will not come. As so, the smart spaces process is not about physical structure, although that is a piece of it. It's not about the furnishings or the technology. What is really essential in the process is that you involve community from the start throughout. So, that is the smart part. We distilled this process from the experiences with the small libraries create smart spaces program and working with all of the libraries and those cohorts. We realize that the strategies are broadly applicable to all sizes of libraries and to all types of planning, whether it's programs, services, strategic planning, partnerships, it is just a very workable and usable process. At the beginning of the first cohort, way back in 2017, we began with the design thinking for libraries toolkit. It is a wonderful tool kit. I encourage you to look at it when you get time. We really quickly realized that design thinking is not a prescription to be followed like a textbook. We also realize that we needed to streamline the library toolkit process to really honor our small libraries with their limited staff. Sometimes really only one, not even full-time staff member and limited time and budget. So, over the period of time, working with both cohorts, primarily the first cohort, we really brought it down to the two essential components of design thinking. Discovery, which is discovering who your community is, what they value, what their priorities are , what might make their lives better, and then experimentation and being open to imagining a world of possibilities and keep -- being willing to meet evolving needs, because we all know that needs evolve. So, this is a cycle. It is not a linear process. I'm going to spend the most time here talking about the community discovery piece of the process. It is centered on community. This is often called the inspiration or the entity phase. I like to call it discovery, because it really is looking more intentionally and intently at your community, and it is the most impactful stage of the whole process. It sets in motion that power of deeply listening to your community to understand who they are and then seeking ways to collaborate with them to make their lives better. This impact fullness of this discovery phase was really validated in both of our smart spaces cohorts. I have collected so many testimonials from them about the value of this. I only have time to read one to you. That is through this discovery process, I was able to tap into difficult and expressed needs. I learned a lot about patron wants, and for a public library dedicated to education and recreation, especially in a poor community in which many times wants are very much forgotten because there is only enough time for needs, I think the wants are critical. You may be thinking that this discovery is really not relevant or much less relevant due to the realities of the pandemic over the last year. First of all, I want to counter the narrative of closed libraries. Libraries close physical doors, but libraries opened up to so many other ways of connecting with their communities, and they did that spontaneously with innovation and imagination. There are a couple of links in the chat that I invite you to explore. They are just a taste to the tip of the iceberg to all of the amazing ways that libraries stayed open. So let's just establish that. I think the greatest testimonials for the power of communities and discovery in the face of the pandemic come from the second cohort of smart space libraries, because they were on the verge of actually implementing their designed smart spaces and then they had to close their doors. They didn't get to fully realize the end product of the process, which would be to have programming and invite people in, interact with them, collaborate with them. That didn't get to happen. It got cut short. We surveyed them at the end of the grant project, and we ask a specific question about the impact of COVID, expecting to hear all negatives, when actually 10 of the 12 survey respondents reported sustained or enhanced relationships with their communities, despite their limited ability to service their community. Some of them felt that the community was all the more aware of how important the library is and that they appreciated at the library was doing the very best that it could in hard times. Some of our libraries actually formed new partnerships and reached families that hadn't used the library previously. I love this quotation. The library actually became the most active organization. This is really a silver lining to that whole pandemic mess. Other wonderful testimonials about how the carried over value of the discovery connections really resonated throughout the pandemic. Another of our participants said, I feel like we grew and transformed as a result of what we learned in this project. It was particularly helpful given the huge shift in our role during the pandemic. Another library was just so enthusiastic about many unanticipated ways that their community asked to use the actual physical smart space. This library staff person said the space really has been used a lot, just not quite in the way we first imagined. I can't wait to use the room and the way it was originally intended in addition to continuing the use of how it is being utilized currently. That's just really iterating the flexibility innovation, experimentation, and discovery all wrapped up into this process. I would like to take a brief pulse check of where you are. We are going to do that using annotation tools. If you will hover your mouse over your screen, that should open a vertical menu on the left. If you click the little squiggly icon, that should open the menu of annotation tools. That will be to the left also. Look for that open square, the teeny tiny arrow to the right of that to open the drop-down menu and select the checkmark. You are invited very much to practice on the screen. I will say that if you are joining through the web app or mobile device, you're probably not going to be able to use the checkmark, but we always invite you and everyone to enter comments, observations, questions, anything in a chat at any time. I see you have pretty much been very successful. I love your creativity. I'm going to ask you to withhold your checkmarks now. Take your finger off the button as we transition to the next slide to actually do the activity. Here we go. I think here we go. So, I would really like to know what tools you have used it to learn about your community in the past or maybe in the past year. You may not recognize what all of these tools are. A lot of them are from design thinking practices and strategies. I expected to see a lot of checkmarks on survey focus groups, and interviews. Those have been around quite a while. I am seeing a very interesting array, quite a few checkmarks on some of these others. I'm glad to see so many checkmarks on observation. Observation is a powerful tool. I think it's underestimated how powerful it is. Thank you for entering in the chat. If you can check, chat is definitely a welcome alternative. This is exciting. I'm really happy to see that so many of you are using a variety of tools. I think if we can turn the tools off, if we can move to the next slide. There are just so many tools. It is really astounding how many tools go far beyond the surveys and far beyond convention. I will not go into details about what they are, but I will emphasize that it is important to not get too hung up on the tool but to really start with your underlying purpose. Who is the community you want to reach? What might be the best way to reach them? Also, understanding that discovery in this context is about starting a conversation. It's about getting outside of your library, moving about in the community so your community sees you as a human face and not as someone posing. You get to actually meet and talk to people. I know that's going to be a challenge over the last year, but there are ways that many of these tools allow you to interact without being face to face. It is also really powerful a lot of these tools involve using images and pictures. That taps into sort of serve conventional thinking. Our community members get stuck in conventional ideas about what the library can do. If you asked them, what do you want to see at the library, they might say longer hours or more story times, but if you use pictures to depict illustrations of different kinds of things that might happen and they might not necessarily happen in the library, it could be outdoor stuff like concerts, cooking programs, that helps your community members start to think more creatively themselves. And then work shopping. Using the power of connection and getting people to actually build a vision of what they might want. Here on the right there is a photograph of a group of teens who are constructing out a very simple craft material mock up of spaces that would be engaging to them. I'm sure there are beanbag chairs in there. Really, the absolute most important tool is listening. You should be doing more listening than talking when you are in your community discovery mode. As you are listening, be careful not to discard ideas off the bat. Get rid of those filters that say, my board wouldn't go for that, we can't afford it. Just let everything come in in this phase. Open those big wide ears and avoid judgments. I love all the quotes that came out of our participants in this project, but this just really reinforces the idea that the community discovery portion is so important. We heard this from many of our libraries of cohorts that they have continued and will continue to use the techniques in the smart space process going forward. Now looking at the experimentation component of the smart spaces process, it has three subcomponents. Ideation, prototyping, and iteration. We will look at each of those briefly. All three parts of this process are intended to slow down the very human tendency to rush to solutions. When we hear a problem, we tend to, I have a solution for that. Let's look at ideation first, because this is very much about that slowing down. From the cohort, the experiences from both of our cohorts, we understood that it is tempting to say, I've collected all of this community input. I see a couple ideas that I feel it we could implement, so I am good. Let's just do that and go from here. Ideation and design thinking, just slow down. I always encourage people to look at all of your community input because you have not discarded anything. Look at it and tackle the idea or the need that seems furthest from what the library could fulfill. This makes a great ideation exercise, so get your brain thinking more extensively. One of our communities -- or one of our libraries heard from their community that they wanted a swimming pool. Obviously, the library is not going to build a swimming pool. The ideation process says, look under that need and look at other aspects of it. Is it the social aspect of getting together with the community at a location? Is there the aspect of being outdoors and doing things together outdoors? Is there the aspect of physical activity? Is there interest in sort of the more cultural aspects of swimming in a community customer Excel, you start to dissect it into all of these pieces. Looking at those pieces, you then come up with the ideas about what might the library do to support that social connection, support that outdoor space. I still encourage everyone to come at that phase, keep an open mind. Encourage wild ideas. You are still shutting off those filters that say we can't do it, the board will not go forth. It's a really great process, and I encourage you to look at the webinar link that just popped into the chat. It is an one hour webinar but somewhere about halfway through we do in ideation with a large group of attendees, so you can get a feel for how that might work in action. And then the stage of prototyping. If so, from the ideation and the plethora of ideas, then you start to pick one or two or three that you think is exciting and innovative but also feasible for the library. Make a tangible model of it. This is getting the ideas out of your head, off of a piece of paper, and bringing it into the real world. These examples here were all created by participants in the second cohort. You can see that they used quite humble materials. They used cardboard and colored paper and Legos. Legos are really fun to play with. The doll furniture, I love that one. There are two key reasons -- well, one make the ideas tangible, but what that does, one, it avoids costly mistakes. We have a specific example from the upper left photo where this library director after making the scale model realized the beautiful section of furniture she had looked at in the catalog was just not going to fit the space. The same with some large tables they had selected were just not going to allow for flow. This is exactly why it's a great idea to prototype before you go out and purchase that furniture and then find out it doesn't fit. The other tremendous advantage of prototyping is that you are continuing and sustaining the connection and collaboration with your community. There is more discovery happening as you build the prototype, and people come in and watch it. I love the photo in the lower right. This library actually engaged a group of teens and tween's to build their prototypes. They brought a whole different energy. It continues the conversation with the library. I love this quotation from one of our participants who said, I was most excited about the buy-in from the community. Initially, there was a definite lack of understanding about what we were trying to accomplish until people started coming in and saw the prototype and had one-on-one conversations. Then they really got excited. The discovery and the connection and collaboration continues. It just sums it up with the two main concepts. Involve the community in decision-making. I would say involve the community throughout. And just try stuff. That is the essence of the process, the discovery and the experimentation. At this point, Jennifer, let's pause and see if there are any questions. >> Fantastic. There have been a couple questions. Someone asked if you can speak a little bit to the current versus active -- or current/active users or low users. >> Yes. It's always valuable to take a pulse and understand more about what your current users want, but this is particularly valuable in going outside the library and going into the places and spaces that are frequented by people that you may want to reach. Sometimes that is setting up outside the grocery store or going to public events. I think both cohorts, particularly the second one, they particularly like to these variations on the boards, talkback boards. There is one example I did not picture, but it was one of our libraries came up with an image of a rocket, because this is the summer reading theme from the previous summer. It had the rocket attached to a box and a hole in the rocket and an invitation with a bunch of Post-it notes to the people at the event to write down ideas, how do you want to feel all the library rocket. Instead of saying what you want the library to do, they framed more creatively. They collected a lot of ideas from people who had never been to the library and had not thought about it. I encourage you to go look at the documents, especially the basket of discovery tools and also if you have time to watch the webinar. If we do talk in more detail about ways that you can reach people, there are fun things you can do, like it is sort of a variation on all of those, but it is a happy hour where you invite people to come to a space and give them lots of posters on the walls around the room and markers. Just ask them to write things and often asking people not specifically about the library. This is a good way to reach beyond the current users, but ask them broader questions. You will read some of this in the transformation stories, but ask them what you love about your community and what is one thing that would make it better. They don't have that constraint thinking about the library. If they are not library users, they are thinking about their community and really talking, sharing what they value about their community and their lives. You can get a much better idea of what might help them make their lives better and where the library might be able to step in and support that. I hope that helps. There is so much more information under the surface of what I am presenting today. >> You will see more of that in the toolkit. >> Absolutely. That's great. That's really helpful. I wanted to let you know that there have been a number of projects participants chiming in. A reminder to folks to be sure to post to everyone. I know there is an option for all attendees is not visible to the presenters. If you just want to go to the bottom of that menu to select everyone by they will all see your posts. It was great to see folks sharing some of the tools and approaches they've used for community discovery. Someone asked, is this considered a talk backboards? If so -- >> It certainly could be. Yes, we were focused on physical tools, but now we are in the digital or hybrid. >> Absolutely. Great point. There is lots of digital ways. Excellent. I think we can continue on, and I believe we are shifting to Gail out. >> Yes. We are going to hear from Gail Bruce, director of the Laurel Public Library. It serves a community of over 15000 and it is one of only two libraries that I was able to visit for travel was shut down. I am so glad that I had that opportunity. It is in a surprisingly rural area over on the Eastern shore, the eastern Peninsula that is a combination of a part of Delaware and part of Maryland. Beautiful, beautiful place. This library in particular has long been a vital hub of that community. She and her team have amplified that vitality through the smart spaces process. We are going to hear from her how that works. >> All right. Thank you, everybody. I appreciate everyone coming here today. We were excited to share how to use this toolkit to not only connect with our communities but also to how we take that and transform our spaces. We are, as Betha said, a small rural community. We have a population just shy of 4400, and a very diverse community. Also, we are very impoverished. We have a poverty level three times the state average. That just shows that no matter what size your library or what type of community you are serving that this toolkit can be adapted to fit any kind of circumstances. Do not think that you have to be a big, bustling metropolitan library to do this. This toolkit will work for anybody. We started, as Betha talked about all of these, I'm going to go into depth about how we use these ideas. For the discovery phase, how do we connect with our community and understand what they really need? We thought we had a good handle on it, but we found out some things that we didn't realize were needed in our community. One of the first thing that we did, and I have to say that this was actually started by our former librarian, Abby, who did end up going on maternity leave during the pandemic and did not return. She decided to be a full-time mom, which was awesome. We already had a good working relationship with our schools and with the students and everything, so they were very open to us coming to visit. During lunch, Abby would take this board and just kind of casually talk to the kids and say, what kind of space would you like to Seattle library? As you see from the second picture there, overwhelmingly Taft was the big winner. We also did some elementary school visits while we were promoting the summer reading program. We have a chance to present a story time and chat with the kids. Anyone who has worked with kids know that they love to share. This was very productive. The basic gist of what they got from that and the common thread was they like anything active that has movement and anything water related. If they can get wet, they want to do this. They also had a big request also for computer games. So we are starting to see a common thread of the technology that has started to develop. Another way that we reached out and kind of connected with the community were at different community events. As you can see here, we talked about the rocket, and that was also very popular. We just attended different community events around the area and in the town. The big take away from this was the request for arts and culture. There is not a lot of our programming -- any in our community and not a lot of other types of cultural events. So there was a big request for that. Another thing that we learned from this outreach was people wanted to create something to take home and to own. The kids were overwhelmingly interested in themes, something tangible, something they could own and keep. Another thing we did was photo interviews. Abby talk to the kids after school. Pre-pandemic it was not uncommon to have 60, 70 kids in the library after school. They were always very open. They had a space just to hang out and to be with us. They were always open to share with us. Overwhelmingly and surprisingly, a large number of them wanted a little nook or cranny where they could just have some alone time. We attribute that and come to find out that a lot of them do not have personal space at home, and they are looking for quiet somewhere. Somewhere they can be with their thoughts to step away for a few minutes. That was something we took away from the photo interviews. And then general casual conversations. We would have a lot of students after school and families in afterschool. The teens shared what they thought of the technology and video games. They presented pros and cons of it to Abby and discussed that with her. Families share Dineen also for the access to technology. Again, a lot of them do not have that at home, so they were looking at this. The picture on the right shows them doing roadblocks. They were able to get on with the kids and do that together. Also, a lot of the students do not have the devices at home or if they have a device, they do not have Internet. The lack of Internet is a big issue in our town also. This was learned so much from. It was not direct conversations with anyone, but it's just watching and listening. Kind of in tangible things that would also help us to kind of form our spaces and how we were going to proceed. We notice we do to homeschool art classes, both of them were always full with a waiting list. Craft programs are always very popular. We always have a good turnout for those. After school we would have kids coming up asking for art supplies, paper, pencils, for markers so that they could just kind of create and do things like that. Through all of this, we really discovered how creative our community is and how that was not being served. The next phase was the ideation. So taking that data and now want to we going to do with that. One of the first spaces that we did, you can see on the left before it was a little nook with our juvenile nonfiction, so we cleared all of that out, painted it, and came up with the innovation station. We had a very creative community. This kind of tied into what we had observed out in the community of a strong lack of arts programs and not a lot of support for those. Our students we thought they were looking for ways to express themselves in different mediums but also, it gave them the chance to make something tangible that they could keep. Yes, the innovation station is, basically, a maker space that we came up with a different name. I saw that in the chat. The next area we took over, as you can see the before space again, kind of just a dreary area, and we turned this into our team gaming station. Dave showed us problem solving, fine motor skills, social skills, perseverance, getting along with others. As stated, we are an impoverished community. Most of the families cannot afford the systems, so this is a way for them to interact with peers and to be able to do something they normally wouldn't be able to. It also gave them a space that they could call their own. Again, that was something that we found in our observations. That was also needed. The teens really took it seriously when discussing this. They really, really nailed home how much they really wanted this. The last thing that we did, we had just a little bit of grant money left. We came up with the idea for a hydroponic station. We are a very agricultural community. We are surrounded by forums. Food insecurity is a huge issue in our community and it has been there for quite a while. The pandemic really only exacerbated that. 51% of our population lived in apartments or rentals, so they don't have a space they can actually grow. The initial idea for this was we had a staff member who was a very knowledgeable gardener and we were going to do a video series of hydroponic versus traditional gardening. They would do some take-home kits and have some fun things. This tap never moved on to somewhere else, so we kind of had to rethink this a bit. We came up with the idea of container gardening, using plastic take-out containers. Right now this face is kind of sitting dormant until we can find somebody else that can kind of use this as a teachable space. Another part of the toolkit is the prototyping. Going through the experiment the process and what we learned from this. The prototyping Abby did was taking a space that was not used very often in our library, taking one of the unused closets, and she filled it with craft supplies and games and any kind of materials like that. The kids could come in and freely use any of the supplies they wanted and to create whatever they wanted. Taking the data from this and the general observation from all of this, that helped to shape our innovation station and how kids crave their own space and create tangible items. Also, from this we learned that they are messy and we needed to find a way that we could kind of contain that within our innovation station. That led us to know that we would need to get all kinds of organizational tools, you know, the bins, the pipe boards, the containers, making sure there was a place for everything so that it would be on them to make sure that they kept their space clean. So what's happening now? Obviously, everyone has been dealing with COVID. Our doors were shut initially. That a lot of time for us to complete our spaces. Also, because of this, as we moved further into the pandemic, we also moved outdoors, but it also stoped our creativity and how we reach patrons and the new ways to do that. The downside is we've had no kids or students coming in at all, even though they are, for the most part, back to school. A lot of them are still virtual learning, and even if they are back in school, the older siblings are caring for the younger siblings at that time. We are looking forward to being open, like I am sure everyone is pretty a fully open and welcoming the community and and sharing what we have done with this. We found that the smart spaces toolkit was invaluable in helping us to dig deep into the community and to help us focus on whatever jewels were going to be. It is very easy to use. It really helps that when you get overwhelmed, because there's so much data, so much information, helping to narrow it down. My advice for anyone in using this is just to take little microsteps. Just keep going in the right direction, stay focused on your goal, and also be willing to redirect. If you hit a spot where it is just not working or you see a different way to go, it's okay to redirect and change it. Especially post pandemic. We have had so many changes in our community that we are going to have to change to meet those needs and to meet them where they are. Utilizing toolkit I think is an invaluable way to do that. I just encourage anybody on the fence about this just to go through the toolkit and see what works for you and adjust it to your community. >> Fantastic. I did not see any specific questions come through, but if you have questions, feel free to post those now. She has provided her e-mail if you want to reach out directly to her to get more details. Go ahead. >> I would like to make an observation about the prototyping I have presented prototyping as making scale models, and this is a different approach to prototyping. You are actually testing out the space to see if it is really going to be used in the way you thought it would be. It was used and appreciated it may be over appreciated. They were then able to change course and make some adjustments to modify how messy the users of the space could be. So it's a different way to prototype ideas that is very valuable before you make a commitment to programming that is not going to be appreciated or services that are not going to be actually what the community wants. Thank you so much, Gail. Thank you for the affirmations from Michelle and Karen. I feel like we all learned so much. I learned so much from everybody who participated in these projects. So let's move ahead and look at this toolkit. We are all realizing that we need public space. I think we are realizing more than ever because we have lacked it so much over the last year. There is a wonderful Article that you will see in the chat in a minute about the value of public space in general, not specifically library space but how the pandemic has really shown how the simple act of seeing other people, being around with other people and sharing space is really a fundamental part of the human experience. Quoting from that Article, this pandemic has been trauma to the community at large and public space is a way to heal it. There is quotations from Eric Kleinberg. He first got my attention in 2018 when he came up with the book palaces for the people, which is a celebration of the value -- the health value and the general social vitality value of public spaces in general. In the book he particularly calls out public libraries as palaces that meet so many needs of the people. I love this quotation where he has understood and recognized the way libraries have responded during the pandemic. I love the word unfolded. Instead of being cramped up in your physical space or confining your thinking and your perceptions to the physical space, you have really expanded that notion and found new ways for people to access the library and for you to connect with them even while the building was closed. The theory gets into the value of public space getting into strong ties and weak ties. Strong ties would be family and friends with whom you share a lot. You look to them for support. People you trust and know more intimately. There is this concentric circles going out to wider connections that are called weak ties. I think week is kind of an inappropriate choice of words, because week is not negative in this case. That is part of what we understand from the value of public spaces how we drive connection and subsidence from being around people that we are not intimately connected with but we all feel part of a community. We feel that sort of more intangible connection. That's definitely something that we have lost over the last year where we have paid more attention to holding onto our strong ties. We have had so many Zoom meetings, but we have really lost a lot of those weak ties and that community. As libraries emerge from the worst of the pandemic, we hope, we are realizing that we are not going to return to the normal of a year ago. Everything has changed. We need to rediscover each other. We need to reclaim a public space, gather new understanding of how our communities have changed. There is a lot of discovery to be done over the next few months and going forward into the future. WebJunction offers this toolkit to help all of us re-envision the library's place as a center of community and how he will continue to be vital no matter what changes lie ahead. I think libraries have demonstrated they can be adaptable and flexible because they have had to. Hopefully, this will provide some tools that can help you be more intentional and how you move through that adaptation. This is really just underscoring the value of connection and collaboration with your community, whether that's going to be in the virtual, the physical, or the hybrid space. So, the resources are laid out in the order of the orientation that we worked with the smart spaces cohorts. We worked with each cohort over 15 months and led them kind of step-by-step through these aspects of working and collaborating, co-creating with community. That does not mean this is linear. Actually, we've designed the toolkit for you to find the point of entry wherever you are in your own process. Are you ready to rethink the use of physical space customer as well, then start there. Have you got the space and you want to activate it with programming? I really encourage everyone to look at the discover community needs and interests section. One thing I learned from working with both cohorts is even in a small community, one might think that you know your community pretty well. One might think that they know the library pretty well. There were so many surprises for so many of our participants when they actually went out and started those conversations and started building those relationships. One of the libraries in the second cohort in a very small community, when the director went out and started talking to people, learned that a lot of people in the community didn't know the library still existed. This was pre-pandemic. They thought the library closed its doors a few years before. Through this process, this director completely turns that community around 180 degrees to the point where the community has collaborated and built stuff and donated money and raised money and has ideas for programming. I encourage you, don't overestimate what you know about your community. You might be really surprised at what you can still discover. If we were to click through that discovery community needs section, in each section, you will see a set of curated resources. These are very concise. It's definitely not exhaustive. We wanted to just provide points of entry and then you can explore from there once you kind of get started. They are really designed to be sort of grab and go, so they are short articles, short videos. There is no need to move through in any particular sequence. You just look at what seems relevant for you at the moment. Many of these resources are drawn from the practical applications of the smart spaces process by our 30 participating libraries. You get to see what it actually looks like on the ground for them. I want to actually find out in chat from you what you think your community discovery might look like as we emerge from pandemic times. Acknowledging that discovery is ongoing. It's not something we did a year ago, we are done. And especially since we understand that needs and priorities have really shifted dramatically. We have all been through significant changes, emotional changes, social changes, priority changes. I really encourage you to pop into the chat any ideas you have from hearing what you have heard today, hearing how the process was applied at Gail's library, just thinking about what you might do going forward to really take the pulse of your community. Yes, acknowledging that it is hard work at a small library. I think this toolset is really designed to be more accessible and to be available for people who do not have a lot of resources, like you can't form a committee and have them go study it. You have a very small staff, a limited amount of time, so pick what seems like the lowest hanging fruit, but just go out and do something. >> I have a couple questions may be well are reflecting on your question. Somebody asked, how do you provide ideas and encourage creativity without leading the question? >> Well, one good way is to use images or provide questions that are really very broad. I think one of the most leading questions the library can ask is what do you want to see at the library? If you just make it more broad, you might event -- there is some tools. There is one tool in one of those sets called my world map where you give people a set of questions of like who are the most important people in your life? Where do you go in your community? What do you do to relax in your community or in your life? What would you like to be doing with your life? So asking a lot of questions that have nothing to do with the library that might encourage people to think more expensively. We are getting things in the chat and it's going fast and furious, so an interesting point about newsletters. If we are still sort of in the interim phase, you can't really be in the presence of community members. You may have to rely on newsletters and surveys, but you can ask questions. There was a survey put out by 1 of the regional libraries that asks what did you do during the pandemic? What gave you the most satisfaction of the things you did during the pandemic. Again, asking those questions that are not specific about the library but trying to get a better view into what is valuable to people and where do they turn for solace? What do they do for self-care? And then going through the ideation process to think about how the library could expand that or extend that or help people heal from the damage of isolation. Definitely connect with neighborhood groups. I would say definitely connect with neighborhoods groups. That's usually valuable. I will put out a big plug for connecting with individuals. I call them collaborators. We have wonderful evidence in the transformation stories of people not affiliated with a group. If you go to a group, you tend to go to the head of the group or maybe the outreach director. There are individuals I am sure in all of communities, because I have seen so much evidence from our smart spaces communities who are willing and eager to step in. My favorite heartwarming story, and it came from the Cornwall Public Library, was a guy who does floors. He lays floors. He was in the library doing some other work, heard that they needed and didn't have the funding to the lay of the floor in the new smart space. He came in on a Sunday, has Monday off in the week. He did a three hour round-trip commute to get to the library to lay this floor pro bono because he said libraries have been good to me in my life. I really say, don't overlook individuals while also connecting with organizations, community-based organizations. Aboard that asks seemingly random questions. That is part of the essence of the design thinking. Instead of barreling toward the target of what you think you want to know, ask and explore. Do things that seem random and seem disconnected with the library, because those things reveal priorities, wants, needs, and feelings that you will not find out otherwise. Then you use the ideation piece to really build on what is feasible for the vibrator to do now that we understand more deeply what our community is feeling. >> There was another question earlier that asked maybe how Gail is responding to the splitting in the midst of what could be budget constraints. >> I will turn that to Gail. >> We have a very supportive aboard and right now we are pretty fiscally sound, so we been able to do what we want to do. In addition, mostly all of this was grant funded through the smart spaces grant. Our board has enabled anyone on the staff to write grants. We have gotten pretty good at that pretty we do get a lot of the grants that we write we do get, and the thing we have found that works best for that is telling our story pretty we have the stats and the hard data, but a lot of times if you share your story there is a lot of grant money out there to help to do the things that you want to do. It make good connections with their local organizations and your local nonprofits. A lot of times at the end of the fiscal year they are looking to make donations. If they understand what your goals are, what your commitment to the community is, sometimes they can be a good source of funding also. >> And I will just mention one story that was really, really kind of dramatic from the first cohort of a library director that did a lot of discovery activities in creative ways and went to communities that didn't come to the library and collected a lot of input that just revealed the sort of enthusiasm in the community for learning. She brought that to the board who had been resistant four years of the library is fine, we do not need to do anything different. It was seeing that evidence and bring that evidence to the board. A story from this cohort of when the board and community members saw the prototype and started to get the ideas. You can leave the process into gradually getting buy-in. >> Excellent. You've touched on this a little bit. Maybe from some of the other folks that participated, how do you carve out staff time to work on these initiatives? >> I would love to hear from anybody in the audience. That is a real issue for small libraries. >> Some folks did chime in. I think your comment earlier in terms of this is a really ongoing conversation, and finding ways to integrate it into some of your existing work. I know some libraries are even more informally writing down some of the observations they have. Look for the ways within the toolkit that are sort of simple four steps to start changing your mindset in terms of how that discovery process happens in and amongst our work and, certainly, in those relationships. >> Very good point. We try to make this process not cumbersome, and I think many of the tools lend themselves to that, and to do is just one piece at a time, just start something. Thank you from Jen. Do not be afraid to ask for help. There is help out there. You may be able to augment your staff time. I will just leave you with this rhetorical question. So many possibilities. The toolkit is a living resource, so I am eager to hear from you how you use it and what you might want to add to it and all of that. And then we are at the top of the hour. Thank you, everybody. >> Fantastic. Thank you so much to Gail and Betha. Thank you to the funder and for us to all share these great tools more widely with you all. I will send you all an e-mail once the recording is posted later today, and I will also send you a certificate for attending. No need to request that. We also will send you to a short survey as you leave. We love to gather your feedback. At both helps us in the ongoing programming and we will also share that with today's presenters. Thank you to the captioner for being here. Everyone have a fantastic rest of your week.