We have a learner guide created for today's session.

This is a tool for you to extend your learning on the topic.

We create these guides for you to work together as a team at your library or on your own.

There are questions for you to consider or to discuss, activities you can do to take those steps.

It can be customized.

So if after today's session you hone in on a couple of things that Timothy really recommends, make the guide work for you and use that to take steps with that work moving forward.

I'm so thrilled to welcome today's presenter.

Timothy Dickey is a wonderful advocate for work in this area.

He's an adult services librarian at the Columbus Metropolitan Library.

He serves as faculty at Kent State, San Jose State and Catholic University.

He's the recipient of the 2022 ALA-RUSA Margaret E. Monroe Award for Library Adult Services.

And he is the author of the book "Library Dementia Services."

I'm so grateful for you, all the work you've done, Timothy, and thank you for coming to share all your great work here at our WebJunction webinar.

>> TIMOTHY DICKEY: Thank you so much, Jennifer.

And I am delighted.

Thank you all who are here and to those listening to the recording later.

I am delighted to see you virtually, delighted to hear the feedback you're going to have in the chat.

And the thoughts that you have.

I have to say I used to start off presentations on this topic, before the pandemic was becoming an advocate for this underrepresented community and our services, I used to start off by asking who in the audience had personal experience of caregiving.

I've given up on that, because the topic is so prominent in our culture, and it would be more incisive to see if there are people in the audience who have not personally known someone who has lived with Alzheimer's disease or related dementias.

Thank you all for your interest.

I hope to give you a lot of different thoughts about how we as librarians, wherever we are, however small our branch is, can serve this community.

Today I'll give you a basic understanding of communication patterns we can expect, the information needs that we can think about as reference resources on our reference desks, and I'm saving time at the end to share a number of different kinds of programs that we can offer adults and their caregivers in our communities who might be living with dementia.

Dementia you may have heard described as a global epidemic, pandemic even, perhaps.

Not to belittle the Covid pandemic, but there are almost 7 million people in the United States alone living with Alzheimer's and related dementias.

50 million worldwide.

And new cases are diagnosed every three seconds around the globe.

Here in America, in North America, roughly one in nine of all people older than age 65 have begun to manifest some form of dementia.

And for those over 80, the proportion is about a third.

But 70% of these people living with dementia are living at home, and thus the community is very pertinent to public librarians as well as anyone working in outreach services, medical libraries, a variety of different ways for us to be touched by this epidemic.

You also should know that the umbrella term "dementia" encompasses a wide spectrum of symptoms.

It often occurs in stages from what is known as mild cognitive impairment, which could be another 5 to 7 million Americans, up to mild, moderate, and severe dementia.

But it's highly individual in how it presents in any given person.

Medical science has determined a number of genetic markers and lifestyle factors associated with dementia.

But we have no effective pharmacological treatment.

The common prescriptions alleviate early stage symptoms for some people, delaying the progress, but not able to reverse or cure the syndrome.

I also mentioned social isolation.

Social isolation is something that we as a society became more aware of during the Covid pandemic, and it's very pertinent here.

The Surgeon General determined that at large, the effects of social isolation on our health is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

If you add that on to normal aging of our brain, social isolation is another large issue for us to think about.

Silent epidemic is a phrase that has also been used to describe Alzheimer's and related dementias among African Americans and Latinx people.

So service to persons living with dementia is also for us an issue of social justice.

Co-existing medical conditions such as hypertension and diabetes, which can be risk factors for dementia, are more prevalent in many minority communities.

And we're starting to understand that even the basic genetic risk factors may be more prevalent among people of color.

Diagnosis may come later in the disease progress, which of course leads to greater difficulty in disease planning and management.

There are a number of serious issues that make it even more crucial as we think about minority populations in our service area.

We also have to think about the caregivers, since so many, 70% of persons living with dementia in this country at least are still living at home.

That means we have to think about those who are living with dementia secondhand, another 11 to 12 million people in the United States who give unpaid dementia care to family and loved ones.

The average is up to 31 hours per week in unpaid care.

And caregiving also exists along a spectrum from emotional support and assistance in the many, many activities of daily life, such as transportation and paying bills, to a more complete set of daily activities leading up to bathing, dressing, even eating.

Studies have shown that between 46 and 59%, depending on which study you listen to, of all family dementia caregivers suffer themselves from signs of clinical depression or worse.

So what should we all be doing?

You're taking a great start here by coming and trying to learn some more and talking as a community.

You may hear me say it again, I don't have the answers here, but together I do believe we all have the answers.

Since every person living with dementia is still a person, we have to do everything we can to reduce the stigma of cognitive decline and seek the gold standard of person-centered care to respect their value and individually.

And since so many of them are still living at home, we need to think about what we have to offer them.

And that's bringing us to the good news.

As early as 2018, the world Alzheimer's report said, and I quote, we may not yet be able to cure dementia, I'll interject we can't cure dementia, but, they say, we may be able to stop people from getting it in the first place or at least it looks like we can delay the onset.

There are a lot of things we can do to delay the onset of dementia for even up to many years, which increases quality of life for each of these individuals.

Basically there are aspects of everyone's risk for cognitive decline.

Age, gender, genetics, that we can't change.

But a number of factors can be modified for most people.

And these nonpharmacological interventions are modifiable risk factors.

And together, these modifiable risk factors could account for up to 40% of all causes of dementia worldwide.

So we can think about healthy lifestyle choices and how to foster those.

Better diet, regular cardiovascular exercise, good sleep hygiene -- note to self --

and anything that is good for the heart and the emotional health is also good for the brain.

And then we get into more library-centric kind of stuff.

Mental stimulation.

Mental stimulation FOFRTS fosters neuroplasticity which stimulates brain growth through active participation in any of the things you see there, brain training, puzzles, reading, creative engagement, learning new languages or musical instruments, anything we do throughout our life to learn new things or to engage our brains helps to strengthen our brains.

And then if social isolation is a threat, social stimulation, which we also offer by coming to the library and participating in any of our programs, is a great benefit as a defense against cognitive decline.

So to answer the question what can we offer, recent medical research shows that a cognitively active lifestyle in old age, reading, visiting libraries, writing, playing games, that's part of the quote there, leads to possibly a five-year delay in the onset of dementia.

And you and I as librarians are already to go with these nonpharmacological interventions.

And in the word of my friend and colleague Mary Beth Ridener, means we can be a part of the essential care team.

That's why you're listening.

And for the rest of the time today we'll learn positive communication techniques, reference resources, and again, at the end, the programs that we can offer, dementia-friendly adult programs that you can use to help your patients living with dementia to live well.

As I move into the next section, thinking about communication, I'm wondering if there's anything immediate that I should be answering, Jennifer, or -- 

oh, go ahead.

 >> JENNIFER: Yeah, the one thing I would just touch on, there's actually a couple, one in regard to caregiver burdens, are there recommendations for programs that offer emotional social support and tips for caregivers.

And I know that a lot of it is sort of whole family, you know, both caregiver and dementia client.

But can you just talk a little bit about how there might, if there are ways to sort of specifically address those caregiver needs.

>> TIMOTHY DICKEY: Sure.

You went exactly where I was going to go.

>> JENNIFER: Oh, good, yay!

>> TIMOTHY DICKEY: It is a whole family issue.

We will get, in a little bit, some of the resources we have to offer are going to be resources about dementia.

And there are books that we can have on our shelves to give caregivers better information about what they will be facing and what their care partner will be facing.

Also with the programming.

We'll start with memory cafes in that last segment.

That is something where the person living with dementia and the caregiver both come and so both get a little bit of a respite and a little bit of a break and get to make connections with others in their situation.

So we are definitely going to get to that.

>> JENNIFER: That's great.

I encourage people, I'm so glad seeing people sharing what they're doing.

Somebody mentioned they're starting a program called connect and care for caregivers and people experiencing dementia.

That's the kind of thing we will share in chat for sure.

Some people are asking for recommendations in hard-to-reach demographics, people who can't get to the library, we'll look for that as well.

>> TIMOTHY DICKEY: Sure.

That's going to be a perennial question for any of our programs, especially if there's anything like this.  I will briefly say that partnerships with your community organizations and anything you can do word of mouth.

My own memory cafe, I am taking flyers that I'm going to be putting up in coffee shops and I will be looking for some doctors' offices, anything like that to get a care partner or someone interested who will say, oh, perhaps this will be something to look into.

>> JENNIFER: Excellent.

Let's continue on.

Keep your questions coming.

Keep sharing.

And we'll check in.

>> TIMOTHY DICKEY: Absolutely.

So I'm going to talk now a little bit about communication and customer service.

We already champion good customer service in everything we do.

So this should be material that isn't a surprise.

We want to be doing good customer service.

We just have to think a little more targeted in how we shape that towards persons living with dementia who may be coming in to your library.

Here are some things you may look out for.

There are some warning signs for Alzheimer's and related dementias.

These have been publicized widely by the Alzheimer's Association of the United States.

When you think about these, think of them as warning signs.

This is not a diagnostic tool, but they're warning signs especially if there's something more severe than normal age-related changes, because allel of our brains age.

The first one, memory loss is the one we probably are all most familiar with.

But we're talking about memory loss that disrupts daily life.

I've never been good with names.

And as I've aged, I've noticed that I've gotten, frankly, even a little worse with names.

But it's not, I believe, a dementia warning sign, because I will still eventually really later.

But if the memory loss is getting to someone who is completely forgetting names or events or is losing track of what day and year and season it is, and the apparent inability to lodge new information in the brain, that might be more of a warning sign.

Similar other things, spatio-visual difficulty.

This is something that can be normal aging.

It can be due to other things in your eyes or in your inner ear.

But if those are ruled out, in addition to having other warning signs, these may be enough to start thinking about whether we have to consider cognitive decline.

And the medical literature also agrees that the cognitive changes that manifest in some of these warning signs also come into some common communication patterns that are associated with dementia.

Any of these may or may not, because it's individual, but any of these may characterize your face-to-face interactions with someone living with dementia, even in the early stages, as part of the most immediate and superficial changes in one's linguistic and basic processing capacity.

Difficulty finding the right words is the first and most common challenge.

They might be looking for synonyms or just having difficulty remembering the proper word for what they have, so they will describe, oh, it's that thing that you ride with the two wheels.

You mean a bicycle?

Yes.

They might repeat familiar words repeatedly, lose a train of thought.

These are all somewhat related.

But they are some of the conversational patterns that you may experience with persons as their brain is aging, and perhaps as they are starting to live with cognitive decline.

Whether you see these as challenges, it might be more in line with our ethics and the respect for the human beings, the person who is in front of us, interpret these as a difference in conversational pattern.

And be aware and think about how we can be prepared to communicate differently and provide excellent customer service.

This list is based on one that was promulgated by IFLA, in a guide almost 20 years ago, as a basic framework.

And this is what I like to share as a set of best practices for communicating and performing customer service with persons with dementia.

You may notice that these are things that we should be doing anyway, as we are on the desk, whatever kind of library, however large or small it is.

We should make eye contact.

We should speak clearly and slowly.

We should pay attention to body language.

All of these are part of our daily repertoire.

But they also are more important for effective and positive work with persons living with dementia.

Many of these directly respond to the basic challenges from cognitive decline in short term memory, in situational focus, and in vocabulary.

So you can use simple language, and you can repeat.

And you can repeat the question if you want to.

And you can leave them time to answer.

And it's even more helpful if you use a yes-or-no question.

Everyday topics are easier for someone living with dementia to have familiar words to talk about it.

And it brings them back into the immediate context.

Other things you can think about doing, which are probably part of your customer service training already, are remaining calm yourself, limiting distractions, maybe walking away from the desk, walking to someplace where it's little quieter.

These are all absolutely appropriate for communication in this kind of situation in addition, there can be larger situation that occur to cognitive decline.

I'm not going to linger on these, but I give you this list just for your awareness.

If you see any of this happening, do take it seriously.

Wandering.

If they have lost situational awareness and are not sure where they are, that's a serious risk in your library.

But you can remain calm, you can take it seriously, you can help bring them back, limit the distractions.

Oh, can I help you?

Here, let's sit down and talk about it.

Sundowning is probably the only term on this list that you may not have been aware of.

For some reason, due to our Circadian rhythms, the effects of cognitive decline tend to intensify in some individuals, since they're all individual.

It might get worse later in the afternoon or in the evening.

If you're having older patrons in your library after dinner, you mighty more and might have to be more careful in how you are dealing with them.

It almost goes without saying, but regardless of your library's size or your location, you may want more training than just what WebJunction has to offer here.

And as we seek person-centered care for this community, and I see in the chat, yes, all these links are available on the event page, and they will be in the ends of the slides as well, there are nonprofit partner organizations that are ready to go to help us, to help partner with us with resources, training, and advocacy.

The Alzheimer's Association of the United States offers brochures, handouts, they will partner, they will come in and table, they will provide informational programming for us.  Dementia friends is associated with the British Alzheimer's Society that offers in-person video awareness training to both individuals and groups.

Dementia friendly America exists to prepare various organizations, all different secretaries in the community, to be dementia-friendly.

They are involved in many states across the country.

And they have a toolkit for libraries with suggestions, further suggestion for programming customer service, collection management, and the like.

Next section, we're going to move into some library reference services.

But I'll take a moment to see if there's anything crucial that has slipped by me that I should address.

>> JENNIFER: Yes, even more conversation.

There's definitely an interest in how folks are either dealing with patrons who are there alone without caregivers having challenges.

Some folks have had to -- like somebody, two different people came in looking for their cars and they were parked elsewhere in town.

They engaged with 911 for assistance.

But it does really make me wonder if there are policies popping up in libraries to know, I mean, things like how do you deal with confidentiality issues when the patron with dementia has issues with their account, lost items, caregiver calls.

So we're very curious about what you've seen libraries doing to address that.

>> TIMOTHY DICKEY: And I have to confess at the outset that I don't have a good answer for that.

I haven't seen best practices.

I suspect that it's something that is happening library by library.

At a presentation for PLA this spring, someone asked that very question.

And former deputy director of the Akron, Ohio library, who was on the stage, they had a policy, but they also happen to be a very, very dementia-friendly advanced library system.

The entire community of Akron is certified dementia-friendly.

>> JENNIFER: Wow.

>> TIMOTHY DICKEY: Their library has memory cafes in a lot of branches.

I think it is probably something we should as a community develop.

But we haven't really gotten there.

And for the moment, we may have to deal with it under the rubric of other policies that we have for health emergencies or customer code of conduct, these kind of things.

>> JENNIFER: That's great.

I think that's helpful.

A lot of the other things are touching more around programming.

So I think we can continue with this, and as you move into the programming, we'll answer some of these other questions.

>> TIMOTHY DICKEY: Perfect, thank you.

>> JENNIFER: Thank you.

>> TIMOTHY DICKEY: Just a little section here on the reference and information services that we can provide to meet the needs of the dementia community.

Here is someplace where we will start to answer the question of the care partner, because a little more of this, maybe 60/40, is going to be materials for the care partner, though we have more than I think you suspect to offer the persons living with dementia as well.

We have a lot of things that we're offering to older adults as information services already.

And all of those are immediately pertinent to older adults living with dementia.

The distinct categories that we may think about most often are medical information, financial information, legal information, and the emotional side.

And in each of these cases, as with customer service, we're doing some of this service very well already as librarians.

And it's just a question of now thinking how to tailor this best towards the specific needs of the community.

Health information has long been understood as the largest information need among older adults, cancer information need is a huge subject in our literature.

But this is pertinent, and we're already, again, I think a little more prepared than you suspect to meet information needs on the medical side for people living with cognitive decline.

Those in the early stages and their caregivers may be anxious, and seeking more information about what is coming.

And so meeting information needs in this area, we're already well-served by a number of consumer health resources.

Even free ones such as PubMed, MedLine Plus, the Mayo Clinic, plus your pay databases.

We have tools for individual health literacy which can be applied to this community.

And there are some more specialized information resources on dementia.

There are print and online reference resources for some of the ones printed by the Mayo Clinic or other Alzheimer's research centers or The Alzheimer's Association which try to translate some of the medical jargon and distill it towards a consumer health audience which will satisfy both the care partners and the persons living with dementia who are looking for more information here.

You'll see one of the resources that I have on the slides at the end, I've created a number of bibliographies in the catalogue of the Columbus Metropolitan Library System and I'll have lynx to some of those to give you some of the best reliable resources that I can think of in print.

But we also want to make sure that we're looking for things that will do support and reassurance, and in all of these, to do so with respect for the person living with dementia.

The second most important information need for older adults in general is financial information.

So for this community, the two specific and immediate information needs are possibly likely going to be, number one, managing the monthly finances, because some of those activities of daily living might start to slip with memory loss, and planning for future care.

In the case of the first need, once again, we're in familiar territory.

We probably have resources already on our shelves about personal finances, budgets, consumer literacy, fraud prevention, big topic for older adults.

The difficulty that we have to keep in mind here is the potential that persons living with dementia might not know that some of the bill-paying is going by the -- is falling off.

The other common information need for this community, as I mentioned, is researching care options as the condition progresses.

Part of the reason for the high number of those living at home is the high cost of residential care.

And so here too, we should act as good customer service reference librarians and get them the best information in that regard as we are doing already for our other customers.

Similarly, we can offer some guidance and information to meet their needs in areas of law and ethics.

We have basic resources for legal information probably already at our fingertips.

One thing you may want to think about here is, look up and see what certified elder law attorneys there are in your area.

Certified elder law attorney is one that is specifically qualified to assist clients with legal issues related to aging, and that includes questions of those aging with dementia and preparing the family and the finances for a move to residential care or different kinds of care options.

We may want to think about end of life care directives.

And you may in fact find some patrons, depending on where you are, who come in with questions about organ donation, grief support, and even physician-assisted suicide comes up in this community.

So those are some of the specific areas of legal and ethical information that we may want to think about.

And that leads us to the basic emotional challenges which will be faced by both the persons living with dementia and their caregivers.

And those emotional needs are huge for all concerned.

A diagnosis of dementia is going to be a life-changing event for the family.

And all of the changes in the life are going to look for some management and some support.

So here's where we have to put on our best compassionate hat and listen to the needs and see what we have in what I hope we can maintain, all of us, even a smaller collection, see what kind of active collections you can have with information about dementia, if you can get memoirs, there are first-person memoirs even by some people, someone with a Ph.D. for instance, who had additional cognitive reserves and was able to understand and think about what was happening and write a book about it.

There's a journalist who considered himself an embedded reporter inside a life with dementia.

There's a psychologist who co-wrote a book with his father, a psychologist who is experiencing dementia.

Some of these you can add to your regular collection development and have some good materials to support the emotional side of that family and all that they are facing.

And before I leave, I want to bust a bubble here, which is that the medical evidence shows that even as we age, even if we age and progress into some kind of cognitive decline, some capacity for reading tends to remain in many cases.

Everyone is individual, but in many cases, the decline in traditional cognition might mean that, okay, reading a linear narrative and figuring out the end of the Agatha Christie is no longer possible.

But it does not mean that a person living with dementia cannot read.

Quite on the contrary.

They can still read.

And it is good for them to read.

Active participation in learning new information and active engagement in reading or any creative activities, even hobby reading, or shared reading with a caregiver, all of these have been shown in different medical studies to boost cognitive reserves and be part of the nonpharmacological interventions that can delay or slow or in some cases prevent the onset of dementia.

With the shared reading, I will briefly note there are even companies out there, publishers out there, you can see them on the floor of the ALA or find their websites, who produce books, editions of the classics which have been streamlined or put in large print, or two-lap books, books you can read on two laps with your caregiver.

But you have things in your collection you can do if you want to if you want to stimulate, mentally and cognitively stimulate persons living with dementia.

There is a place for repurposing even some maybe of your picture book and YA collections.

I will say, do this carefully.

Do this thoughtfully.

Do this respectfully.

If you go to an older adult and you're reading them why do dinosaurs love tacos, they know that that's a picture book.

But if you go say into your juvenile nonfiction and look for books with some text but lots of white space and lots of good colorful pictures, and you select something that's in an area where the person's interest had been, golf, puppies, classic cars, or the puppies book that's in your art collection, you can use this for reading therapy and you can stimulate conversations and spur conversations about memories.

You can do that with history.

You can do this with local history.

You can do this with biographies of famous people.

You can do joke books.

You can do poetry.

You can do fairy tales.

You've got lots in your collection already that you can use.

You've got music and videos and other media, which is bringing us to our section on programming.

I will also say that there's another webinar in the WebJunction catalogue by Mary Beth Reidner and Tammy Hurst which gets directly into collection and reading materials for older adults.

But I will take another pause and see if there's anything before we finally get to answer your questions about memory cafes.

>> JENNIFER: Fantastic.

Yes, I saw Mary Beth here, yay, thank you so much for that shoutout.

I did put that webinar in chat.

I think before we move into programming, just one question around or actually two, sorry.

One is around becoming a certified dementia-friendly system.

Is that something that happens in different ways, or -- 

>> TIMOTHY DICKEY: I would say that that's something you would look at as a -- yeah, it would have to be something that you would take on.

I actually don't know how she got that certificate, now that I've flustered around for a few words.

It is something that is probably different by state.

And it is something that will have to do with a holistic approach to your staff training, your physical facilities, your signage, your collection, your programming, all this.

And usually it's something -- I think I meant in Akron itself, the whole community, many sectors, the banking sector, the housing sector, public safety, the libraries, all of these went through dementia-friendly America and looked for ways that they could improve as a complete community and built together for the dementia-friendliness.

I see someone, yep, putting in the Ohio libraries guide.

>> JENNIFER: Someone shared that, yes.

>> TIMOTHY DICKEY: I'm not going to say anything more about that because I see the links I would have been helping for.

>> JENNIFER: And recommendations for helping people with late stage dementia or Alzheimer's.

I can speak as a person who has actually had multiple family members, but one, my dad, was super, super challenging in his late stage, and the needs at that point, there were people caring for him, the family was no longer able to care for him, so then I would say your family members are really important to stay connected with and follow up, because they are definitely going to need support, additional support.

So any thoughts on that, though, Timothy, in terms of how to address late stage issues?

>> TIMOTHY DICKEY: Absolutely.

That's something that as library professionals, presumably we're not going to have too many coming into the library.

That's more of where I would be looking, yes, to support the family members, all of the care partners.

You want to make sure they have good social and medical care.

Whether they're in a facility or not.

It's more for the professionals.

But that being said, there's an example in the coming slides that I think will surprise you there as well.

>> JENNIFER: Excellent.

And in addition to sort of that question we have around policies or practices that we could be proactive around situations, but also someone just, again, you know, what do we do with people who we suspect of having dementia but there are no caregivers, perhaps they're experiencing homelessness, for instance.

Timothy emphasized that connection with community partners.

So there could be other agencies or organizations in the community that are interacting with that person, so then connecting to maybe make some decisions together about consistency across those organizations.

>> TIMOTHY DICKEY: Exactly where I would have gone.

Thank you.

I've seen a lot flying by on my sidebar, on programming.

And I am eager to dive in here just a little bit.

This is the exciting part of our potential, because so much of the nonpharmacological interventions of mental and social stimulation can be already a part of the programs that we have, and just as in the prior sections of this presentation, what we're doing already, we have to think about how to tailor them best towards the needs of persons living with dementia.

Memory cafes are one of the easiest places for you to start, whether -- even if you're a smaller library.

And this is a light programming option which involves both social and mental stimulation.

And together it's been part of the dementia programming in the wider global community since 1997.

It's a very easy program you can add.

Basically you're creating a monthly social gathering with both persons living with dementia and a care partner.

And you do put in most cases a specific theme with each event.

But it's geared more towards the time that you spend together, instead of doing a presentation where you get an outside speaker in to stand on the podium and tell them something and then take questions, you get something where you have someone who is facilitating experience.

You might start off, as my own memory cafe started, with actually a coffee tasting.

I brought someone from the local community in who donated some coffee and we all drank a little coffee and tasted some pastries and we did some coffee trivia and we talked about how we like to drink coffee and our memories of the first time we did.

And boom, that was all the time.

And there's conversation, and there's memories, and there's discussion, and there's a little bit of activity.

And that's in a way all you need.

It can be more or less structured.

Usually it's an hour or an hour and a half.

And there are plenty of library partners who can help you with some ideas, with some planning, with some checklists.

There's a very good percolator community in the Boston libraries.

And I've got the library memory project in Wisconsin here, which is a collaboration among several libraries in Wisconsin.

And all of these partnerships, again, you don't have to invent the programming.

You can learn from our colleagues, and we can all talk and get some of these together.

And it's an easy thing.

You can do it with a budget.

You can do it with very little budget.

And it's a great way to start.

It's something that we're doing already in our adult programming.

But you can tailor some of that specifically to the needs of the community.

Tales and travel, since we mentioned Mary Beth Reidner in the audience already, this is another well-established program which offers, as the focus of the programming for each event, virtual travel to different areas around the globe, with stories and music and folk tales and maps, images, maybe recipes.

And conversations and reminiscences around the travel.

It's an award-winning programming.

And the materials are available to you under creative commons license on the website.

That suitcase logo you can download and put your library's logo inside of it.

And you can get some ideas about which expeditions you would like to try, what might be some good folk tales to read aloud, what might be some common books you might have in your collection that you can bring, or you can bring a globe and talk about the location there.

Since the pandemic, a lot of the tales and travels expeditions have also been translated into video tours, which you can share as part of your programming.

Another easy thing for you to start thinking about if you want to add a program without having to spend a lot of time or a lot of money from your library budget.

We can also move beyond books, in a different, nontextual formatformat.

Because since Alzheimer's and other dementias affect speech and use of language, all kinds of arts programming can have sometimes an even more transformative therapeutic effect on older adults.

And this is any kind of creative engagement, whether that is storytelling, whether that is dance, whether that is poetry, whether that is drama.

There's medical evidence that shows that artistic participation increases resilience and can even counter depression and behavioral issues and can foster some of the neuroplasticity that we've spoken to.

Just a few examples on the coming slides of where you can look for ideas and materials to start you off.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York City has a program called Meet Me.

They use visual elements to spark conversation.

It's led by dementia-trained docents.

Instead of being informational, we'll take you through the 16th century and go to the 17th century, they'll go to, say, three or four large canvases only and they'll be all gardens.

And we can talk about gardening and remember the gardens that we had and the great moments we had with our families in the gardens.

The tour is not educational but it is sparking social conversations and memories and that kind of stimulation.

Music has similar and sometimes even more powerful therapeutic effects.

Our musical memories have a lot of different workarounds in the neurons in our brain.

And the musical memories might live even longer than other kinds of memories.

So if you want to try a sing-along program with older music or concerts can be good, those are ways of engaging in music.

There's a program called Music and Memory.

This image is from a video on YouTube which shows someone in the late stage, this was the example that I was thinking about, at the start of the video, I'm sorry to say, he's very quiet and really not present, he doesn't recognize his daughter.

And the Music and Memory person comes in, and they've put together -- they've taken a donated phone or an iPad, added in a personal playlist of music from this individual's memories, and he starts listening to it, and his eyes open up and he is talking and he is singing, and even once the music has stopped, he is carrying on a conversation about Cab Calloway.

And so music stimulation, music programs, are another place that we can go.

Music and Memory will certify librarians to apply this kind of program.

Poetry, a man named Gary Glazner does a project with poetry.

Some of it is reciting antiphonal classic poetry.

Some of it is getting into poetry from older memories.

Some of it is creating new poems like the ones on the screen.

This is another kind of arts engagement that can get us into some of the therapeutic effects that we would like to see in our programming.

I should have said at the outset, you can make an entire hour webinar easily on the different kinds of programming.

I'm sure you've got ones that I haven't seen pass by in the chat.

But there are other even categories of programming that we can think about.

Games and technology.

We can do puzzles on iPads.

I've seen librarians go into a facility or go see people who are aging in place with mental stimulation from puzzles or a do this in-branch programming.

Assistive technology can add multimedia to some of our programming.

This is an application of digital storytelling, for instance.

We have even got some studies that are looking at how virtual reality and mixed reality can be used for older adults, if it's not too much for them physically to put on a headset and take a virtual tour to the Louvre or the Grand Canyon.

If you have a homework help center or a job help center, you can have a memory connection center.

You can put up a kiosk with some of the things you have in your connection that you're able to repurpose.

And you can advertise from some of your community partners, your local Alzheimer's Association or your local chapter of Dementia Friends, any information from medical providers.

You can put that in one place to get the information out.

There are therapeutic effects from meditation and yoga.

And so that can be something you could steer towards older adults in cognitive declines.

You can bring in therapy dogs.

They're wonderfully interactive on a nonverbal level and can spark memories as well as conversations and a different experience of the day.

And I see something about memory kits.

I probably in my zeal to get through the remaining slides neglected to mention these.

Yes, there are publishers who offer memory kits which have multimedia collections which you can check out to caregivers or use in your programming.

We're going to have a program about holidays.

I'm going to play some holiday music and there will be a book about holidays.

And we have some postcards of holiday decorations.

And we'll put party hats on, something like that.

There are so many different options.

The remaining slides, do I have some resources and some bibliographies.

As Jennifer said, all of these links are going to be on the WebJunction page for today's session.

And I want to thank you all for caring enough to listen and to do something in your library.

>> JENNIFER: Wow, fantastic.

Thank you so much, Timothy.

We just have a little tiny bit of time so I just want to sort of surface a few other things that came up.

Somebody was asking about funding, if there are either funders that do work in this area, someone mentioned that I think they had done -- or maybe you mentioned something, the community conversations with seniors.

They wondered if that was part of a grant program.

I know that lots of the organizations that you mentioned on that one slide do have different grant projects.

So can you just touch on that really quick?

>> TIMOTHY DICKEY: Yes.

The community partners is exactly where I would have gone.

And I think you have a couple in your catalogue about seeking funding through community partnerships.

It's a little bit of a separate managerial topic.

But that is -- yeah, that is more of where I would look, whether it's your community area, your triple A area agency on aging, or something connected to a foundation at a local health center, something like that.

We have a new Center for Caregiving Studies that I hope will be a good partner in this area.

 

>> JENNIFER: For sure, that's exciting.

How do you bring people in for the programs that have mild cognitive changes without putting them on the spot?

I want to mention I know Mary Beth in that session definitely talks about how to meet people where they're at and not -- you know, that's definitely an issue, sometimes they're super cautious about being embarrassed.

But there are definitely ways that work better in those group settings.

So definitely check out Mary Beth's webinar that we mentioned.

Timothy, any final last comments before we wrap up?

>> TIMOTHY DICKEY: No.

Again, I thank you all and I look forward to all of the great service we all can do for the needs of this population.

>> JENNIFER: Absolutely.

And thank you so much for sharing your contact information, if people have outstanding questions or something comes to mind that you want to get Timothy's opinion on.

I know that he would be eager to hear from you.

So thank you so much, Timothy.

Thank you all for attending.

Thanks to our captioner and our WJ Support.

I will send you all an email today once the recording is posted.

I'll also automatically send you a certificate for attending.

I'll send it after Labor Day.

And then also we have a short survey we would love to get your feedback on.

If you don't have time now as you leave, I'll send you directly to the survey, but it will also be in the email I send you.

So just remember to take some time.

We really appreciate your feedback.

We'll share it with Timothy.

It helps us guide our ongoing programming.

Thank you all so much.

Thank you, Timothy.

Have a great rest of your week.

>> TIMOTHY DICKEY: Peace.