>> JENNIFER:  We have a learner guide, it's a tool with some questions for consideration, some steps for action.

It can be customized so if you have specific steps or goals you'd like to share with your team, maybe you have volunteers, you can use this as a tool to take action and learn on your work.

So it's for you to use and to apply to your work.

I'm so excited to welcome today's presenters, and Engaging Beyond Our Walls, Benjamin Stokes, the Associate Professor of American University and the director of Playful City Lab and David Quick, adult services coordinator from the DC Public Library and I'm so excited to learn about Engaging Beyond Our Walls.

>> BENJAMIN:  It's great to be talking to hundreds of librarians across the country.

As you can see, we've worked with librarians in 50 plus cities and towns over the past three years doing these projects to build Engaging Beyond Our Walls and we're sharing that and hoping it gets spread even more broadly, so it's an important time to be talking with you.

I'm Ben Stokes and I teach at American University, a Playful City Lab and David, I'll let you introduce yourself a little more.

>> DAVID:  Thanks, and thanks to OCLC for joining us.

I'm David Quick, from the DC Public Library.

Do all kinds of things here in DC, but get to work on fun partnerships with this.

It's been fun to connect with Ben and his team, leveraging this tool for libraries across the country and I'm glad to be a part of this conversation, talk to you about we've done at DCPL and how we've worked with other libraries to make this tool a useful thing for libraries around the country.

>> BENJAMIN:  So as we start, we are going to talk about tools at the beginning and at the end.

But in many ways, what you'll discover is that these are not the usual tools.

They aren't necessarily the tools you would expect to be using and our hope is that we can actually open a new imagination for what we can do that's not about social media and using the high tech things available, but a storytelling that strengthens our communities and places, connects our neighbors and patrons to each other and the library.

To start, I want to acknowledge that new technology is coming out all the time and there is a lot of buzz including things like the Apple Vision Pro.

Let me see, our first slide, the Apple Vision Prohas come out, and it's incredibly expensive, and most can't afford it.

But it is a way we are augmenting reality, not just phones and stepping away from our desks and going down the walls, but what is the future of augmented reality?

I want to contrast it immediately with a broader notion of how we're augmenting reality and changing our cities.

Here's an image from New York City where the protected bike lanes are changing the experience of what it means to get to the library, to move through cities.

So our cities are changing as well.

And this is a project, Engaging Beyond Our Walls, where it's not just the internet, online, somewhere else, but technology is increasingly coming to our cities and our places.

They take many different forms, and libraries sometimes are innovators in this space.

Here, you can see the eBike program from the City of Concord Public Library and I love how eBikes are going beyond our walls and bringing books but connecting storytelling.

If there's one thing we have to do, it's stretch our imagination about what is technology.

This is technology.

This is part of storytelling.

It's something that libraries are already doing a great job at.

Storytelling is also taking a lot of different forms.

This is a short story dispenser that has been popping up in many different places -- France.

This one is actually in San Francisco in BART, and many of the stories are written by patrons, by residents, short stories and poems and a lot of them are popping up in library as well.

This is a paper version.

Paper is still an amazing form of mobile media.

There are a lot of technologies in public transit.

So think about the TAP systems for getting on and off buses which a lot of cities are using and experimenting.

A lot of them will use your cell phone to make a payment, but this will lend to storytelling you're seeing, so there's all kinds of technology.

Every time that I see a new technology, I want everyone to step back and say, what is a low tech?

This is a low tech, a storytelling project, the artist, Amanda Barrows is doing with nightstands placed in parks.

So sometimes we can augment reality not just by fancy headsets but encouraging people to leave a story, a poem, to be a part of our space and it's wider than we think of occupying.

For this, our project started in some ways with the conversation, at least, around Pokémon GO, which the craze, everyone was talking about.

It still is an incredibly popular system and still earning massive amounts of money for thethe franchise.

But this library was building poke crawls, nonplayers or people who were -- didn't have the technology with them to use the paper version and still engage a little with the content and storytelling.

So multiple forms of technology, multiple forms of access, something we saw even with a big landmark franchise property like Pokémon GO, we saw people doing interesting things locally.

What we realized was that libraries didn't have a lot of control what was in Pokémon GO.

The stories, who was included, excluded, were marginalized voices able to be credited was controlled by the company beyond Pokémon GO so we got a grant, how libraries can be a part of that space, can we make our own in that many of our own people are making the videos, can we make our own playful experience.

Our tool is called hive Mechanic, this is the logo at the left and we've trained libraries in 50 plus towns and cities to use this tool.

Along the way, we've discovered that many of the features of our tools are available in free tools elsewhere.

So we'd love for this to be a divine space where people are thinking of engaging with and experimenting.

And David and the folks at the DC public library have been helping us think about this.

How do we stay in touch with what libraries really are.

This is a broad shout-out to the people, who helped do some of the training over the past three yearsyears, also built conceptually on a foundation, this is a book that I put out in 2020 called "Locally Played," documenting the impact on some of the communities, how games and play can make places stronger, can circulate local news, elevate voices that have been marginalized.

So this is a self-promotion moment, but this is a little bit of the research, am I allowed to do some of that research.

But this is a project about the making and how everyone can make things so that's what we're going to spend most of our time today.

What did they make?

What kinds of projects were created?

To start, I want to take you outside the library to Milton, Wisconsin, where we think about a sculpture that was out at the library of some birds and metal, a metal sculpture to start a story garden.

This is the beginning of a story that -- I saw it in person, and, an interesting sculpture and you can see these three birds in it.

And they wondered in Milton, could they give these birds a voice.

One of our models, we can text and use our physical environments, with sculptures, with murals, even buildings.

This is what they started to build.

They started a sign, zoom in, you can see, Caw!

See us birds?

You can text with us!

Caw!

Text the word, and QR Codes can populate phone numbers so you don't have to type out the full phone number, you can scan the QR Code and you're texting.

In terms of the storytelling, when you text in, you get this response.

Hello, look up!

We are the birds on the story garden arch.

Ezra, Avo, and Scout, furthest to the right.

Which one would you like to text with?

So you explore different aspects of the library.

Each bird had a slightly different personality, the content from one bird included some jokes that were written with local young people, so you can involve young people in the content, some of the content, all of the content.

Lots of different options here.

One of the birds was talking about the history of the library and the branch, and this is a busy spot outside the library, on a set of trails, a lot of hikers come by.

You see this spot, they can learn about the library as well as learn about the community.

They got so excited about some of the storytelling they were doing here, they even created these T-shirts of Ezra, Avo, and Scout, and this is mobile technology too, right?

T-shirts, things we wear around.

They can be a part of storytelling.

They can be a part of getting into, how can we connect what our libraries are doing to be hubs for the information of our community and what our communities are all about.

That leads us to our first design principle that we want to share today.

Which is that these are -- games and stories that should be low tech to play.

We're interested in this idea that the core foundation, it doesn't take a fancy phone to do this.

You can do this without a Smartphone.

You don't need an app.

You don't even have a data plan.

Some have a Smartphone but can't afford the data plan.

The ability to text is one of the most universal technologies we have and this is a system that can do that with text messaging as opposed to through the web.

And this resonates with a lot of libraries.

Bookmarks.

So this is a project that uses bookmarks, the summer reading programs, but on the back, art that talks?

Scan the QR Code and it brings the summer reading program into an experience.

It can also give voice and center a lot of different voices, including, as part of existing events, and this is a bike tour that the DC public library has been running annually, but we did something different.

David, do you want to talk about this project?

>> DAVID:  Sure.

This was a fun way to bring this all together at DCPL as we were in this advisory mode.

Every year at the library we do a community tour, a community bike ride, visit a few library branches as a way to connect people to library spaces and have a fun community bike ride together.

The year that we did this one was when our team was with Ben's team thinking about things we could do together.

Just the way to get people to know about the branch they're visiting seemed like a way to use this technology, but this was a moment when we were having a conversation here that was happening around the country about how you name buildings after people.

What's the just way to name a building that's paid for publicly after a person, a thought around naming something of a particular person.

We have, all these branches that are named after people in DC and I know a lot of people don't even know who they are, icons like Martin Luther King Jr., but our local DC people, we thought we could ask a staff member to build a tool in this platform where you could ride up to that branch and this was still during the COVID lockdown, so we did a group ride, but some people did this on their own so they weren't necessarily having a staff member there telling them about the building.

The Dorothy heights Bening library, learn more about who she was and it was fun.

And last thing on the right, the QR Code, the texts you can engage in to tell you more about these buildings are still available to us if we want to use them.

So it was fun in that way.

Also, a question that was -- one challenge that came up was that even with staff members who were pretty tech savvy, there was still a learning curve around it and needed to devote time to learning it.

So I think as we go forward today, Ben and I, I would put that out there because I know that public libraries struggle with that staff capacity so I would open that up as we learn more about this tool, how people feel it fits into their tech capacity.

Thank you, Ben.

>> BENJAMIN:  Absolutely.

Just to add a little bit of color on thinking about the experience people have, one, when a group would ride up to one of the libraries, it wasn't necessarily an individual experience where everyone was on their phone at the same time.

One person might scan the  QR Code and people gather over.

This is an experience to groups, different than how we mentally imagine them.

We want a lot of people using them -- actually group experiences are great because there's a conversation.

There were trivia questions, what do you think was the story, the origin behind this library.

So the group went off and discussed these questions.

I think the idea that our experience is not just pushing content.

We're not trying to fill people's heads, but we're trying to start conversations.

Whether it's in groups or among family members.

About history, about our places, and how they connect.

I think it's a really different approach to understanding how this experience can unfold.

There was also a question in the chat about QR Codes.

Are they old, also, out loud, QR Codes may seem old-fashioned, but their use is exploding.

There are so many ways to use QR Codes and I think they'll only become more connected in digital and physical ways and QR Codes is a way to become from the physical to the digital.

Anytime you want to have a website tied into a place, whether that's a story walk side, a permanent sign, QR Codes are still an incredibly powerful way of doing that.

And I think there is no clear alternative that is coming up.

It's an intriguing thing.

People said, I thought that's an old-fashioned thing.

People said the same thing about print because they're just going to read online.

I love reading print, by the way.

There's a lot of mixing old technology as we look to the new.

I want to turn us to another project also at DC public library, sought to amplify one voice in particular, and this is a project -- we jumped -- we'll jump ahead to -- there we go.

At the Women's History Museum put together with the DC Public Library and the exhibit was called, "we who Believe in Freedom," so it could be an art center or a church or synagogue might have a small exhibit and the idea, there was this voice for the community member, it had some really different insight to give her version of the tour of the experience and in this case it was an audio experience.

You call in with your phone, just like you might call a phone number like United Airlines or something, but she says, I'm going to walk you around this exhibit and give you my personal tour.

The interesting that's different from a lot of audio tours, there were choices.

Do you want to go left or right, hear more about this object or that, and press one or two and follow.

And as that happens, you could also receive text messages from pictures from the exhibit.

There was additional content that you didn't see in the exhibit that was sent to the phone because it had too much packed into the physical space, we could text people additional pictures and this was an approach that we think of as having a local expert or voice bring their voice on top of an existing exhibit.

David, anything you wanted to add about how this project has -- it's right there in your main branch.

That's where it's been, right?

>> DAVID:  Yeah, for a little while longer.

I'll say a couple of things.

This is the way that -- Ben's team and our documented originally for the Smithsonian so there was already this kind of multi-partner engagement that was going on and this exhibit that we're talking about was already here in the building that had been organized by a team that I'm not a part of, so there was this great exhibit in the building that, you know, both of our work here, thinking about how to do this and engage people and also help them, you know, enhance this -- the user experience of walking through that and so it was just great to this existed as an option to add to the experience of walking through this exhibit in a very inexpensive kind of low-tech way but still using technology.

So as Ben presents, think about what might be happening in libraries.

It's very cheap.

It's very accessible if your staff has time to learn it.

So that was one of the fun parts of putting all the pieces together to add mobile content and voices built by a top-notch museum.

>> BENJAMIN:  The mixing of fancier content on the exhibit with the audio, a little more human, I think is also one of the interesting opportunities to keep -- to develop an experience, the digital still feels personal.

This is Bellow Falls, Vermont, an historical re-enactment, took us back in time, and you'll see from the experience on the right.

Time is out of order and must be set right!

Due to recent events, I suddenly found myself awake and thinking in this mysterious void.

And help me remember who I am!

This is about putting together the past and an interesting part of that past was actually on your phone, getting a text message that might be a little bit of a clue, head over to this location in the town, and you see the town has an historic connection to the railway, was at one time the Northwest furthest stop on the East Coast and interesting history since then.

Part of the what the community did was historical re-enactment and set to take people to -- 

whether that's taking them to a web page on the phone and might take them away from texting or you can text people a video and then it's actually not being sent through the phone but being texted to them and that actually has a different implication for accessibility and daily use.

But the storytelling is neat here because it's the storytelling of the past and let people untangle a puzzle.

We saw so much creativity from libraries with projects, I think for me, that was one of the big takeaways.

It's not one template on how to make a web page.

There are so many ways to tell a good story, connecting with the community, with history.

And we have about ten main recipes that we've been calling them and we'll show you in a little bit.

I want to highlight a couple of others as we give you these ideas to tell you how different they are.

This was based on a book walk around the town.

The city Shapes, a great kids book, gave a little bit of premise, and a little -- around the town, also inviting people to take pictures and send them in.

So our system let people send in pictures by text message, not just receive content.

And people in this "I spy" adventure were invited to look at historical shapes, to open the eyes to the architecture of the community.

Someone saw the circle of the handicap accessible button and took a picture of that and sent it in.

And then they get back different content from the story that these librarians set up to tell with content.

So this project did involve posters, making posters, but the interesting thing in terms of scale, to David's point about how much work is involved, the project is highly extendible.

You can start with, here, go take three pictures.

Then we can start responding to pictures, then we can make posters, if you want to or if more volunteers join your project.

So the projects that grew started out small and modest, but they had so much excitement, they started adding more content and building as we go.

This business us to the second principle we wanted to identify.

We talked about how they have to be low-tech to make, but also --

further, there we go, back to my picture here.

They have to be low tech to play, but also a low investment to make.

We want the creations not to require a whole dedicated staff person, not necessarily to require a technologist, although one of the things we saw, some libraries, the ability to save images felt technical.

So what is technology?

Is that part of like a computer science type of technology or media making and how do we identify those basic skills?

We've started to tease some of that out in the model here.

Low investment to make, here's the Grand Ledge Area District area in Michigan, and they started out with this sculpture outside of the library.

My name is Webster.

Come take a Strom  -- stroll around town with me.

And I think that's a grounding principle to the approach.

Every library begins with the cultural assets, including sculptures, mural, local history, begins with these assets they have.

And often, it's how do we begin storytelling with this that leads to super engagement?

I tell storytelling, if I tell you ten facts, people can go to the website already.

We want to engage with new audiences.

And I think we saw so many projects that creativity, sometimes just looks like ghost stories.

So here's a library, the Umatilla Public Library in Florida, they had a physical caboose added to their library and they had ghost stories tied to that caboose.

They launched a project around Halloween and had a great table, come meet the ghost of the caboose, come scan this code and find out a little bit about the ghost.

Well, you can see in this diagram to the left is the stories they built.

It started super simple but they wanted to give them this picture.

And the complexity is not required.

The complexity is just if you're having fun and you want to keep telling more of the story, you can.

And I think that that's -- 

that's also a way in which this -- I think a lot of the best projects were different, than just building websites.

It wasn't that you developed an official PR version.

There was a playfulness, an iterative approach with this type of storytelling, which is how we've told stories face to face for a long time.

You tell it to a friend and maybe a few friends and then you get out and tell it in public.

So this is storytelling, in many ways, that happens with digital media.

This is a story about some tiles in front of the library.

These tiles are all each a little art pieces installed in San Leandro, California, and they thought it would be interested in the voice of Don Quixote, and in English and Spanish, so there's a bilingual approach.

We wanted to play a little bit of the voices of the makers so you could hear how they think about it and how they were learning in the process as well.

>> Just getting to even walk around outside and make this -- 

was really enjoyable, and I got to look at the tiles a lot harder than I'd ever looked at them before.

So [indiscernible] too.

>> BENJAMIN:  The school  -- 

tool that we use, if you want to give them a welcome to the sculpture, you can edit it here and it doesn't involve any editing or coding, more like filling out a form.

On -- this is a diagram of how every time you send a message, you represent the little circle, and you can think of this like Post-It Notes.

In fact, Post-It Notes you see in the background are a lot of how we encourage people to write their stories.

Post-It Notes are wonderful accessible, you can gather around and do that at work.

Sometimes they look into things -- I'm going to jump ahead a little bit to some projects about how people made them.

Sometimes they look digital, like these Post-its.

Sometimes they wrote them out on cards.

Sometimes they wrote them out on postcards by hand.

We say this on our postcard, we reply with this and the patron replies with, tell me more about this sculpture, tell me about the history, tell me about the library it's connected to.

So we are still doing a lot of the storytelling and writing with paper.

Paper is a great way to do these kind of projects.

I wanted to jump around a little bit in the slides to show you one that was chatting with a book mobile.

See, this one.

Where they had an interesting book mobile that they wanted to give some personality to and tell a story and here are all the Post-its they did, took a wonderful picture of the Post-its and draw a line, how they were going to get people from one post it to the next.

So a little storytelling, how can you tell a branching story, choose your adventure, ghost stories, some of the dialogue back and forth.

This is a great way to do some of that work and you can see how young people, people who are less technically skilled could still jump in and be a part of this writing process, a much broader process.

It also invites participation of all kinds of folks from the community.

Often a library becomes a hub for bringing in an historical society, the downtown, especially in smaller and rural communities, those might be easier connections to make.

Wanted to talk a little bit about Brookings.

Brookings in South Dakota it an historical texting tour and this is how they wanted to tell the story.

It took a while, because they were working with different city agencies that wanted to highlight different buildings, and I'll play a little clip about someone from that project.

>> We chose to do this project because we wanted to build a stronger relationship with our downtown Brookings organization and find ways to get the community involved in community history.

>> BENJAMIN:  So sometimes the motivation is not just playful storytelling but also -- the opportunity to tell a story could bring a chance to bring a partner in.

That could be a way to address the resource questions that David was talking about.

Sometimes the person doing most of the work was not actually a library but somebody from the government, a community organization, an historic society.

So the library doesn't have to do all the work.

The library can just kick things off and host the experience.

And I think that's a great model for balancing some of the effort that can go into a project like this.

So many creative possibilities.

And we wanted to give a preview of something that we are launching today, which is we call it the EBOW Recipe Book.

We're inspired by the idea that recipes are something that a lot of us have.

A lot of us do cooking.

That doesn't mean that we are world-class chefs.

But that doesn't -- in the same way we aren't all making Pokémon GO, but that doesn't mean we can't do something great, like chili, make something great your library could be proud of and this QR Code takes you straight to that recipe book, they look a little bit like this.

Up here is the ghost tour, just showing you the ghost and the caboose project from a minute ago and here's the recipe, what you need to do to start thinking about a ghost tour.

We're working on these.

We'd love your feedback if you're interested in how to improve our recipes and test it out and make it a different way, that's great.

We also published a bunch of these projects, so here's a list of the recipes.

We've published a bunch of what libraries have made and we're calling it a tasting menu.

So if you want to sample beyond what libraries have made beyond this presentation, you can go to our website and use this tasting menu of library projects.

A lot of these, just as a shout-out, are borrowing from the world of game design.

When I went to college you couldn't get a degree in game design.

That wasn't a thing.

But now there are over 400 degree programs in the United States with degrees in game design and we're recognizing that games are not just for digital spaces.

Games are as old as culture with board games and brogue -- 

growing up, a lot more people are using board games aren't but the Peabody Awards, around games.

So just to acknowledge some of the -- how we can borrow from the science of games.

Games in the sense have playful challenges, they have feedback loops where the player and they do something, they get some feedback from what they do, and there's a little bit of uncertainty.

You don't always know what's going to happen from one game to the next.

I would argue these principles are ways we can learn from games and how different they are from library websites, both in terms of the playfulness but giving people something that's deliberately hard.

Not saying it's as easy as possible, because a game that is easy is boring.

Our goal is not to give people games that are boring but mental challenges through the game system as well.

While we're doing that, we do it partly through feedback.

So when somebody makes a choice, like this part of the story, choose your own adventure book, you want to immediately affirm what they just told you.

And they approach a story, it's not always hard.

Sometimes it's just in the dialogue to acknowledge what they've done and there's a little uncertainty.

You don't know where they're going to go or what they're going to choose.

So that's more if you'd like on the website.

I wanted to give you that end of show our tool, hide the mechanic, there's others out there, Twilio studio, as you can see, if we get an incoming text message or incoming call, we can connect it to something else.

Here's how you can drag and connect to a box.

Oh, we're going to send a reply.

Ho, Ho, Ho, this is the North Pole, and these are systems, I wouldn't call them hugely accessible, not as easy as posting them to a blog with WordPress, but they do not allow you to learn program language.

In the middle.

Intermediate technology language for some of these systems.

And if you don't want to use a system like this, you can still make some of these kinds of experiences just with QR Codes that launch single video or audio.

You can imagine a story walk or on the backside of story walk that's on the lawn, there's a different audio clip that's part of a story, a hint, a clue, part of an adventure.

So there are very low technology ways of doing these things as well.

That's a quick overview.

We have the historical society if you want to go back and look at this afterwards on how we see this coming out of movements and libraries and games, but I think this might be a good time to pause, take a few questions.

We have some additional slides we can show, but to open it up for some of your questions as well.

>> Fantastic.

This is so exciting.

I just have to say as a library person, when we talk about information behavior and how people interact with stories and artifacts that this is just so -- such a different mode.

If you think about, you know, people come to the library, they get books.

It's sort of a one-way.

They're not necessarily coming back to tell us about the book.

Sometimes, maybe.

But I just think this is such an innovative way to look at how we all have these things we carry around how you're really connecting to the way that information behaves now in this day and age.

So wow.

So powerful.

I really appreciate it.

Yes, please post questions that you have.

I did see a question come through about, do these systems including higher mechanic cost money?

>> BENJAMIN:  Yes, hive Mechanic is software you have to put on the server.

So we've been running it for -- 

because of ILMS' funding for the past three years, but we are not in the business of operating servers exactly, so we are not installing it per se.

But if you have somebody who would like to install it, it is definitely free and available.

We are actively exploring alternative business model that we hope to launch and test out this fall where people could pay a fee to a software developer who would install it for you and give you access to it.

So that's -- we have our software developer who built it, actually based in Chicago and is starting a nonprofit to scale up some of these projects for others.

Ours is free and open source for software, but this would be an opportunity to pay if you wanted to have someone install it for you.

The Twilio Studio that I showed before is a tool that is part of using the texting services of Twilio, and Twilio is kind of like Amazon, almost, but for texting and phones.

So, for example, if you wanted to launch a new United Airlines hotline, it probably could be improved.

But you might pay Twilio for every text message you send and receive.

And the cost for those are typically a penny per text message.

So you could imagine, it's not free.

You might interact with somebody and they might essentially cost you 20 cents to engage with.

But you can reach hundreds or thousands of people on a budget that is probably less than web posting budgets.

So where I think -- $100, could you do a great test for a number of months or a year, a local -- 

someone might donate that cost to you.

It could be a small donation.

But texting does have a cost in -- similar to how web hosting has a cost.

Either you're paying by putting ads all over your site or you're paying the web host.

There are some other tools out there.

We've compiled a list of some of the free and low-cost views.

QR Codes are, by the way, cheap.

There are a number of tools out there that will generate them for free.

So you can generate QR Codes for free.

You can, of course, design posters and slides for free.

Printing still costs money.

So this is just a way of acknowledging that even paper is not free, right?

Paper costs something and there are lots of libraries working on very tight budgets, where doing poster budgets is nontrivial.

I like to flip that around.

This is something to raise the visibility of downtown, connect to your businesses, elevate history that a donor might also be excited about telling a story.

This can be a part of a large project with fundraising that some libraries are very interested in.

Some cities are interested in.

Some patrons might want to pay for on their own.

So there are some ways around some of the budget options, but this is very low cost compared to games, video games that you might be making for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars.

A lot of stuff we talked about today is more on the order of somewhere between free and a few hundred dollars for some of these projects.

If you wanted to host your own server and do something for your state, you want to do something for Illinois and 20 libraries do projects, it might be in the thousands.

So that can present some of the budget scale and this is on the incredibly affordable side as far as a lot of game projects go.

David, what are your thoughts?

You've been doing this budget and balancing side as well.

>> DAVID:  Sure, I think that's all right, what you said, Ben.

Somebody in the chat said, somebody who truly [indiscernible] coding and technology, I will say, I think that's sort of the intent on a lot of this, accessible.

There's still very much a learning curve, but anybody who is curious about this to know that there's a learning curve.

It's not about downloading an app.

It's something you have to learn how to use.

I raise the question of staff capacity.

I know here at DCPL, going to CLA -- that's making the most of a lean staff is where a lot of libraries are at, so you have to make choices about that.

The flip side of that, for people who are thinking about hopping into this, you probably have some staff who are worn out, burned out, doing a lot of work on the desk.

How do you keep those people from burning out?

This can be a nice project for people curious about local history, about technology, about coding, the library has so much to offer, but mostly, you need them on the desk.

If you can give them an hour or two a week to work on something like this, this can give them a boost and a new breath of fresh air, staying engaged with what you have to offer as a library.

So that's just another dimension of this in terms of thinking about managing your staff capacity.

So if you're curious about it, I really encourage you to learn more and I -- I'm not as deep into the project as I was at the beginning, so I'm always glad to get to come to these and see Ben's slides and what different libraries have done.

Those recipe cards are a great new way to make this even more accessible, take even more of the mystery and the learning curve outs of this work.

So there's a lot of tools you can use to get going with this platform.

>> BENJAMIN:  I've seen from looking at libraries with trains -- a lot of them are intimidated by the technology, but it was building the story.

The hard part is how you tell a story that people want to pay attention to.

You do have to get over this hump.

And that, I think, is similar to anything creative.

If you turn to something and say, I want you to draw a picture of this person, a lot of people are like, I can't draw anyone, right?

They will totally shut down.

And I think that I -- somebody says, well, just try it.

Do it this way.

Our recipes hopefully give you a way to try.

But there is some -- there is some need to just jump in and be willing to do something a little bit different.

I think that David's point about that person who might otherwise burn out is also a very interesting one.

What it hints at, could this be assigned?

I want you to go be creative.

If that's not the way that person thinks of themselves, that might be a hard lift.

But on the other hand, you might have somebody who wants to be creative or experiment with different ways of engagement or a patron, a partner, you don't have to do the heavy lifting yourself.

Find someone who wants to do that, who thinks that part is fun, and it unfolds from there.

The technology, I think we're talking middle-level technology.

If you have a hard time saving images or organizing folders on your computers -- and some people do -- maybe this is going to be a hard project.

You might find somebody else on your team or find someone who finds is not particularly difficult to do some of those basic media needs.

To text a picture, you do have to save that picture first to your own computer and then figure out how you would upload it, like you were posting to a blog.

But if you can figure out how to do a blog, like with -- with basic tools that are out there, WordPress, for example, incredibly popular, with so many libraries having WordPress sites, I think it's been in that same space.

And if people have technical difficulties, at least for the next couple of months, our lab is glad to lend you that support, if people want to reach out to us with quick ideas, we might be able to give you pointers or places to start or where to go.

We're still interested in that, understanding how our recipes might be picked up and how people are working through things.

And in fact, on Twilio Studio we're going to add a guide next week.

So look for more to come.

>> That's great.

I love that you mentioned joining with people in the community.

Someone mentioned use it to connect with high school students.

Maybe the tiny libraries, maybe there's one staff member but a super engaged team group.

Those are the folks that I would say, bring this brainstorming idea to or like you said, even patrons.

There could be somebody in your community who has an interest in this area using this as an opportunity to leverage their expertise is a great way to connect with the community.

So I love that people are sharing ideas.

Somebody mentioned folks that --

that folks could tap into open writer groups, open mic night, English teachers for writing support.

Somebody said they're excited to implement it to help people use their brain garden and learn more about what it does and how to interact.

So thinking about the different things you already have going on, as David said, it might be connecting this work to some of your existing efforts as well.

And again, making that a part of, you know, a community-wide piece.

I love your example from the one library in North Dakota, using it to make those connections, you know, to be able to say the library is there to help, you know, take these kinds of steps with technology.

I thought there was a great question around sort of gauging, how do you ride the line of what is too easy versus what is too hard?

Do you rely on feedback?

And this, especially when you're talking about working intergenerationally, if you're doing something for a storyboard and the parent is engaging with the child, how different is that than working with adults only?

Can you talk a little bit about how libraries have sort of ridden that line?

>> BENJAMIN:  Yeah, it's a great question.

And to me, it's one of the reasons that you want to use an approach that feels a little bit more like kayaking where you're navigating the challenges as you go rather than planning everything in advance and launching it.

And I think that some of us have done -- built websites that way, for example, for libraries or other instances where there's lots of discussion and writing and suddenly it launches.

It's hard to do that with interactive modes, especially if you want to read different audiences.

There's so much to learn how they interact with it.

The approach we've taken is to recommend people prototype as small a version as possible.

The first line of a story.

The opening line.

The first joke.

And immediately, take it up, try it at the farmer's market, try it out on a sunny day, try it with a friend.

You can almost try it with absolutely no technology.

So focus -- a friend and say, what if you were texting with this sculpture and you have it texted to you and what if you got this and send them the picture.

So almost like role-playing and in game design they talk about theatrical role-play design where you go back and forth and figure the interactivity, how the conversation might unfold.

That helps you to try out different audiences.

Does that work for kids?

Does that work for parents?

What we've seen, by the way, for kids, kids are tricky to text with.

What does it mean for a kid to have a cell phone?

How do you get permission?

It's been a lot easier for us to think through what it means for the parent to be the lead one involved in bringing their family along with it.

That seems like the space where we have felt more comfortable aiming, even though some teens and younger will get texting services and engage.

We've just often said, well, this is a space that it's outside the library and we can't fully control.

Let's focus on adults as one of our main out  audiences.

Young people love writing, love content, love making this stuff and some of the comment of Pokémon GO, a younger range wanted to write content for pokePokémon GO rather than play it.

That's too old, that's too hard -- kids had a lot of reasons they didn't want to play Pokémon GO, and this was a study done in Boston, almost all of the kids in this neighborhood wanted to write content to change about what was said about their neighborhood, the monuments and what was said about them.

So it's a broad, accessible idea that you can create this content and publish it as well.

There is also a question about the third principle, strong places.

So explain, the idea there, strong places can tell their own story.

It's a strong place, where did we come from, who are we, the sense of community and identity, begins at the very least, can you even name the place you're in and some are in an ambiguous neighborhood, there's this whole effort of place-making.

I know WebJunction has covered in other projects, a really interesting movement where libraries are a part of placemaking efforts and I think we're in some ways drawing on that tradition to say some of these sculptures and public art are strengthening our attachment to place, and a sense of who we are in that place.

So that's what we have met by stronger places.

>> That's great.

I just can't tell you how much it really does kind of open up that whole, you know, like I said, it's just how people are interacting with information.

You're touching on your comment around them being more interested in the writing.

I really feel like libraries need to think about our community at content creators and how do we support them as content creators, so having them interact with the library story and the community story, what a great way to really, again, you are making stronger places.

That definitely feels like stronger places element for sure.

Yeah.

The other question -- or comment I thought was helpful -- and I'm curious if you've heard this from any of the libraries you've worked with.

I know there are libraries using chat bots or even using chat and, you know, messaging services for other parts of their offerings.

Have you seen if there's sort of any interaction with those existing tools that libraries have around this kind of engagement?

>> BENJAMIN:  That's a great question, and where I've had conversations with libraries around this, there's a sense that storytelling in the woven in with your main information service makes people a little nervous.

If we're answering straightforward questions, then if we start getting into storytelling, is that the same, is that the same space?

Is it the same person who is doing the book, the children's book reading who is also answering information questions about where to get a job?

We want to keep the key information-seeking stuff a little bit separate.

But I don't think that technically -- you could totally do that.

So you may want a different installation and have it be a different place on your website and say, we're in storytelling mode here.

If you're not in storytelling mode, libraries built things without thinking about the storytelling, they are thinking about how they would for the web design.

Here are three facts about this mural.

And it wasn't playful or fun or engaging.

So you have to step away from, I'm going to give neutral, third-party facts and often have a host, a personality, as you're engaging with people.

So I would love to see projects.

If anyone has seen a project like that, please send it.

We would love to highlight your work as well.

So let us know if you've heard of projects doing these kind of things.

Technically, it's a great fit, how to position playful storytelling along more information.

>> That's great.

Yeah.

I love the iterative nature of this continues, for sure.

So really wonderful.

Well, thank you so much, both of you.

It's been really exciting to see this unpacked a little bit more and obviously lots of information for folks to dive into.

I love your recipe book and your tasting menus.

Don't forget to take some time to use the learner guide to use some of your next steps.

That's a great tool if you want to bring another person into your conversation.

That's a great way to talk about next steps as well.

Thank you so much, David and Ben.

We so appreciate you bringing this great work to a WebJunction webinar.

A reminder to folks, I will email you once the recording is posted and automatically send you a certificate next week and I also will be sending you to a short survey as you leave the room.

That link is also in the email that I send you so if you do have to send back to the desk, we appreciate your feedback and will share this.

There's also a survey on the webinar recording page so know you can provide that feedback as well.

Thank you so much.

Everyone have a great rest of your week, and we look forward to seeing and hearing more about your playing and making locally.

Thank you so much!



	
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