[In this video, six people are having a conversation. The people’s names are Chelsea Jordan-Makely, Charissa Brammer, Amy Bahlenhorst, Sara Wicen, Carol Peeples, and Renee Barnes.]

 Chelsea Jordan-Makely: We’re here today to discuss the PRISM project and IMLS funded grant to study the outcomes of prison library services led by the Colorado Department of Education and specifically to learn more about some of the project logistics from partnerships to focus groups, as we want to share our experiences and make this information available for other teams that may replicate this study elsewhere. My name is Chelsea Jordan-Makely. I’m a consultant who’s been working on this project and I will be interviewing our panel here, Charissa Brammer, Amy Bahlenhorst, Renee Barnes, and Sarah Wicen, all with the Colorado State Library and Carol Peeples, founder and executive director at Remerg. I’ll now ask everyone to introduce themselves and to answer our first question. How would you describe your role in this project? Do you wanna kick us off, Charissa?

Charissa Brammer: Sure. So, I’m Charissa Brammer. I am the Director of the Library Research Service here at the Colorado State Library, and on this project I am the one that applied for the grant from ALA and manage that grant. And then I’ve been doing a lot of the logistical work around the grant and then attending all of the inside focus groups that we did so doing that kind of field work as well. I’ll hand this over to Sara who’s on my team.

Sara Wicen: I’m the Research Assistant for the Library Research Service and so my role in this project has been to just help with kind of like the organizing and some of the formatting of materials and I also attended like just over about half the focus groups and in those focus groups, sometimes I was conducting them and sometimes I was taking notes, managing the recording. And then since we’ve completed focus groups, I have been helping with the analysis and part of all the discussions we’ve had around our codes that we’re using on our transcripts. And yeah, I’ll hand it over to Amy.

Amy Bahlenhorst: I am Amy Bahlenhorst. I’m the Research Analyst at Library Research Service and my role is pretty similar to Sara’s. And I was helping prepare materials attending again, about half of the focus groups and then doing some of the analysis portion of the information that we received. And I also did some project management on this, so the wrangling of people, scheduling of things kind of trying to keep things flowing a little bit and organized. I’ll hand over to Renee.

Renee Barnes: I’m Renee Barnes. I’m the Director of Institutional Library Development at the State Library and my team helped a lot with the all the inside logistical pieces of identifying participants, making sure that notifications were made to participants as well as going with the LRS team to the focus groups and providing…instead of having to have a security officer in the room to maintain security, someone from my team was always in the room to provide that support and really answering a lot of questions around prison and what going into prison is like and what we can and what could be brought, what could be not be brought, all those kinds of things. And Carol?

Carol Peeples: And hi, I’m Carol Peeples, I’m the founder of Remerg and the director Remerg. It’s a nonprofit based in Denver. We provide a statewide resource website for reentry and a call line, and then we’ve been developing other programs. And one of the…this opportunity to work with the prison libraries has always been near and dear to my heart because I’ve always loved the I’m a former educator myself, and I’ve always found the prison libraries were the most likely to collaborate with me on getting reentry materials out to my target audience. And so, this is a reminder we had two sets of interviews going on. We had focus groups. We had focus groups inside the prisons, and so Remerg was the partner with the focus groups outside the prisons. So, we set up a statewide tour of halfway houses and community partners to create and host focus groups of people who had been incarcerated to talk about their experience with prison libraries.

Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Awesome. Thank you everybody.