 Well, good morning everyone. Sorry for the technical difficulties, but I'd like to welcome you to the prayer professional section 2013 spring meeting. Learn from experience. If you don't know who I am, I'm Janet Greaser and I'm one of the committee members of the prayer professional section. For every single one of you attending this meeting, thank you for joining us. We're so glad you're here. We're not a member of the pairs. We'd love it if you'd consider becoming a member. But if you can't, we're so grateful that you decided to join us today. We have 54 attendees who are scattered all over the state of Nebraska from places such as Blair, South Sioux City, North Platte, and here in Lincoln, where I am. And there's a large group in some memorial library in Pavilion, which we're having the technical difficulties with. But we'll take it. We'll figure it out. We're not here because of our passion for library work. I'd also like to thank Connie Hegdorn for her hard work setting up this spring meeting. If you're watching with multiple people on the same computer, would you please type everyone's names into the chat box so that we can make sure that everyone gets their CE credits? We've got three sessions today, so I hope you all enjoy it and that you learn something you can use on the job. There'll be a five to ten minute break between speakers. And now starting off our program is Dan Nieman from the South Sioux City Public Library. The session is called The Embodied Librarian, Learn to Sharpen Your Skills. Okay, Dan, you're unmuted. You're good to go. All right. Well, thank you for being here and thank you for having me for this presentation. We're going to talk about the Embodied Librarian. Becoming the librarian you were meant to be. And today's takeaway is from this program. There's one that's motivational, since it's the first hour, I did think of getting motivated to be who you're supposed to be. So we'll have a little bit of motivation. Second, we're going to talk about developing a personal plan for professional growth. And thirdly, we're going to look at resources for professional growth. This talk was kind of, you can thank Ray Bradbury for this talk because book Fahrenheit 451 was a big influence on it. If you remember the story in the story, Montagren's across a group of intellectuals that have memorized Shakespeare and St. Mark and different people. The idea was to embody those people so when the world was ready to improve and to get away from the crazy world of burning books, they would come back and they would do their, that's what they would do is they would be that people and they would be the people to come back in and make that change their world. And that's what we're supposed to do, our job, but I'm not sure how to get rid of this. Thank you Dr. McConaughey. That's all right. Hopefully the technical things, I really don't want to mess with too much. Now, our job is to go into the world to rebuild it and to make it even better. And yes, we have technical assistance from super people. All right. I'm glad there are other people that have, I'm not the only one that's had technical difficulties today. All right. Okay. One of my favorite little motivational quotes is from the movie The Mummy. And again, this is just motivation, it's really not informational. But it's, I like this quote because my father-in-law, this was the quote that helped my father-in-law understand why it became a librarian. He never understood it. He always worked with whole mining and welding and all these real jobs. And we were watching the movie The Mummy together. And after Eva Carnahan gave this quote, you know, I may not be an explorer, an adventurer, a treasure hunter or a gun fighter, but I'm proud of what I am. I am a librarian. That is what I want you to come in away from. That's the motivation that you have to have for professional continued growth and to be an embodied librarian. And she was embodied because she was a librarian even when she was in The Mummy's tomb and stuff. So just an example of an embodied librarian. So who are you? Who are you? Why are you here? Why did you become a librarian? This is part of the talking about embodiment. You are called to be a librarian. Now, maybe not called the way your priest or whoever was called to the ministry. But at some point, somebody looked at you, looked at your resume, looked at your application and got on the phone and said, okay, you would make a great librarian. How are you? So you're called. You have a purpose. And that's what we're going to talk about is fleshing out that purpose. When you came to your first library job, you came with a toolbox. Maybe not one like this, but you had a toolbox of skills, abilities, experiences and education that you were able to come in and use in your job. So what's in your toolbox? You want to take a look at your resume. What were all the skills that you brought in? You might be a computer whiz. You might just have a lot of books or be a bit typist or good with customer service or good with reading to children. Those are all tools. Look at those and list them out as part of your personal growth and development because those are things you will need to keep working on all your life. Those are the core tools that people hired you for and they're the things they're going to expect you to keep using. Always remember that you might be a great librarian in 2005, but that doesn't mean you'll be a great librarian in 2015. Things change. Systems change. ILS systems change. Computer things change. And you have to as best as possible stay up, keep those skills sharp. And so even though you're good at ABCD that you've listed out on your resume, those are also things to keep going back. Take refresher courses. Take little extra things and use that as your first layer of your continuing education of your library career development. Kind of think of those as your gen eds. Second area that you need to work on is mastering the job skills that are listed in your job description, job design, whatever. If you're supposed to know the search system, learn it. Don't just make it. I want to learn it. I really want to learn it. When I started the first year I was at the library, here I was going to be taught to catalog. Well, the way they taught me was they gave me a big stack of books that the head librarian had chosen and already found records for and highlighted the numbers I needed to put in there, the numbers I needed to fill on the mark record. And then my job was just to type those in. I wasn't satisfied with just being able to type in the numbers. You'd go on and you try to learn more and more and more about your job. Dig deeper, go higher, whatever you want to say. You really need to master the job. And mastering the job. List out each skill. Ask your director for your job description or maybe you have one at your desk. List those each point out. Customer service, circulation, reference, story times, whatever. Go ahead and make your list because those are all things that you can add and keep studying on and keep working on the regardless of where you are and regardless of what you're doing. And then find opportunities to improve those skills. Go after webinars that have those skills. That's why they have webinars on the different youth titles every year that have a different non-fiction or whatever that's given you a chance to improve the skills, improve the knowledge base. The secret to success is making your vocation, your vacation. Mark Plain said that. I think a lot of other people have too and that's really kind of transitioning in. Once we've got our core things that we've sharpened and we're good at, once we've started mastering our job skills, we get to do the really fun part of continuing education. And that's to create your own specialties, your own special skills, your own special, put your own special brand on your job as a librarian. To do this, think for just a second. What would I want to do in the library if money and time were not an issue? I'm asking you here to drink. What would you really want to do? Get those ideas out and then do those. Teach yourself how to do them. One of my first programming things was a book club leader. I didn't know how to do that, never done it before. I didn't really know that that was that to give a deal in libraries. A director just asked me, what would you like to try? I'd like to try a book club. I didn't know there were websites or whatever for it. What we'd learned. We grabbed ahold of that and we developed it from there. And thinking about these things you might want to do, these little areas of expertise and specialization. What first interest of you in becoming a librarian? Every librarian I know is either both a collector of things and a list paper. They have lists of lists of math that they do, that they know. Lists of websites, lists of files for this, files for that. Collections of books, collections of music, collections of whatever. Think about those things. Think about those things that make you go, ah, make you go, wow. Think about those things that are where you can lose time. You just pour yourself into it. I know a couple people earlier mentioned Pinterest. That's a great thing to become and to learn on. Because it brings in photography. It brings in the social media and all kinds of things. But that can be, maybe you don't get continued education credit for it. But there are benefits to it. It's part of your own personal education. You can either be this type of librarian where you just are in the library behind the desk and that's it. Or you can be that super librarian that is holding the book aloft and going out and doing all kinds of things that make people say, I didn't know librarians knew that. I didn't know librarians knew that. All of these things, whether it's knitting and crochet, whether it's painting. Even if you're a motorcycle enthusiast, there are ways that those interests can be used to strengthen your collection, strengthen your programming, and make you a more effective librarian. Here, Dave is big in the organic gardening and things. When I started librarianship, I didn't know that. The library that gardening and libraries went together, it does. You know, gardening and a lot of things go together. Or librarianship and a lot of things go together that you wouldn't think would. But those are all anything that you're interested in. From 001 in the duty system for 999, those are all potential things to use for programming and for continuing education. Again, it may not be graded classes. It may not be toward a degree. But this is the part of training that makes training fun. One of my wife and I did things that we like movies. We go to a lot of movies, we buy a lot of movies. And that's the place where, when I recommend movies, going through all the stuff and looking at the best movies is both work and play. It's making your vocation your vacation. And that's what we want you to do. You do the stuff you have to do. But then find those things that you love that you're passionate about. And keep doing those things. And keep building your education based on that. Keep building your specializations on that. And love this little quote. You love what you find time to do. And so again, if you want to continue your education, if you want to study and, you know, find things within the library world that you love to do. And you'll spend time on them. And you'll enjoy it. And make those part of your curriculum. They're not all of your, you know, personal job plan. But they're personal development plan. But they can be a fun portion of it. Now, where can I find information about continuing education? Well, you look, work at a library. And that's always a good place to start when you're talking about work. Look at the professional section that your library already has. You know, see what's out there. Take advantage of subscriptions they might have. The book list or library journal or school library journal. You know, read the library newsletters that come in. Whatever. But make use of the library you have. You also got up here the Northeast Library System. They've got library, they've got information to share. Books to check out. DVDs to watch and things. So that's a good place to go with your learning. And continuing it. The commission itself has a lot of good tools. They have a large library that you can draw from. And as well as having, again, videos, DVDs, other kinds of tools that you can learn with, through and from. Webinars. You can have things like encompass. Web junctions, book list webinars. There's just an untold number of people that are giving webinars. O'Reilly Media. There's another great place to look for your webinar ideas and things. All those things work together and work well to give you education and give you training. Again, you have to take credit for all of it. You have to go through everything and get credit hours. That's not the only reason you do things. You do things first to learn. To enjoy it. I don't even have to worry. I don't even worry about CE hours. I find stuff that I want to learn. Do it and don't worry about it. And then periodically just look and say, okay, grab my ad on my CE credits. Making things fun. Making something you're going to want to do again and again. RSS. There are innumerable blogs, websites, training things that have RSS fees. Use fees. It's a quick and easy way to bring in a lot of information about librarianship, about technology, about collections, about anything. But use these. You can also set up RSS fees for if you have an interest in something. I have one that's just South Mississippi Public Library. And that way any news that I'm looking for about the library will pop up in that I don't have to go out looking around for it. Just follow the feeds, follow the stuff. You can use feeds to follow websites. I have it set up. So when we add a page to our library, when I have a page to our library, it will show up that night in my feeds. That way if somebody else adds a page, okay, somebody put up a new list of books. Somebody put up a new list of children's activities. It helps when people worry about what's going on in our library. You can set up feeds also for, I think even on the EBSCO, EBSCO hosts their magazines. If you're interested in a topic, set up a feed so that when an article comes out, you'll get a notification. There's an article. I haven't played with that too much, but I'm pretty sure I've seen that in there. Look at the feeds and things that might come from the different databases you have. OCLC has a lot of feeds of training things about what they're doing and EBSCO and all these different things. So take advantage of all this stuff to develop your abilities, to develop your skills, and to become a library specialist. Again, learning practical skills. This is a picture of GCF Learn Free. It's one of my favorite things for all sorts of things, including science, technology, even developing the reading skills. If you find that you're not up to speed on Windows 8, they have Windows 8 training modules with videos and they have handouts and things so that you can teach yourself and keep yourself up on changing technology. I don't even have Windows 8 at home, but I have tools where I can learn it so I can help somebody else do it. And that's part of what we're supposed to be doing is learning and growing. And this isn't just the only site that does this. Microsoft, I know, has their own training thing for Microsoft products. I'm not an Apple user, but I'm sure Apple has the same thing. And there's more. Something I didn't include on here are Read Your Help pages. Whether it's on your circulation system or on your databases, get to know those help pages because they're really good. If there's questions about what you want to do or how to do, how to work this database or how to search or how to do whatever, the help pages are great. Even on social media things like the Facebook help pages, the Twitter help pages. You can learn a ton just by going to those types of pages. And it's not really exciting, but it's something else to do. It's something to do to keep yourself up on what's going on. Another thing I didn't add on here is Web pages. Look around at what other libraries are doing. And that dovetails with the newsletter idea. Take time to study what other libraries in your area around the world are doing. Don't just wait. What Nebraska is doing, but with the Internet and things, we've got this big open picture of what libraries can do. And really it is limitless with what we can do. So go out and do it. As far as newsletters, I know each of the commission has several newsletters that it sends out. Northeast library system, you know, subscribed to these things. A lot of them come electronically. Sometimes you may not find a lot of things in, but other times you just find an abundance of things that hit your basic interests, your basic needs, things, but also your special interests. There's just a lot of different things you can do with those. Again, lists serves. There are times that I will watch our email lists and discussions of different problems in cataloging or circulation. And maybe I don't know a whole lot about what they're talking about, but there are times that you can really learn some cool stuff. And if you're thinking about one time we were... Don't forget what the question was. We were talking about something with just specific electronic parts for people to just use databases. And I was able to get a couple websites of places where they have... Some people have library cards that are mostly just to use databases. Again, I don't remember exactly what that example was, but you can just learn a lot on those things. Twitter lists. And again, this is not just Twitter, but Twitter has a list so that you can create lists of librarians and find out what the movers and shapers are doing, but also find out what Nebraska librarians are doing, what Iowa librarians are doing. If you work in a public library, find out what school libraries are thinking about. It's not just the book education, but educating yourself on the library community. Also LinkedIn groups is another thing that I've found that is really educational on several of those. And again, people throw out... I read this article. What do you think? And maybe you don't always have a comment or something. And not all of them will hit home to be real exciting to you. But follow, check them out. And surprisingly, you'll find things that are really helpful to your career and your life. I've created a list of things on this website, and I'm sure that will be in the notes and stuff, so you don't need to worry about us. We're going to let that down. But here I have a list of several different companies that do webinars and podcasts and things. There's one blog that I followed that's just called WIPER and that's, you know, you've been posted here all the April webinars. Make sure you go sign up for it. I have links to a lot of different podcasts and things there. So go out and learn and be embodied. Are there any questions or things here? Or on the webcast? Any questions or discussion? Okay, thank you very much, Dan. Sorry, getting our people to get it arranged here. As Kristen said, thanks, Dan. And we're going to take a short break. And please call in if you have any questions, comments, or technical difficulties. The number is 402-416-6957. We'll start the next session at 11 a.m. with Crystal Bossard. Thank you. Okay, no questions came in during your session, Dan. If anyone does have any, you know, like we said, unmute your microphone. We do have some time here. Or type into the questions section. We're monitoring that. We can see questions up here. Or is it over here? Both. It doesn't look like anything urgent is coming in right now. That's fine. So I think we'll go ahead and mute you guys there, Dan. Thank you very much. And if you do have any questions, type them in. We can always go back. And we're going to take a few minutes break here. Excuse me. And then I'll be checking in with Sump again, and see if we can get them all connected and sound working. Okay, thanks.