 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Christa Porter here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays that's fine. We do record the show as we are doing today and it will be posted to our show archives for you to watch later at your convenience and I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of our show archives. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on Encompass Live. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries. This would be similar to your state library, so we provide services and resources and training and grants to all types of libraries in the state, so you'll find shows on Encompass Live for all types, public, academic, K-12 corrections, museums, archives, anything and everything really are only criteria. Is it something to do with libraries? We have book reviews, interviews, mini training sessions, demos of service and products, all sorts of things. We have Nebraska Library Commission staff that come on and do presentations for us, but we also bring in guest speakers as we have today. Today with us is Justin, who's our world traveling librarian. Who has done lots and lots of things in his career is going to tell us about how we can use creativity to grow and develop ourselves. So, Justin, I'll hand it over to you to give a full introduction to yourself and tell us all about what you have for us today. Cool. Krista, thank you so much for having me here. I was in Nebraska in 2018, and what a cool state you have. I want to put in a plug for RUNZA, and all the cool librarians that are there in Nebraska. You welcomed me in 2018, and I'm so glad to be back. Come and try RUNZA. It's a wonderful, yummy experience. It's a RUNZA. Home, fast food, it's interesting. It's little both, yeah. It's pretty good. Don't be scared of it being fast food. Just go with a RUNZA, trust me. But I'm coming to you from Maine today. I'm coming to you from my kid's room because they have computers, and I don't. That's what happens when you have children. You give up things, and that's okay. I'm here to talk to you about how to use your creativity to grow and develop. I'm going to share my story because that's the story that I know, and hopefully I'm hoping you can scrape some ideas, inspiration, positivity, good vibes from this, and apply that to your life, and go ahead and move ahead in your community and rock on. So before I start this, I just want to give a lot of love to Jane Dysart, who encouraged me to... She was the one. She said, Justin, get off your butt and start presenting again. And she was the one who said, talk about your creativity. I really like that about you. And if it wasn't for her, I wouldn't be doing this. So here I am. Hello, Nebraska. So before we start, my first slide. Wait, where am I? Okay. I'm going to tell you a little bit about myself. My name is Justin. I live in Maine with my partner Hailey and our two kids, Fin and Arrow. I do not work in a library right now. I'm taking a break. I was in a library for 17 years, and I hit a point, and I just decided I need to stop. So I'm doing something else now, and it's really cool and fun, and I'm growing in many different ways. I have a dog named Darby. He's a Kotan de Tuliar dog, and he's a adorable. The Kotan de Tuliar is from Madagascar. I have a monthly column. Oh, you'll have to check it out. I have a monthly column called A Day in the Life in Information Today magazine. I talk to librarians from all over the world about how they work, why they work, what they're doing, and all sorts of things. Krista, you're coming up next in I think next month's issue. So Nebraska and the world stay tuned. What do I like to do? I like to listen to and make music all the time. I want you to smile and laugh and learn as much as you can today while I'm here, because if we're not smiling, laughing, and learning, we're probably doing something wrong. So let's have fun with this. And what do I want you to take from this? I asked that sometime this week you head out into your community and do one thing for someone else. Just do anything for someone else. That's what I want you to take from this and do. And if you want to talk to me, there's my email address. I really love emailing. That's Darby. I got to slide that in here. It's a very fluffy dog, very cuddly. Looks very soft. Very, very soft dog. He would be here, but he'd be barking. So I am a creative person. I knew from when I was a kid, I used to fill up drawing books full of character design sketches for Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter 2 knockoff video games. And I knew I wanted to do something creative with my life. And then as I became a teenager, I got really into music. And I developed that other side of me creatively. But I never chose a creative path in my career. I kind of just worked retail jobs until somebody, my mother-in-law gave me the nudge and said, go work with teenagers in a library. So that's what I did on the left side of these pictures. That's me hanging out with teenagers in libraries. We did wonderful creative things. We built phone booths, not phone booths, photo booths out of iPads. That's where that first photo was taken with me wearing the UPS thing. We played video games. We had video game tournaments. We built board games. We turned the library into like Minecraft in real life. It was fun. It was creative. And then at some point, I hit a wall and I said, I'm tired of being creative. I want to help others be creative. So I became Mr. Manager. And for about seven or eight years, I was a library director in public libraries in America and New Zealand. I'm going to go to this next slide. I moved into leadership because in 2010, I always remembered this quote, Francis Heselbein. That's how I'm going to pronounce her name. The leader's job is not to provide energy, but to release it from others. That was told to me by a wonderful library named Peter Bromberg. Does everybody know Peter Bromberg? He is a truly wonderful human being. We'll You mentioned Jane Dysart. This is if people know the computers and libraries conference and internet librarian. That's something that a lot of us have been to and I have been at and presented at many times over the years. Highly recommend. He's been there as well. Highly recommend. Very great people. A great learning environment and a great fun community environment. So this Francis quote Peter Bromberg told me this in 2010 and it stuck with me as a creative person because I had never had anybody in my life pushing me. Instead of saying I didn't have anybody saying to me, yes, Justin, go do that creativity. Go be that person that you want to be. So I stuck that in the back of my mind and I said, maybe someday I'm going to come across somebody who is a great manager and pushes me that way. I'm going to talk about a great manager who did that for me very shortly. And then someday maybe I can be that person. I have to remember as a creative person that there are other creative people out there and that I could be somebody for them to unlock their true potential. So I came up with this idea that I wanted to be the creative leader and moving ahead, how could my goal to be to keep this library afloat, to keep it managing, to keep it moving ahead, but also be somebody who recognized what my staff needed and wanted to do and how to let them explore those options. So I came up with these bullet points that really guided me as a manager moving from a youth services role where I could be creative all the time to being a manager where it was a lot of budgets and boring stuff, but you also have that very important role of helping others. The first thing that I learned is let go. If you're moving into a management role from being a creative role, it's great to just be aware of where you're at and what's going to happen. At first I really resisted this change. I thought I can still do all these creative things. I can still run programs. I can still be that youth services librarian and also be a library director. You can't really do two things at once like that. If you just accept where you're at and say, okay, this is where I'm at. This is what I need to do. I'm going to put the past behind me, but I'm going to figure out ways to bring that past ahead for people in the future. Just let things happen naturally. You retrain your brain. When I was a youth services librarian, it was creativity all the time. You're surrounded by kids and teenagers. They're running around, kids and teenagers. They just want to do things. They want to have an impact on the world. They want to make their mark, I guess. This is where as a creative leader, you have to retrain your brain to not always have that constant stimulus happening, to be able to gain patience, to be able to sit back, process things, and think about, yes, you want creativity to happen and let it flow naturally, but you also know that as the leader, you have to build in systems to help people achieve that. Office work. That's one of the things you're going to do a lot as a manager, even if you're creative. I found that my creativity flourished when I organized my space. I found a focus and I got to work. I knew that there were things that needed to be done every day as a library director and as a manager. I got those things out of the way first, and then I was able to find my focus, and then I was able to dedicate the second half of my day to helping people with creative projects, doing creative projects of my own. I found that that organization really helped me. It actually gave me a lot more time to be creative, and I was never able to lose that even as I was a manager. Never lose sight. Krista, if there are any questions, any comments, you can always feel free to chime in. I do not mind that at all. Anybody, if you ever think of anything you want to say or share a question or a comment or sharing your experience or anything as a leader, go ahead and type in the questions section of your GoToWebinar interface, everyone, and I'm monitoring that over here. I'm going to monitor and I will grab it. Thank you. Never lose sight. One of the things that hit, I hit a wall in 2017 where I lost sight of who I was as a librarian, as a person, as a manager. I stayed in my office too much, and I think that's a thing that hinders our creativity. We might think we're staying in our office, we are, we're really working on projects, we're really putting our head down, we're really getting to work, but creative people, even if we're a little bit shy and you know, I think it happens with creative people, I think we tend to stand back a little bit, not wanting to put our creativity out there, but I think it's important for us to always get out, don't stay in our offices, get out into the world. Remember that we all came from a place in libraries where we were, we all had front-facing customer service jobs at one point. Remember where you came from in libraries? Remember that you're always serving a community, you're always serving people. And the one thing that I'm always going to stress is changing kindness. Through this all, as a creative person, kindness is always going to be at the front of what you're doing. Going through big changes, if you're moving from a creative role into leadership, make sure you're kind to yourself, make sure you're, as I said before, let go, you're entering a period of growth and change, let it happen naturally, be good to yourself, make sure you take time out to take care of yourself. Let me see, okay, there we go. Communication. I want to talk about how important it is as a creative person and as a library manager, how important communication is. I found this out the hard way. As a creative person, sometimes I get really in my own head about my projects, about the ideas that I'm having that I kind of fail to let the world in until they're fully realized. But one of the things that I've learned is every step along the way, no matter where you're working, keep people updated on where you're at, where you're headed, why you're on this path. I think that when we all know what each other's doing and we talk to each other in a kind and honest way, we're able to put aside all of this drama, a lot of wondering about what's going to happen, where are things going to go if we just talk to each other. Right before I signed on here, my wife and I homeschool our kids and we're having kind of a homeschool off day, it's vacation week here for the public schools and my kids were having a little tip about video games. One was playing, one was not, they wanted to switch and they just had to have one minute of communication, but instead they stormed off in two separate areas. One kid's on the third floor, one kid's on the first floor. After this presentation, I'm going to have to mop up the damage. It's just a real life example of I think communication, every step of the way when you're diving into a creative project, when you're working in a library, keep people up to date on what you're doing, why you're doing it and when you're going to get there. It's also good to share your stories. We'll talk about that too later. Sharing your stories lets people know how excited you are to be doing the work that you're doing and when people are excited about the work you're doing, I think it's going to have a bigger impact on the world. All right, as I said before, communication, part of communication is connection. As a manager of a creative team, you need to connect with these people, you need to let them know that you are there for them, you are going to support their ideas, you're going to help them realize their ideas. So first, listen, let your team generate ideas. My first library was in Titusville, Pennsylvania that I was a director of and I remember I came into that library after I had worked for about four libraries before that, looking at it and going, I know this place, I've been in a library like this before, here's what we need and I was very wrong and it's okay to admit that you're wrong. I did not know anything about that community because I wasn't there long enough. I should have let the team who had been living there all their lives generate the ideas. I learned my lesson the hard way. I gave them the keys to the car and for the next four years after that, it was pretty awesome because they were doing cool things and I got to be a manager and that was pretty neat too. Connect, you've got to connect with the people you work with. This connection will make the library grow and connect to the community more. I don't like to use the term work family because that's kind of a weird thing. I don't know. I have a family. I'm cool with that one. I don't need a second one. Work is kind of like a family at the same time. I just don't have the right word for it. Think about how you connect with your family. Think about how you communicate. Even though I know it's hard sometimes, but it's necessary. Think about how you want to, how you have to have these connections in your life and I think when you have at least understandings with each other and have good relationships, libraries can really take off. Once you have those connections with your staff, that's when magic starts to happen. That's when people start to get to the good work to connect with the community. Hang out. Think about how much time you spend with your staff. Enjoy that time. Sometimes that means you buy way too many donuts and for like six months every day you buy donuts and everybody gains a lot of weight and then everybody realizes you got to lose that weight so you work together to lose that weight. That was an actual real thing that happened and that's okay. Yeah. I mean, but those things are really great. Have coffee time with your staff. Just hang out. Have chit chats. As we were saying, chit chats before this presentation started. Talk to people. I think as we spend more time with our staff, we start to understand who they are. We start to understand what drives them creatively and we start to let them do those things and give them more options to do those things. Listen part two. I just put that in there because I can't stress how important it is to listen to your team. Trust me from not listening to my team for six months, listen to them. Encourage your team. There is never a bad time in the day to remind somebody that they are the brightest shining beacon of positivity in the world. We are connected in so many ways over the internet, over text, over phone calls and through video and all that. We've got all the time in the world just to let people know that they're doing a good job and that you believe in them and that they'll get to where they need to be. Just keep on encouraging each other. Some as mentioned, you said family. Some people do call their work family, work family, but some people I sure would be like uncomfortable with it, but some people suggest that they sometimes call their non-traditional family their tribe or their clan. In other words, you can use if you want to give a little sense of community or connection. Yeah. My work tribe. I like that. Thank you. I don't have a work environment right now, so I don't think about that. I'm just constantly surrounded by a 12-year-old and a 15-year-old in a dog. That's cool. Where was that? Where was that second one? Oh, okay. I was going to talk to people about, where did I go? Sorry about that. I haven't done this in a while. Encouraging people. Do you see my cursor on here on the screen? Yes. That person I'm circling is Corinne Hill. She was the library director of the Chattanooga Public Library and in 2013, I believe she brought all of these people to Chattanooga to be creative and weird and kind of give that library a nice little renaissance. And everything that I did in these ones, listen, connect, hang out, encourage them, that's what Corinne did. And I put this photo up because I like to reminisce about that wonderful time with Corinne, Nate Hill, Allie Burns, and Meg Bacchus. And I think about the creativity in that library and the culture of yes that Corinne put into that library. We had a fourth floor to that library and on that fourth floor, it was a 12,000 square foot space, I believe, and it was just kind of empty. And Corinne let Nate and Meg have that whole floor to build a very early maker space in libraries with community space so they could have presentations and workshops and events and all that. And we had these big empty walls. And Meg had this great idea to paint this wall. You would come out of the elevator of the stairs and you'd stare at this yellow wall. And she painted it yellow and put up, you're in the right place, which she made with the vinyl cutter in the maker space. And that was, everybody came up to that floor and said, where am I? Am I on the fourth floor? You're in the right place. And that was just Meg's wonderful brilliance and creativity. She kind of just had that idea. And all that Corinne said was, go for it. Here's the money to get that yellow paint and you know how to run the laser cutter or whatever it was, not laser cutter, vinyl cutter. Saying yes can lead to amazing things. And I don't know if that's still up there in Chattanooga, but when it was, it was one of those things I kept seeing people go up to the fourth floor just to take a picture of them in that space. And how easy it is to say yes and how life changing that yes can be. Just to let somebody know they're in the right place. There's this destination now. So that's what a creative leader can do, just a small little thing. I like that the culture of yes, more people need, that's a perfect phrase that more people need to embrace, I think. I mean, I think it's totally cool to go back and you know have some time to think about things and go, you know, you don't have to just go yes automatically. But always trying to find a way to say yes. I know in the library world, we talk a lot about how we just don't have the budget or we just don't have the time or the resources. And I think that instead of saying that we can always try to find a way to make something happen. Even if we have to scale back the idea, I think the idea of the culture of saying yes to an idea really shows a person like go for it. Just make it happen. It might not be exactly what's in your brain, but just try it and see what happens. Who knows what'll happen that way. I believe in encouraging creativity every day. As I said before, we homeschool our kids and that's kind of our platform for how to teach our kids. You know, math is boring. All those typical textbooks, that kind of stuff's kind of, it's tough to learn that way. It was tough for me at least. So we find creative ways to connect with our kids and hope that they learn that way. And they do and it's great. And I think that that's by encouraging creativity every day, that's another way you can connect with your staff. Listen to their ideas that shape library services. Listen to the ideas the staff has. Find out how you can support them and trust them to happen. My first library director was in Cape May, Courthouse, New Jersey. Her name is Deb Puyon. Does anybody know, do we have anybody from New Jersey here? Not a bad state. Not the armpit of America like people say. No, there's some wonderful places there, yes. It's wonderful. She was the person who always had her office door open. She listened to our ideas. She said, that's a great idea. Let me figure out how I can support you. She would always support us. She would always find the money. She would always find the time. And then she trusted us. She gave us, at that library, we wanted to have a beautiful gaming program. She gave us all the tools and resources that we need. She never came to an event and that's okay because she trusted us as the video gaming nerds that we were to run the things. And I think that's a really great thing for a leader to know. Just trust your staff to do the thing once you give them the resources. Always encourage your staff. Nudge them to think differently about both library services and how things are done. Get them trying new things at their own pace. We have to constantly move ahead in this library world. Our world is changing so fast. I went to computers and libraries last year around this time and the whole discussion was about AI. And I hadn't even thought about AI the year before. And I guarantee that whole conversation around AI right now is completely different than last year and even scarier. I just saw this Reddit video, by the way, of how fast AI has advanced in a year. It was showing AI-generated videos of Will Smith eating spaghetti from a year ago and today. And like a year ago, it was like, you know, he had 10 fingers per hand and it was like very scary. But now it legit just looks like Will Smith eating spaghetti. Crazy, okay. That's very scary. That's just very horrifying, not natural looking photos, the fact that it is so accurate. So accurate. So in this world where everything is changing so fast, we can't just rest on our laurels and libraries and say, we've got all these great things here. Why don't you come and visit our spaces. Constantly nudge your staff to think differently about how they can provide library services, what is an actual library service, what is an actual library service, and how can they get things done? Like, we don't have to do things the same way. We can reinvent how we do things. So just always kind of encourage your staff to think differently about that. I always call that encouragement planting a garden. If you think about it, like here in Maine right now, we're getting ready for spring. We're putting our little, we're doing winter sowing and we're saving in our house a bunch of milk jugs. We're putting the soil in them and the seeds and all that. So you find ways to encourage your creativity. Pretend that you're planting a garden, sprinkle those seeds in the soil, which is your library, water them, nurture them, see what they need. Every little seed and every little plant is differently. Think about how different plants are. I have this one plant in my garden here called borage. Does anybody know what borage is? Beautiful purple thing. Bees love them. You can never get rid of borage. I've carried borage across the world almost. Actually, I didn't because New Zealand would have killed me if I did that. I've carried it across all of America, I should say that. You can never get rid of borage. You can neglect borage. You can give it no water. You can give it no sun. Borage will grow, but then you have these other plants that if you don't water them every 15 minutes on a regular basis, they're going to die. Every staff member is going to be different, but tend to those people in those different ways, tend to their garden, let them grow. You'll be surprised what happens. As a manager of creative people, you're going to want to always be a little bit of a part of everything. I know I said before, stand back, let your staff do the thing, but make sure that you do keep yourself in tune with the day-to-day happenings. For a while there, when I was in New Zealand, I really wasn't involved in any of the day-to-day happenings, and then COVID came, and it was, I think, the day before we closed the libraries for good. We had tons of people that called out, and I had to go in and actually run the library, like the day-to-day stuff, and I didn't know, and that was a bad day. So keep yourself connected to the day-to-day happenings, but at the same time, you know, let your staff run them, let your staff have that experience, but if you're a part of that still, you'll keep that fire lit for you. Also, find time for yourself. You're going to be overwhelmed with a lot of work, but always remember your creative pursuits. Make sure you take care of yourself and keep yourself creative. Libraries are not everything, and we're not just our work. I'm talking to you today as a person who does not work in a library anymore, and I think a lot of the reason that I don't work in a library is because I didn't take care of myself. I didn't allow myself to be creative for a while, and I thought that libraries were everything, and I think I burnt myself out, and I think having that balance, the yin and the yang, you know, there's a reason we've been talking about that for a very long time. Achieve that balance and you'll be good, and I think your staff will be better. Self-care is so important, and especially in the world we live in today, not just dealing with libraries, but just in general what's happening in all sorts of places in the world that you need to take a step back from things, and think about yourself. Absolutely. 100%. Yeah, I feel like when I come on here, when I was preparing this to talk to you, I was like, man, I just feel like a self-help guru, like talking about like, be positive, be kind, take care of yourself, drink water. I think this is a really important thing to remember in the world today. We're very creative people. Humans are super creative. Look, we've lasted this long, and we've seen so many things and been through so many things. We're still here. We are creative people, but that creativity can be like snuffed out very quickly if we don't take care of ourselves and if we don't take care of each other. I think that's a lot of the reason why I'm talking about that today. There's a mantra that goes in a lot of the discords that I'm in that is for various gaming and things that a lot of people always repeat and try to remind each other about. It's good to have other people that are reminding you about this, like this presentation. You're not doing this all by yourself on your own. Hydrate, touch grass, untrimp. Have you ever heard that phrase, untrimp? I like that one, yeah. And that's a lot of people who are on their computers all hunched over all the time, or being artistic and drawing and whatever, you know, untrimp, stretch your back, stand up, walk around, touch grass, hydrate. Yes, take care of yourself. I just read a really great piece in, I think, Mother Jones Magazine this morning. Yeah, it was Mother Jones Magazine was sitting out on our dining room table like magic. I think a magical little like being left it there. And it was talking about these things that we carry around our phones and how we think we're looking at them to broadcast out into the world. But all that we're doing is we're talking to this screen. And we are broadcasting out to the world, but not a lot of people are listening because we're all just kind of talking to this thing. I think it's really important in a world where this dominates that we kind of set it down sometimes. And we do remember to get out there and connect. And we connect with others, with ourselves. And yeah, touch grass, stay hydrated, untrimp. Okay, this is my whole thing on taking care of yourself. I added this a few days ago when I was like, we need to talk about this more. Okay, first, when you get into a creative position in a library or a management position, ask yourself, what can I contribute creatively to my library? Take a look at the surroundings. What's going on? You don't want to step on anybody's toes. You don't want to do something that somebody else is already doing. You also want to see where there are gaps. Look into the community. Where can you find things that, what does the community need? Every community is going to be different. Some communities are just going to have more resources and you don't have to do as many things. There's one library where I had to have summer lunches for kids. It was just, if we didn't have the summer lunches during this one month of summer, kids didn't have a place to eat for free. I've worked in other communities where it was like, why would we ever do that? Because everybody was fine or fine. Everybody thought they were fine. I don't know if they were, but identify the gaps. Do what your community needs. When you do that, you're bound to reach someone. After you've found what you can contribute creatively to your library, set goals and clear boundaries to allow yourself to flourish. Don't get too caught in the weeds. Don't try to think about every little detail. My children, I'm going to go back to them because those are my coworkers these days, I guess. They're going on their first overnight adventure today to a friend's house and they were just getting completely overwhelmed thinking about every scenario and every single thing that they needed to take. We just took them aside and said, set these goals, set these boundaries. You're going to be there for exactly 23 hours. What do you need in 23 hours to allow yourself to flourish? Once we set those boundaries, they were able to pack a bag. They seemed to be happy despite their fighting about the TV earlier. Oh well. Set aside time to allow yourself to be creative, especially if you're in management. You're going to notice your time being sucked away. Always find some time in your schedule, even if it's 15 minutes an hour where you can do something creative. It can be whatever you want. I used to just, when I was a library manager, I used to open a Google doc and just do free writing, just whatever came to my mind. I was a creative writing major. I enjoyed that and it never amounted to anything, but it kept my creative brain flowing. Make a space that allows you to turn your creativity on and off. We have a third floor in my house and we gave it to our kids so that they could have a Lego lab, but with dad being home all the time now, dad needs a space. Dad doesn't have anything. I carved out a little corner that is my creative nook where I can listen to and make music. I've really enjoyed having that space. I can go there and I can do that thing and then when I'm done, I can turn it off and leave. I find having all my tools, all my resources in one space allows me to turn my creativity on easier. I don't have to charge up, I guess. If you have an office, use that as your space. Find something. I bet your library has a little space where you can nip off and turn your creativity on and off. Don't give everything to your library. Allow yourself to pursue your creativity outside of work. Like I said before, I gave everything to a library for a while and I stopped really listening to music and making music, which is the thing that makes Justin happy. I struggled because of that. I've been allowing myself more time to achieve that balance again and I think I'm getting back there. Finally, show your coworkers how your creativity is having a positive impact on your community. We all have great stories to tell. I think it is very important for us to share our work, to be out there, to be proud of what we're doing, to share the successes and failures on my website, which is justinthelibrarian.com. My biggest post, no matter what I've done in all of my career, is there's a post called, Oops, I Broke the 3D Printer. It was about how when I was in Chattanooga, they bought me a 3D printer and within an hour, I broke it. Like to the point where the plastic, instead of going down, it went back up in it in case the machine in it. Oh my. But it was fine because then I learned out how to fix it. That was a story. But share your stories, the good, the bad and the ugly. When we talk about these things, I think we grow from that and I bet you all have amazing stories to tell. I still tell stories about my time in libraries to people and you probably have this. They always say you should write a book. And if anybody's ever said you should write a book, you should probably start a blog or something. I guess nobody blogs anymore. Share your stories because I think, man, they're so positive and they're so good. There's this one librarian out there. I keep following him on LinkedIn. I think his name is Michael. He's in California. He's on TikTok, which I'm not on TikTok, but I watch him on TikTok. He just shared stories about how positive libraries are. Yes, I fell him too. He's famous now. He's been on Good Morning America. And I just saw he was at, he did an in-service day at West Des Moines, Iowa Public Library. Beautiful. That's share your stories because I see that person in my timeline and every day I smile. I'm like, wow. I hate TikTok. I don't even have it. But I go to TikTok to watch this person. So believe in your stories and believe in the amazing work that you do and believe in your creativity and share that with the world because I want to see it at least and I bet other people will as well. And I think when other people may see these things too. My husband, who is not a librarian, is not in the library world. He's following Michael Librarian. He saw him. He has big TikTok user and he must have just come up in his, you know, in his, in his thing. And he said, oh, this librarian dude, do you know about him? I'm like, yeah, I know about him. So it will get out to people that are even not, you know, your library people, your staff, your colleagues. Definitely. And he talks about a lot of things, you know, about self-care as well and mental health. But he is just so positive about it as well. Yeah. And something I wanted to say too about your previous slide about the failure had with the 3D printer. This is a big thing I remember a few years ago. There were a lot of presentations at conferences about failure and that it's okay to fail and it's a good thing as you learn from it. And it's just because something didn't work doesn't mean it's a bad thing. You just may need to rework it. Or just like you said, learn from it. It's okay and share those stories, the good and the bad. Because other people learn from it too and feel it's not just me. I'm not the only one that didn't know how to do this thing on the 3D printer or who had this problem. Yeah. Yeah. The last library I worked at, I worked there for a year and I sucked at it. I was the worst. I was just a terrible library director and I wasn't into it. And I had to step away. And I'm not ready to be a library director right now, but I think I'm regaining it back. And I think knowing that I had to leave and all that kind of, you know, you take the good, you take the bad, you take the both and there you have the facts of life. Which is my final slide. I'm a child of the 80s and I remember watching The Facts of Life and that sticking with me. It's a, is it a great show, Krista? I don't even remember. I'm probably not great anymore. Yeah, this is our Gen X, yeah. This is our old people moment of the presentation. I'm sure some of you watching are of our generation too. Thanks for joining us at the Gen X. It was a show, but yes, it did have, you know, that theme song. It's true. It's a good, yeah, it is what it is. I think it's very important that you remember that just, you're going to have good, you're going to have bad and that's life. As a creative person and working with creative people, we are, we're going to have ups and downs like you wouldn't believe, you know, we're going to have great creative ideas and then I've had great creative ideas in five minutes after that been down in the dumps. It's just going to be that way. But when we look at the whole thing together, good and bad, we're going to get through this. We're going to get some good work done. These are my, these are everything I think I talked about all the creative projects that I've been a part of. You can check those out. And I don't even know what time it is. I don't even know where we're at, but I don't have anything else to say, but I would love to just hang out and talk and we can leave these slides, this slide up here with those links. Now I will tell you too, while we're here, do not try and scribble down and write all these links. You don't have to do that if you're interested in them afterwards when the recording goes up, I will have a link to Justin Slides. This is Google Slides, right? Yes. So you will have a link to all of these later with the archive, yeah. Along with the recording of today's show, yeah. Yeah. As I'm looking at this, my links here, I can't believe how many of my, the creative projects that I've been involved in have all been a result of maker spaces. And I'm kind of going back to my, like, thought in my earlier slide of just how important it is when we carve out these spaces to allow creativity and thinking to happen, what can happen in the, I guess, while I'm just realizing there was thanks maker spaces that have changed my life. Yeah. Are you, oh, go ahead. No, go ahead, ask. Go ahead. I was going to say, are maker spaces still often discussed in libraries? I guess I'm a little bit out of the loop on that. Definitely, I would say yes. In new and interesting ways, I would think, yeah. We actually hear, and so first I would say, yeah, anybody have any questions, comments, thoughts, type into the question section? Like we said, we still got about 15 minutes left in the show. We will chat and talk and answer and whatever you have to offer. But yes, maker spaces are definitely still big in libraries. Here in Nebraska, we just last year wrapped up a like four or five year grant program that we did where we put maker spaces into libraries temporarily. It was our, where we got a grant for them in student museum and library services for a couple million dollars. And we bought like a set of maker space equipment, multiple sets. So like the big things, 3D printers, vinyl cutters, laser cutters, and then the little things too, a button maker, embroidery machine, robots, the Lego mind spaces, robots, and a whole bunch of other things. And we had four sets of these that we would temporarily put into a library for about 20 weeks for them to try them out, test them out, get a feel for it, and get their community involved in it, and then move it to another library and then to another library. And we went through about 35, 40 libraries in the state. Oh, that's beautiful. And it was huge. Yeah. And now as a result of that, it was a, it was kind of like, you know, well, give them a taste and then they wanted to buy it for themselves. It was the idea, you know, they can't afford to buy all these big, especially huge machines too. And it's not the right piece of equipment for their library, but we gave them a taste of all of them, and then they could figure out, oh, our people, like, they need an embroidery machine, and they need a 3D printer, but they don't need all the other stuff. And they learn that. And then they go on to buy their own of that or apply for grants. We offer grants here through the Nebraska Library Commission. I'm just wrapping up awarding those right now, our 2024 grants, library improvement grants, which is also funding from the NC Museum Library Services. And yes, people are still applying for, we're giving one library a new 3D printer. Others are going to make equipment and cabinets to hold the stuff and all sorts of things. So I don't know about anywhere else, but yes, here in Nebraska. Very cool. That's good to know. We encouraged it by offering these, I think, by helping them test out all this equipment. That's super awesome. You mentioned a button maker, and I think one of the coolest, most low-key creative tools we can put in a library is a button maker. When I was in Chattanooga, we were on the second floor. It was an entire floor for youth. And the first thing you saw was a table with old magazines and a few button makers on it. And just the creativity that I saw come out of that pile of old magazines and scraps of paper. Wow. It gave me a lot of hope about the world. I was like, this is awesome. Everyone likes to make a button. Everybody likes to make a button. It gets a whole setup for a couple hundred dollars now, maybe 300. And then you can put anything in there. We did it with paper. We did it with fabric. Different fabrics that you can cut out pieces from. Button maker and laminator. We took to our state fair, the Nebraska State Fair, for two or three years in a row. They had one area for the kids where you'd walk through this hallway and there was rooms outside. And we set up there to show off this because it was going to be coming to their library. So this is coming soon to your library. And we had a button maker and laminator there. And oh my gosh, the line of kids and adults just wanting to make their own things. It's just, yeah. Beautiful. And I think it really shows how people want to be creative. And if you have the resources for them. Until they see it, they don't realize it. They just do it. What is this? I can do it. You can make a button. Make it anything you want. Look at all that. Yeah. Oh. Her Christmas this year, our kids, one got a guitar and one got an iPad and an Apple Pen. And my wife Haley was just like, you know, we're just going to leave the guitar out. We're just going to put it in the living room and it's just going to be played whenever. And you'll see like they'll just touch it all the time and they won't be able to avoid it. Like they'll just she said it'll be like two months and they'll be awesome. And like it's pretty cool to like watch my 12 year old just like playing Nirvana songs right now. When you have like access to the tools and the resources, which you know, I think libraries are like the place to do that. Amazing things happen. And cheese. Yeah. Just imagine if we just had more stuff. I keep thinking about how cool our communities could be. Absolutely. If you have a question, if you want some advice on and anyone else go ahead and type into what advice do you have for encouraging team members to develop their own ideas and run with them? Hmm. Okay. You should do, but how I guess it's maybe more of the how. I'm trying to think back to experiences that I had. Wow, how, how. Okay. I'm taking back to my time in New Zealand where everybody seemed to, everybody had a hand in running the story time events that were happening there. Everybody kind of had to do, you know, we had a roster and everybody kind of had the cycle through. And I just remember having a lot of conversations with the more, I don't want to say anti-social, shy staff members who didn't want to get out there and sing to the children and, you know, be out there with the parents. I just remember trying to relate to them and talk about how, you know, I think everybody has some kind of stage fright. Relating to them on a personal level, trying to tell them about, I talked about my first program that I ever ran, which was a open mic night, which one teenager attended. And this teenager, I was like, oh, sorry, nobody came. I guess we're not going to have the open mic night. And she's like, oh no, I wrote this poem and I'm going to perform it for you. And just like the guts it took to do that. And I think people just sometimes need somebody to listen to them and hear out their fears and hear out their worries and just be there to encourage them and go, you know, take it slow. You'll get there. It might not be right now, but like, let's work together on this. I think amazing things can happen that way. Absolutely. And yeah, telling them you can do this and you're not, yeah. I remember when I first started teaching way back when, before I worked here at the library commission, I worked at a university library back in New York. And my first couple, probably first six months or so having to teach in front of students, oh my God, my stomach didn't flip flops. I had notes like crazy and it was just so, so nerve wracking. But now, you know, I just do it off the cuff. Yeah, I think it's, I don't remember where I heard this, but there was like that 10,000 hour idea where you just do things and do things over and you keep doing them. And once you hit 10,000 hours of doing that thing, you become an expert. But it takes a long time. Yeah, it's not. It just takes a long time. And yeah, and giving opportunities to, I remember there were definitely story times that were less well attended than the other story times in New Zealand. So we try to roster those people into like maybe the smaller story times, the ones that got only six people instead of 60 people for some reason. To kind of, you know, I guess to use like a baseball analogy, they have the minor leagues and the major leagues. Not everybody starts off in the major leagues. Sometimes they got to work through the minor leagues to get to where they need to be. And yeah, just giving people the time and the patience. I think showing that to a person that you have the time and the patience for them to allow them to grow and to get to where they need to be. I think people really respond to that. There's, yeah, and giving the space to do their own thing. I have been lucky with, yeah, I've been lucky with almost all of my supervisors over my career that have been not micromanager type things. Enough to know what I'm doing, but also enough to, there's that balance to let me do the thing and try to, and like you said, the culture of yes, saying, yeah, try it out. I mean, if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. And you go into something else, but there's no reason to say, no, you shouldn't be doing that because you might not have the time for it. Exactly. We don't know what'll come of it. We'll know, we won't unless we try. Yeah. But that's one thing that I follow in my current directors put steps, I'd say. I try to, he's really good at giving the encouragement into just saying, do your thing. Absolutely. I will support whatever, but then checking in on, so how the thing do, how to go. I want to, and then telling others about it, like following me and following you, talking about telling your stories about what you do. But if your supervisor is also bragging about you, honestly, you've got to follow through with that as well, that hey, that's a cool thing. I wasn't involved in it. Absolutely not, but they did, and I want you to go see that. So, they have to have the follow through too, I think of letting you do the thing and then also promoting that you did the thing and telling everyone. Exactly. You mentioned micromanagers. You mentioned micromanagers, and I just wanted to add, I had a micromanager once, and I remember being so depressed, I was like, this person just doesn't want me to do anything and my life is miserable. And my wife, who's just cuts to the chase, she was just like, quit whining, Justin, like this idiot's just like giving you a template for what not to do. Like, they're laying it out for you. Don't do this. Like, you never have to do that stuff again. Like, you don't have to go through that experience. And I was like, wow, it's such a cool positive way to look at that, you know, instead of being like, I have the worst manager in the world, you think like, this person's terrible, and now I don't have to be terrible. You can learn from that too. Yep, I had learned from that. And I'm like, that's always in my head, never do anything. When you think of something, do the opposite of what that person did. Exactly. It's crazy. I think about that person more than some of my best managers. Whatever it takes, whatever it takes, you know, it's that cliche that the good and the bad, it all builds up what you are and how you do things. Absolutely. I would like to take back my one thing that I asked everybody to do, and it was go be kind to somebody in the community. Actually, just go binge watch every season of Facts of Life. I'm not joking, no. Do the nice thing. But try and look for them too, just to get, you know, try and try it. It wasn't a horrible show, I don't think. Go to your library and see if they have it. Yeah, it's got to be somewhere, absolutely. Cool. All right, we're almost at the top of the hour again. Does anybody have any last minute desperate questions they want to ask of Justin or anything you want to share? We do have some thank yous coming out, coming through. Great inspiration. Yep, that was the idea. It was very nice to talk with you and to be a part of Nebraska again. Thank you for coming, everybody. So glad to have you on. And, you know, good luck in whatever you are going to do next, whenever you do, if you end up back in libraries or doing something else. I think I want to be a shelver again sometime. I think that's really what I want to do. I want to start there and not get to up here. I want to get to like there, the middle. Yeah, the getting burnt out on certain things. I know, like I said, before I came here, I was in a university and I did like you eventually, I was there for like nine years, I did get burnt out by it. I was like, I can't. This particular thing anymore is just making me and now I'm on the other side here at the library. I help librarians do their jobs. And I'm so much happier. You're doing an awesome job at it. I've been here for 20 years and I don't think I would ever go anywhere else or do something because this is my, I found my happy place for now. Awesome. You're doing great work. Keep it up. Thank you. You too. I will keep an eye on what you do next and maybe we'll have you on in the future to talk about whatever your next adventure is. Sounds great. I'd love to check. The library connected. Yeah. All right. So I'm going to change my, I'm going to pull back presenter screen to my monitor here. There we go. To wrap things up for today. So thank you everybody for being here. Thank you so much, Justin. It's good to see you. Thank you. I know you said it's cold up there. It's my wife's, but I think, I think I'm rocking it. It looks so cozy. Yes. I love it. And all right. So here is the session page for today's show. If, as I said, today's show is recorded and if you go to whatever is your search engine of choice and type in Encompass Live, the name of our show, you will find links to our main page and to our archive page. No one else is allowed to use the name. I don't have a trademark or anything, but so far we're the only thing that comes up. So if I go back to our main Encompass Live page, here's our upcoming shows. But here's a link to our archives. I wanted to show you where you can access them. And today's show will be at the top of this list. There is a last week show. It should be up here and ready by the end of the day tomorrow, as long as GoToWebinar and YouTube cooperate with me. Everyone who attended today's show and registered today's show will get an email from me letting you know when it's available. We also pushed out on our mailing list here in the library commission, through the library commission and on our social media. We have a Facebook page. There it is for Encompass Live. If you like to use Facebook, give us a like. Here's a reminder to log in to today's show. Here's when we posted the recordings for the last week's show. We post that up there as well. We also pushed out onto our Twitter account for the library commission and Instagram, which I've got a catch up on. We use the hashtag and comp live little abbreviation for our show name anywhere that we post as well. So you can look for that if you want to. While we're here on our archives, I will show you, you can search our show archives to see if we've done a topic, a show on any topic, type in anything you want on here. You can do just all the full show archives or just the most recent 12 months if you want something just very current. And that is because this is our full show archives and I'm not going to go all the way down because this is a huge page as you can see. But this is the full show archives going back to when and compass live first premiered, which was in January 2009. Meaning this is our, this is our sweet 16. This is the 16th year of and compass live. Yeah, thank you. Crazy, but been doing it. I've been doing it 16 years. But just pay attention to the original broadcast date. They all have a date on there when they first were done. And some of these shows will be fine. Great shows will stand the topics will stand the test of time would be good resources. But some things will become old and outdated. Resources may have changed drastically or no longer exist anymore. Topics may need to be definitely updated. Like in 2017 talking about getting internet probably want to have something more more recent than that. But it's good to look at the old things too. Some links will be broken. People may will work at a different library or different place than when they promote presented for us like 10 years ago. So just pay attention to that original broadcast date. But this is something that libraries do. We keep things for historical purposes and make them available. And as long as we have a place to host them, which right now is all on these are all on the Nebraska Library Commission's YouTube channel. We'll always keep our show archives up there and available for you. Get back to the top as you can see as you. All right. So that wraps it up for today's show. Next week it is, as you can see here, we've got two pretty sweet texts, pretty sweet tech. It's the last Wednesday of the month, the next week, which means it is pretty sweet tech day. Every last Wednesday of the month, Amanda Sweet, who's our technology innovation librarian here at the library commission, she comes on and talks about something tech related. We may have tech related shows throughout the month, but you can always depend on the last Wednesday of the month. It will be Amanda. And next week she is bringing Brian Pitchman from the Evolve project. He's been on the show a few times before. Also another computers and libraries, internet librarian person. And he's going to talk about his Evolve project project. He's a nice dude. He is. He's awesome. Yeah. He and Amanda do, they do a lot of work together. So he's going to talk. And I will be filling in more dates here. As you can see, I've just got one other date for March, but I am working on some finalizing some more presenters. So do keep an eye on our schedule here. One last thing I want to mention is our coming up this Friday, two days from now, is a big talk from small libraries. This is another online thing that I do here. Annual conference, small libraries doing big things. It's always the last Friday in February. We started this in 2012. Big talk from small libraries. All of our presenters are from libraries with an FTE or population served of 10,000 or less. It is online. It is free. Anyone from anywhere is invited to attend to watch. What we are is sponsored by us here, the Nebraska Library Commission and ARSL, the Association for Rural and Small Libraries. The schedule is available so you can check and see who's present, what topics we have on. We are also very happy this year. We have the Page Public Library, the best small library in America award winner for 2023. When the COVID-19 pandemic started, Library Journal, they suspended doing this award, but they brought it back last year for the first time. We do have the Page Public Library will be on at our 10 a.m. central time session talking about what they've been doing and how they won this wonderful award. We've got speaker information. You want to see who is presenting and then you can register right over here on our registration page. Please do join us on Friday for a big talk. The entire, almost the entire day will be recorded. There's one session at the end of the day who will not be recorded, but all of the sessions will be recorded and available in our previous conference link over here if you're unable to join us on Friday. So that wraps it up today. Thank you, everyone. Thanks, Justin. Good to see you. Good to see you. Thank you, everybody. Thank you so much for having me. This is great. This is a lot of fun. I think hopefully we've got a lot of good good vibes and good things we'll be doing now in our libraries. Positivity always wins. Yeah, absolutely. I try to be. All right, so hopefully we'll see you all on a future episode of Encompass Live. Bye, everyone. Bye.