Thursday I watched for my talents in Activator theme. What I noticed was my impatience to sit and talk about things. I want to just make decisions and get on with all the things that need to be done. This was very apparent to me during our supervisor's meeting on Thursday.

The insights into the Activator Strength are so on target with what I have said above:
I can see how ideas can be turned into action.
I want to do things immediately.
I am not so sure that I am powerful in making things happen or getting other people to take action.
I do get criticized for being impatient and "running over" other people.
I hope I bring creative energy to problem solving but sometimes I think I just forge ahead to be moving.

Calling Question #1

At the end of each week's study, there is a "calling question" leading us to find our calling in our lives. This week's question is "There are so many needs to be addressed in our world today: poverty, injustice, loneliness, substance abuse - to name a few......what needs make you stop and think, "I wish I could help!"?
I am constantly reminded how truly blest I am in my life and how small my problems are when I am faced every day with the people that our society has abandoned. Whether it is the homeless person who smells less than lovely and acts a little funny, the man everyone assumes is homeless but really just can't find an affordable apartment, the teen left to her own devices all day or the lonely person whose only human interaction in a day may be talking to my staff, it seems truly amazing to me in a culture with so much that individuals like this must exist without support, either monetary, physical or emotional.
I do not have any answers but I do know that my heart strings are tugged every time I see one of these forgotten ones.

How does it feel to be able to "name" your talents?

To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. - 1 Corinthians 12:7

I think in many ways, seeing the results of the StrengthFinder makes me feel very self-conscious. I do agree that most seem to elucidate particular aspects of my personality pretty well. In day to day life, however, these strengths aren't always perceived by others as positive.

Living Your Strengths - a new direction for this blog

I am currently involved in a class at church called Living your Strengths based on a book by the same name. Since part of the class involves a daily reflection, I've decided to reinvigorate this blog as my reflection tool. The first activity we had to do for the class was take the Clifton StrengthsFinder test. The test was a bunch of descriptors and we had 20 seconds to determine which of each pair best described ourselves. The results are given in 5 Strength areas. Mine were as follows:
1. Strategic - meaning I can analyze and determine effective ways to solve problems or do things.
2. Input - I am a collector of information and things that may come in handy some day.
3. Activator - I would much rather learn by doing than over studying.
4. Self-Assurance - I have confidence in my decisions once they are made.
5. Learner - I love to learn new things simply because new information energizes me and feeds my Input strength.

Thing #23 Time to Fly!

Well, I must say that I had doubts along the way that I would ever get to the end, not because it wasn't interesting and fun, but just because I never seemed to have time to work on my "things"!
I think Library Thing is one of my favorites, as are the more creative apps like picnik, flickr and some of the image generators. I am not artistic, so having web sites where I can play with visuals is a real plus. I also think just the act of blogging has been enjoyable. I have always liked the idea of keeping a journal, but have never done it. Obviously, I don't want to spill my guts here for everyone to read, but the act of putting thoughts down in a slightly structured way has been good.
I think I am still struggling with some of the "social networking" aspects of many of these applications and tools. I like Facebook, but really don't care is somebody else is reading the same books I am. I'm already in 3 book clubs with people whose facial expressions I can see!
As a learning tool, this has been awesome - I have seen so much interaction and mutual assistance among my staff during our journey to Thing #23. A huge thanks to the Nebraska Library Commission and to Michael, Allana, Christa & Susan for all their work and encouragement. Who knows - maybe I will come to appreciate Twitter some day :)

Thing #22 Podcasts

I never get to listen to "All About Books" on NET radio, so I subscribed to that podcast. I also subscribed to "Uncontrolled Vocabulary" mainly because the name is great. The challenge will now be to find the time to listen to my new subscriptions. I have found that I am not very good at making time to go in and look, read, listen to the feeds I have subscibed in Bloglines. I think I will have to winnow my list down to a few things that I will actually attend to on a regular basis. Nothing fancy here, but I do think the whole podcast/RSS idea would be an amazing way to announce events for the library, do book reviews, book talks, etc. Maybe just once a week "Library News". I'm sure how often Lincoln City Library does their podcast, but that is certainly a model to look at.

Thing #21 You tube

I have loved and laughed at YouTube for a long time, but this exercise started me thinking about using a tool like YouTube to create tutorials and/or marketing pieces for our library. One of the most amazing things about YouTube is all the stuff that is there - you can literally spend hours watching silly stuff or looking for meaningful video on a specific topic. The searching seems a bit hit or miss to me - an awful lot of hits per search, meaning there is a lot of sifting that the user has to do.

My favorite library marketing video is this one that was done by or for the Columbus Public Library:

Thing #20b

If at first you can't figure it out, keep playing!
My first collage I created on picnik saved onto Flickr as a solid black rectangle, so I tried a different collage and figured out how to actually embed the picture straight into the blog post.

Thing #20a

2008wreath
Originally uploaded by HPLmeanderings

This is one of the pictures I edited using picnik - I cropped it and added the frame

Thing #20: picnik

I always seem to struggle when trying to edit photos, so I thought I would give picnik a try. This is a web-based photo manipulation site that allows you to edit a photo without having to register or have an account. You can upload from your computer, from flickr (and some other social networking sites), from a web sit or from a camera and then also save to these same locations. The site was very straight forward, with step by step instructions in balloons that led you through most tasks. The only frustration in using picnik is that there are many. many things you cannot do without buying a premium subscription, but I was able to crop, frame, resize, and make a simple collage. Things like color correction, red-eye fix and special effects were also available at the free level. I'm looking at this in terms of a way that the public could edit photos without having to download anything onto the public computers or as a tool to use when teaching a class on photo editing for the public. I think it would only work, though, if each person had a flash drive, a Flickr account or Facebook or some other place to download the finished product. All right, well I was going to embed my image from Flickr, but I can't get that to work, so I will end this and try to go the other direction.

Thing #15: SlideShare

I got so frustrated with this app the first time around - I couldn't get into the site, could get registered, etc.that I skipped it and went on. This time around it seemed very straight forward, so maybe the problem was all the traffic before. I decided to embed something a little bit fun rather than a work power point. It should be a little vicarious escape from winter in Nebraska. Enjoy!

Maui

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: travel hawaii)

Thing #19 Con't

Both of these apps have real potential. Zoho seemed a little more straight forward, but couldn't handle the picture I tried load. Google Docs was a little more complicated to set up the blog posting but it handled the picture just fine. Zoho seems to have a little more compact formatting than Google docs (lots of white space??) but the inserted picture may effect that also.

Thing #19 - Zoho vs. Google Docs

I am going to try the same thing here in Google docs that I did in Zoho Writer.

I finally got all the Christmas decorations put away tonight.

The house looks sad all bare -

Christmas is Gone

I finally got the last of the Christmas decorations put away tonight.  

The house looks sad without all the lights and sparkling decorations.  

I need more Valentine's Day swag. 

I was going to put before and after pictures of my house, but  couldn't get the picture to load!

Thing #18 - Sandbox fun

This is just an example of what effective collaborative tools wiki's are and how easy they are for lots of people to use.

Thing #17 Wiki - wiki - worki

I really like wikis and see so much potential for them. I set up one on wikispaces last year for the NLA Continuing Education Committee to use to share program information. Like all 2.0 tools, it only works if you can get everyone to actually go to the site and contribute, but the use of wikis on web sites seems like a great way to make them easy.

I am thinking hard about whether there are advantages to the "subject guide" type wiki like St. Joseph County has versus an ordinary web page with links. My web mistress thinks the advantage would be having lots of people that could update links!

The Princeton site seems like great inspiration for setting up something interactive for Adult Summer Reading this year. The debate will be whether to use a wiki or a blog.

Thing #16 - Thoughts on Library 2.0

First of all, I can only hope to someday have a bit of the understanding of the library world as it relates to web 2.0 as these authors do. Obviously I am too mired in the mundane to think like a philosopher!
My biggest fear is that the portion of our community that really "gets" all this has already forgotten the library as an irrelevant dinosaur filled with musty books. Even making some attempts at 2.0 interaction and repackaging won't attract that segment back through our doors, physically or virtually.
I do think that libraries have long excelled at meeting our patrons where they are and these new tools only make for another way to reach out beyond our physical space to offer service. But in our community there still seems to be such a wide range of technological skill and expectations to deal with. I had 2 members of my Friends of the Library Board say last week that they really wanted the card catalog back, but we are helping people program their phones on our public computers and beginning to get asked which library resources are compatible with hand held devices. That almost feels like all of human history being thrown at us at once, with no more resources and the same number of man hours (or woman hours as the case may be!)
I want to embrace all of this and figure out how to improve service to our community using these tools, but sometimes it is just overwhelming.

Thing #14 - Delicious

The idea of having a web-based repository for web sites is personally appealing since I sometimes lose sites from home to work. I don't quite get the social part of this. It was sort of interesting to see which sites had the most links to them. The tagging for most of what I saw seemed fairly straight forward and what I would expect.
As far as NebraskAccess goes - I really think we need to have some non-librarians come up with tags that mean something to them. I would guess that "databases" doesn't mean much to the average Nebraska college freshman who needs journal articles for a paper.
I do think this would make an excellent tool for teachers or others leading classes to share groups of web sites. i need to play with the networking feature a bit more to figure that out - I am having some of the same problems on Delicious that I was having on Twitter finding other people. I know they are there, but I don't know how to find them because they are using user names that are not their names.

Thing #13 - What's all the Twitter About?

OK - I know I am old and behind and frustrated but I really don't get the whole Twitter thing! This is the third time I have been on Twitter and I cannot seem to find anyone. The 1 person who is following me (and I am following) is a colleague, which is fine, but I don't think she is tweeting much. I tried following Austin Public Library, because I wanted to see what kinds of things a library would tweet about. It was the stuff I would have expected, but there were probably 3-4 tweets a day. Do their patrons want that many messages from the library every day? I would be interested to know how they got their 97 followers and how many are patrons and how many are staff, etc.

Thing #12 - Library Thing

I really wish I had time to really use Library Thing - I think it would be a great way to keep track of the titles for the 3 Book Clubs I'm in and also to have a list of all those books that I see at the library and say "I need to read that", but then when I am between books, I can't remember. It is the perfect tool for those of us that wear "Too Many Books - Too Little Time" t-shirts. Whoever perpetrated the myth that librarians get to read all those books did a really good marketing job.

I am also thinking that this might be a good class to offer our library patrons who are always wanting us to keep track of everything they have read. It would still require a little effort on their part, but not much more than logging in and searching a title if they just wanted a basic list of items they have read.

My library is a real hodgepodge right now, but if you want to see what I have, just go to:http://www.librarything.com/catalog/pbohmfalk