The Alchemist

I just finished reading The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. This book was about a boy following his personal journey. Throughout the story the boy had to relinquish his possessions and essentially start over learning a new skill to reach his goals. He was taught to pay attention to signs and realize that there may be a greater plan for you than you think to follow your destiny. I have over the last few years read about Shamanism and often about how to pay attention to animals for some of life's lessons. I have begun trying to write some of these lessons as children's books. I have decided on a series of ten and have six already finished. I enjoyed this book. Personal journey stories are among my favorites. I would definitely recommend it to others.

SLA's 23 Things

A co-worker recently told me about SLA's 23 things. I thought it would be a good exercise to do in preparation for my upcoming workshop. It was created to encourage librarians to use the social software tools that are out there. The first step is creating a blog. Since I have done this many times through different services (Livejournal, MySpace, Xanga, and Blogger.) I did not feel a need to create a new one. However, I did feel a post would be appropriate with some insight on what I like about the services. My overall preference is Blogger. The biggest thing to consider is who is your audience? Why is the blog important to you or to others? Sometimes I feel that I don't need to write a blog so that others will see it and comment. It is something that I need to do as a writer to achieve a certain task. Other times it is important to reach a particular audience to get the information to many people at a time.

Here are a few ways in which I have used blogs.

Professionally, I created blogs for PALINET as a way to help support the needs of the library community for Interlibrary Loan and Cataloging Information. These started out as Blogger and moved to WordPress, due to the branding options available. The blogs are PALINET ILL and PALINET CAT. The updating has now transitioned to other staff, but I still assist them with pertinent information.

I also volunteer with the Springfield Township Library and have worked with the children in the Middle School group to have a blog for information and the events at the library for this age group. There are pizza nights for the group and so they came up with the blog: http://readingbytheslice.blogspot.com

This blog was originally created for my I am a Librarian project. I also created my Xanga blog for the same purpose, but the blogger one was more popular so I stuck with it. It was also very difficult to maintain multiple blogs stating the same information. Then it became important for the blog to be fluid. The momentum of the project is not as it was in 2004-2006 and so the need for a blog on it seemed somewhat silly, so I changed the purpose of the blog to reflect book reviews or important or interesting things that are circling the library community, such as SLA's 23 Things.

Additionally, I didn't want to hold on to all the papers from my daughter's daycare, but I wanted to keep the information so I decided to create a blog for my daughter, Harmony. Her blog is http://butterflysmiling.blogspot.com This is a great way to help keep the Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles, Friends, etc. informed about the changes in your child.

Blogging can become a phase if you let it. It can be hard to constantly update information but is also rewarding when you can. With Blogger it is easy to include photographs and videos and this aspect is very important to me.