Week Nine, Thing Twenty Three

Well, after a very late start I managed to complete this program just in time. I want to say thanks to the Virtual Services Team for making this possible. I really enjoyed this program and I'm very grateful to my supervisors for giving me the support and encouragement to participate. For me, being aware of new technologies is not enough. I have to use the tools to really grasp and understand them. Being able to explore and test out all of these 2.0 programs was a great opportunity.

Out of all the exercises I enjoyed using flickr and flickr mashups, the image generators, and de.lic.ious the most. What surprised me about this program was how simple most of the exercises were. I was really expecting more obstacles. Also, I never explored YouTube much in the past. Whenever there is tons of hype about something I get turned off...but I think I will play around with the site some more.

I would definitely participate in another program like this. The only shortfall I experienced was an initial lack of work time to explore the program. About half of the exercises I completed at home, which was okay and definitely worth while. Even with the large time extension from the Virtual Services Team I was still barely able to finish in time. Then again I didn't start the program until the end of February. And, I could have finished after the March 30th deadline. It was my choice to try and finish in time.

Thanks Virtual Services Team and thanks also to Helene Blowers.

Week Nine, Thing Twenty Two

On to eBooks. I try to encourage patrons to check out eBooks and when they turn up in the catalog. I give my little 30 second spiel about what they are, but so far people have seemed fairly reluctant to try them out. Home computers seem to be a rarity in the neighborhood where I work, so this could be a big part of the problem.

If I could generate enough interest, I would love to do a workshop on eBooks and have offered to train staff members on the eBook portion of our website. My main motivation is practice. I used eBooks a few times in graduate school, but haven't really used them much since. Most of the eBooks I would browse were software training manuals on Dreamweaver and Access. I would like to check out some language instruction books but so far haven't made the time for that.

These were the top 10 eBooks downloaded from Project Gutenberg on March 27, 2007

1. Manual of Surgery by Alexander Miles and Alexis Thomson (896)
2. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells (849)
3. Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period by Paul Lacroix (508)
4. Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 01 by Elbert Hubbard (464)
5. Searchlights on Health by B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols (400)
6. History of the United States by Charles A. Beard and Mary Ritter Beard (374)
7. Great Britain and Her Queen by Annie E. Keeling (351)
8. Our Day by William Ambrose Spicer (335)
9. Kamasutra by Vatsyayana (302)
10. Illustrated History of Furniture by Frederick Litchfield (287)

Sort of an interesting cross-section of material. It seems like the list is heavy towards reference material and that is what I imagine eBooks are best suited for. I don't know anyone who prefers reading on a computer screen for a long period of time. But if you are working on a computer or hand held device, being able to consult a digital version of a book can be quite handy.

Week Nine, Thing Twenty One

I searched and browsed through a couple podcast directories, specifically podcast.net and Yahoo!Podcasts. I wasn't all that impresed with podcast.net. In scanning through the results list nothing caught my eye.

I have to say I did like the Yahoo directory. The front page is subdivided into three panels; What we like, what other people like, and explore on your own. The first section contains podcasts that Yahoo! finds new and noteworthy. The second panel contains lists of the most popular and highly rated podcasts. And the third panel allows you to browse by category. I added npr's All Songs Considered to my Bloglines account. This podcast is currently the second most popular on Yahoo!.

I tried searching for book reviews in the Yahoo! directory and was surprised by the amount of comic book podcasts that are out there (along with reviews of fantasy books and podcasts from a christian perspective). I did find C-Span's program After Words which airs on BookTV Sunday nights. This podcast features the writer of a hardback, recently published, non-fiction book, interviewed by someone with knowledge in that particular field. I added this podcast to my Bloglines account too.

Most of the podcasts I tend to listen to are radio broadcasts like This American Life and Fresh Air. In the past, I haven't sought out library related podcasts with the excpetion of tutorials we've used on Learning 2.0.

Week Nine, Thing Twenty

Below is an Arcade Fire video I found on YouTube. I'm going to see them in concert in June but I haven't heard their new album yet, Neon Bible. This was one of the better quality videos I found. A lot of the music videos I looked at, Arcade Fire and the Shins, were taken at live concerts and had very poor sound and video quality.

When searching for a specific topic, I liked how you can sort by date, view count, or rating. I sorted by date because I was looking for something fairly recent from the new album. I also liked that once you choose a video, the right-hand side of the page would give you related videos, more videos from the contributor, and playlists. What I think is great is that the site really allows and supports both known object searching and serendipitous discovery.

Here's what I didn't like: When I tried to add my blog to my YouTube account, an error message kept appearing saying I was using an incorrect username or password or didn't have access rights to the blog. I checked and double checked my username and password and then gave up and just embedded the html for the video in my blog post. I don't know why I couldn't add my blog to YouTube, but it irritated me.

Week Eight, Thing Nineteen

So I posted about LibraryThing already, and how much I love it, and how right on I found their recommendations. This time around I cataloged a handful of books I have at home.

Now this is going to come as a shock to those of you who think all librarians have huge book collections, but I don't actually own many books. Why?

1. I am cheap
2. I almost never read books more than once
3. I've worked in libraries for the last nine years

Now I read all the time. It's just that almost all of the books I read I get from work or I borrow from friends. So thinking of five books I actually own was a challenging exercise.

All of my books were quite popular with the exception of Impossible Vacation which is owned by only 90 members. That surprised me. And, get this...no other members own the exact same books that I own.

I added a widget to my blog that shows some of my favorite books. See it? It's on the left-hand sidebar.

If you're interested you can also check out my catalog on LibraryThing.

Week Eight, Thing Eighteen

Today I am exploring web based productivity applications which is a fancy way of saying word documents and spreadsheets created on the web.

We have a mac at home and the computer I use at work is a Hewlett-Packard PC. Sometimes I run into problems opening files at work that I created at home.  A web based application, like Zoho Writer or Google Documents, would eliminate that problem.  I also wouldn't have to worry about different versions of a software program being compatible.

My dad could really benefit from applications like these. His computer is loaded with two operating systems, Linux and Microsoft. He prefers working on the Linux side, but if he emails documents from that operating system to others, the recipients often have trouble reading or editing the files. If he used a web based application, he could create documents on the Linux side and still share it with others. I think. Anyone: Correct me if I'm wrong.

I just exported this document from Zoho Writer to my blog. It worked pretty well with the exception of adding some unnecessary coding and paragraphs.

Week Seven, Thing Seventeen

So I added my blog to the SJLibrary Learning 2.0 Favorities Wiki. I like the quick and easy exercises. I also added Tai Pan to the favorite restaurant page and Amelie to the movie page.

One of the departments I work in has a wiki, which I haven't used yet. I know, shame on me. I think it could be a great tool for sharing programming ideas, documents, and event flyers.

Week Seven, Thing Sixteen

Moving on...This post is about wikis and their implications for, what else, libraries.

I have to admit I've been one of those people whose mind immediately jumped to wikipedia whenever the word wiki turned up. To put it mildly, I've been generally distrustful of the site. What's frustrating is that I often see students turn to it as their sole trusted resource for any particular question, whether it's personal or school related.

However, I do think wikis have good capabilities and good applications, particularly for libraries. I really enjoyed Princeton Public Library's BookLovers Wiki. I've been wanting to collaborate on something like this in my own work environment. What a great way for staff and the public to learn about new books, find recommendations, review their own reading, in an open, shared network without hierarchy or division between participating groups.

I'm also really impressed by the Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki. Just in the few minutes I spent exploring I found several resources that could be quite helpful in my current work setting. In particular there are some neat programming ideas, such as the cookie swap, and the area devoted to services to specific groups had some intriguing resources. I just posted the Services in a Multi-Lingual Environment page to my del.icio.us account. I sincerely hope I come back to it. I fear that del.icio.us may become a new, elaborate way for me to procrastinate. A technical version of "I'll get to it later."

Week Six, Thing Fifteen

What do I think of Library 2.0 and the future of libraries? My thoughts are a bit bipolar. In some ways I'm very excited about web 2.0, its implications for libraries, and the opportunities it provides for discussion and connectivity. But I'm also overwhelmed and exhausted at times by how quickly the world of information expands and evolves. I guess what I'm saying is that my views of it as a participant are sometimes different from those I have as a professional.

In many ways, Learning 2.0 has been the best professional exercise I've experienced since moving to the west coast. I am giddy with the possibilities of what web 2.0 has to offer, yet I also feel torn. Technology and time has a way of altering everything on its own schedule. I like how the library profession is changing on some levels, such as making services more user-friendly, libraries more patron focused, incorporating more and more media into collections, providing more virtual services, and so on.

And although I enjoy the new I also get nostalgic for the old. I love the physical collection. I like working with the physical collections of libraries; reading reviews, selecting items, cataloging them, creating reading lists, displays, weeding materials, and in general, managing the physical collections of the library. That role in libraries has been slipping away from me and I miss it. But with its fading comes new opportunties to manage virtual collections and web content, from webliographies to ebooks to bookmarking information into social networks like del.icio.us to using web 2.0 technologies to share information with patrons in their own virtual time and place.

So I agree with Rick Anderson and I see the icebergs he warns us about: We need to think more about virtual collections, make our services more intuitive and user friendly, and create libraries that are more relevant and accessible to people who may not have the time, interest, or inclination to visit libraries virtually or physically. It's the last item in particular that makes me dizzy. But so does a strong cup of coffee, a good book, and a long conversation with an old friend. And I certainly wouldn't give up any of those things.

Week Six, Thing Fourteen

So there's way more to Technorati than I imagined. At first I just thought of it as a way to search RSS feeds but that is just one its more basic features, I suppose.

Today I played around with Technorarti's popular feature which delineates the top keywords users search, the top blogs favorited by readers, and blogs that have the most sites liking to them. Looking at the top searches is like being faced with a randomly weird cross-section of America: You see tech terminology, tech geeks, country music stars, tabloid celebrities, comic books and video games, popular websites, etc. I saw words that are deeply etched into popular culture and then words that are utterly meaningless and completely unkown to me.

I took a peek at some of the top 100 blogs favorited by Technorati users. In particular I explored 43 folders and Postsecret. Postsecret is more up my alley. It reminds me of the humor, creativity, and visual escape I used to find in Found Magazine.

Then I tried searching "Learning 2.0" in Technorati's blog posts, tags, and blog directory. I added the quotes because without them the search engine was adding an implicit or (vs. and) and giving me only half of the equation I was looking for. The results became more relevant and more centrally focused on learning 2.0 as I moved from searching blog posts, to tags, to uncovering blogs via the directory whose partial defining feature was blogging about learning 2.0. In searching "learning 2.0" I also discovered a lot of the blogs created by my coworkers as part of sjlibrary's 23 Things exercise. I even turned up my own blog which was a bit startling.

Part of the purpose of this lesson was think about tags, their advantages and disadvantages. So this is what I think right now at this specific moment: Tagging is an uncontrolled vocabulary which basically mearns that it's a mixed bag. Tagging allows each user to be as vague or specific, universal or idiosynchratic, terse or verbose as they wish. Some taggers may attempt to work in a shared vocabulary with others and some are more personal or obscure with their tags. Bu what level of description is best? I guess like everthing in life, it depends. It depends on the situation, intention, and needs of the user.

Week Six, Thing Thirteen

I've been working with del.icio.us this afternoon, a social bookmarking management tool that allows users to store, tag, and share their favorite websites in one place. Using del.icio.us gives users the advantage of accessing their favorite sites from any computer and discovering new sites other users have tagged and saved to their personal (or shared) del.icio.us pages.

Some of the websites I visit often have short urls that are easy to type and remember. Other web favorites are easy to access since my home computer will recognize the beginning of the address and complete the rest of the url for me. However, del.icio.us would make it much easier to save and access all those sites I may not use very often or sites I want to explore in the future but don't have time to look at in the present. For example, I could save sites with tax forms and tax information, cooking and baking recipes, health topics, movie and music reviews, etc.

When I worked at a more traditional reference desk, staff members would often bookmark websites for future patron interactions and reference queries. Having a del.icio.us page would have be excellent. Not only could staff members access it from any computer in the building (we worked on three floors), but you could share the del.icio.us page with library patrons who could access it from any internet connection whether they have library cards or not.

I looked at a few del.icio.us pages maintained by public libraries. It's interesting that three of the libraries listed on the sjlibrary learning 2.0 blog (La Grange Park, Lansing, and Thomas Ford) are libraries from Metropolitan Library System; the system I worked in until last year. This is perhaps due to the influence of Jenny Levine, who used to work for MLS.

Week Five, Thing Twelve

I've been experimenting with rollyo this morning, a free web service that allows you to build your own search engine and search multiple websites of your choosing. I played around with some of the preexisting searchrolls, such as free photos and quick quotes. With the free photo searchroll I found a public image for my last blog post. Using quick quotes I discovered this statement from Eleanor Roosevelt; "It is not fair to ask of others what you are unwilling to do yourself."

Here's my personal contribution to rollyo, a customized comix & creators searchroll.

I added five sites to my searchroll: Fantagraphics, Quimbys, noflyingnotights, Comiclopedia, and Friends of Lulu. These are some of the sites I used to search quite a bit when I was selecting comix and graphic novels for the teen section of medium size public library with a large collection budget.

Select Search Engine...comix & creatorsSearch The Web

Powered by Rollyo

Week Five, Thing Eleven

Housing Maps / Craigslist mashup
Originally uploaded by GISuser.com.

Wow! I've been exploring some of the winners and honorable mentions from the Web 2.0 Awards and I have to say I am really amazed by what's out there.

The first site I looked at was citeulike, listed as an honorable mention in the books category. The purpose of the site is to help "academic" types organize, store, and share the scholarly journal articles they are reading. This way they can access their collection of reading material from any computer and import the citation into Endnote or BibText when ready. The other neat thing is they can share their reading list with others and see who else is reading articles of interest. Because I live with someone who regularly leaves giant piles of journal articles lying around the house, citeulike struck me as a neato innovation.

Next I discovered HousingMaps.com a mashup of google maps and apartment listings from craigslist. From the homepage you can select a city and a price range or click on a city icon within a United States map. The default setting is rental units but you can also choose to search home sales, rooms for rent, or sublets.

I clicked on the icon for San Francisco Peninsula and then clicked the For Rent option. The left panel of the page displayed a google map with colored icons indicating available rentals. When you click on a colored icon, the price, location, and title of the rental listing is displayed, along with photos when available. The title of the rental listing is hyperlinked directly to the original craiglist posting. On the right side of the page, alongside the interactive map, is a list of the apartments in your selected area with their price, bedroom size, city, and date posted to craigslist. I can't tell you how useful this would have been last fall when we were looking for an apartment.

Week Five, Thing Ten

Happy Birthday Daniel!
Originally uploaded by Better than my first Poloroid.

This photo comes courtesy of redkid.net's sign generator page: A really fun site I linked to from the Generator Blog. G Blog contains a very impressive collection of image and text generators scrolled chronologically in blog style, as well as indexed a to z in a right sidebar panel.
This image was created using the movie marquee generator and was made in honor of my sweetie who will be having a birthday in nine days.

To create the image I simply inserted my text into three blank text boxes and then clicked the "showtime" or submit button. The generator automatically overlaid my text into the preexisting image to create the personalized image you see above. I then right clicked the new image and saved it in my pictures folder. I added the picture to my flickr account and from flickr I was able to create a blog post that was imported into my blogger account. Wa-la!

Week Four, Thing Nine

So today I checked out sites that collect news feeds, specifically feedster.com, Topix.net, and technorati. I have to say I wasn't all that impressed. Overall, it seems the most current RSS feeds are often generated and listed first whereas relevancy to my topic was often low. I searched the same topics on all three sites, namely Barack Obama, Democratic contender for the 2008 U.S. Presidential race, and whippets, a breed of dog similar to greyhounds.

Feedster did allow you to sort results by relevancy and that did improve my findings somewhat but I still wasn't all that intrigued by the results.

Topix.net listed results from a wide variety of news sources; newspapers, television news sites, public radio, online magazines etc. but the hits, again, were not all that relevant. They most often just mentioned Obama in passing.

Technorati allows users the option to search through blog posts, tags, or blog directories. I was pleased to see the option but I don't know how much it helped me as the top three results for whippets were all written in Dutch. Did those Dutch writers mean whippets the dogs, whippets the aerosal whipcream spray, or some other usage of the word?? What I did like about technorati is that it sorted the results by format, so you could tab into blogs that matched your search, photo and video results, music, people, and events. The event section was especially useful for my Barack Obama search as it gave me various meetings and gatherings across the country by people who want to support this candidate.

I guess what it boils down to is that (in this particular attempt) I didn't find information that useful to me. I think I tend to have a handful of trusted sources that I like to turn to for information, news, and entertainment, and some of the random sources generated by the RSS collectors did not seem that interesting or trustworthy. I remain interested but unconvinced.

Week Four, Thing Eight

I've known vaguely about RSS and aggregators like bloglines for a few years. I remember my second year of grad school a bunch of my fellow classmates were talking about bloglines and which feeds they subscribed to. At the time I didn't have a home computer and thought of aggregators as something I would do once I had internet access outside of the University labs. And three years later, here I am, finally getting on board.

I can see how useful aggregators are for people who like to stay current with a lot of online news sources and blogs. And I had no problem finding eight or nine sites to add to my blogroll. I wonder though how much time I will devote to staying current with the posts. Outside of work I tend to devote little time to the Internet, besides a bit of email, online banking, and a quick read of a news headline or two. I think its something that I'll need to incorporate into my routine; perhaps devote twenty mintues of my lunchtime to checking in on my blogroll. And I think I'll need to keep the number of RSS feeds fairly low in order for it to be manageable.

So without further ado, here is the url to my public blogroll: http://www.bloglines.com/public/GingerRenee

Week Three, Thing Seven

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Originally uploaded by aNA_vaLDES.

This week I discovered Library Thing, an online service that among many other things, allows people to catalog their book collections. You can tag your books as you like, export your data, and, what I like most of all, find book recommendations.

Currently, I'm reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. A most outstanding novel and one of the best books I've read in some time. When I type the title of this book into Library Thing's Book Suggester, it tells me that 3200 people who use Library Thing own this book, only 95 books are more popular, 55 people have reviewed the title on Library Thing, and it shows books with similar tags, library subjects, other books owned by people who own this title, and finally, suggestions for other books to read.

I have read and loved at least four of the ten titles recommended by Library Thing. Amazing! Can you guess which books? All right, I'll tell you: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, The Hours by Michael Cunningham, plus I've read and enjoyed books by Dave Eggers, one of the recommended authors. How utterly fantastic.

Week Three, Thing Six

Daniel Outside
Originally uploaded by Better than my first Poloroid.

How timely. This morning I was reading a post from a friend's blog and he mentioned mashups. The word caught my attention. I could guess at the meaning, but it was a term I hadn't read or heard before. Then, what do you know: Today's Excercise on Learning 2.0 is all about Flickr mashups or hybrid web projects that take one application, such as Flickr, and merge or enhance it with another application. I clearly don't spend enough time playing on the web.

The first mashup I explored was the postcard browser on Flickr. I looked at photos of the Ukrainian Village, my old neighborhood in Chicago, and felt a bit homesick. Next, I made this mock magazine cover of my Valentine and our pup Lola using fd's Flickr Toys. It was so so easy. Just upload a digital photo, fill in content fields, and bingo, it was done.
There are so many smart people playing with the web.

Week Three, Thing Five part II

We just missed Calvin Trillin!
Originally uploaded by KatDeiss.

I stumbled across this photo of a Calvin Trillin flyer in Flickr. When I was a kid, my Dad had copies of Trillin's political humor collections lying around, but it wasn't until I was 19 or 20 that I read Trillin on my own. He quickly became one of my favorite writers. His books always felt like home. Trillin, with his wry humor, reminded me of my Dad. And Alice, with her smart practicality seemed a lot like my mother. When Trillin talked about his urban adventures with his two little girls it brought back memories of Saturdays when my Dad would take my sister and I on downtown adventues of our own. We'd go to greasy diners, European coffeeshops, and my Dad would try to entice us into exploring the city's steam tunnels. Joking, of course, but I always took him seriously.

On Saturday I read About Alice, Trillin's latest book and tribute to his late wife. I found it beautifull written and quite moving. I wish I had time to say more. Perhaps later.

Week Three, Thing Five part I

Today I've been exploring Flickr. I've used the site before, to view photos that friends have shared or that folks have blogged about, but I never really examined Flickr that closely or thought much about it. I guess because I'm not much of a camera person. I like viewing other people's photos but I don't often take pictures myself.

I can totally see how fun and valuable Flickr must be. With our wedding coming up, Flickr would be a great place to gather pictures from our friends and family members, as well as post our own. And my fiance is a camera person: He owns a 35 mm, complete with tripod and zoom lens. Flickr would be a great place for him to store and share photos.

So, I guess I'm a convert. Too bad I don't have any pictures to add. I'll have to go home and steal some of D's.

Week Two, Thing Four

Well, I am about to register this blog with the Virtual Services Team responsible for this project. This makes it official. I am committing to this project and therefore need to make this exercise a priority in my work day.

Because my workplace is very busy, I will need to set aside uninterrupted time, set realistic goals, and avoid being distracted by the ever array of new projects. And I will need to embark on this adventure with curiosity, enthusiasm, and patience -- as things will go wrong. Problems will arise. Am I a realist or pessimist? Either way, I will work through whatever challenges arise and view them as learning opportunities. I sound like Greg Kinnear in Little Miss Sunshine. Maybe I should just be Olive and go in assuming I will conquer all.

Week Two, Thing Three

Okay, so what's with all Thing 1, Thing 2, and numbered weeks? Well, like I said this blog is part of a learning exercise encouraged and supported by my employer.

Over the course of several weeks, each participant in this project will learn 23 Things. This blog will mark my progress through the 23 items. What are the 23 Things? Online tools and technologies such as Flickr, RSS Feeds, Wiki's, etc.

Gotta it? Two hours later, I think its finally coming together for me at least.

Week One, Thing Two

As part of this learning project i am participating in, I watched an online tutorial on the Seven and Half Habits of Lifelong Learners:

1. Begin with a goal
2. Accept responsibility for your own learning
3. View problems as challenges
4. Have confidence in yourself as competent and effective
5. Create your own learning toolbox
6. Use technology to your advantage
7. Teach/mentor others
7.5 Play

We were asked to consider which of the seven are the hardest and easiest for us to tackle.

For me the easiest is number five. I'm good at finding and gathering resources that will help me, whether those resources are books, people, information, etc.

The hardest would be number three. I can be very impatient with myself when I make mistakes and I like things to work out smoothly as planned. Problems annoy me and can wear me out. Usually, after initial annoyance or unhappiness, I am able to reasses the situation and view the problem as challenge that can be addressed and dealt with in a positive way. I'd like to learn to skip the panic that comes when problems first arrise and be more patient with working through things that have gone wrong.

Week One, Thing One

What is this blog all about anyway?
This blog is essentially a learning exercise, a chance for me to explore new technologies as part of an online course provided by my employer. The course is broken up into weekly excercises. This blog will serve as place for me to post what I learn, as well as my thoughts and ideas as I complete each weekly task. Wow, it all sounds so serious! Hopefully, there will be some humor too.