IT'S OVER!
It feel as if we just barely started doing this and already we're moving beyond it. Yeah, if we had another program like this on a topic I was even vaguely interested in I would defintely want to participate. It's educational and it can be nice to break up the work day with something outside of your usual duties.
I feel strongly that there are things I've been reticent to explore on my own (more from my considerable entropy regarding certain things and fear that they were a waste of time than anything else) that I benefitted from learning about during these exercises.
I really liked finding the "...in Plain English" series of vidoes and have subscribe to his youtube videocasts so I'm looking forward to more of those. Del.icio.us should keep me up to date on webcomics and dooce's cute pics of Chuck. There were lots of fun and useful activities, and even the ones I wasn't particularly interested in I am glad that I know more about, such as ZoHo and Bloglines.
The things I think will be stickiest for me (i.e. that I am most likely to stick with) are the idea of collaborative wikis built by librarians/library associates, the concept of blogging (which I had sort of taken up again anyway), and the overarching notion of Library 2.0, a place we build *with* the patrons rather than for the patrons. It just makes sense. Who knows what patrons want and need? Patrons.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
I'm so over OverDrive
Considering that I taught a class on how to use OverDrive and got an ERA for doing it, I'm going to give myself a pass on learning to do this again. :)
Oh, screw it. I can't come up with a witty title...
...about Podcasting. Although I did find a podcast I'm super excited about! The Poetry Foundation has a podcast of poets reading their poetry and discussing them. Hopefully Matthew is reading this because this might be good for his Poetry Discussion Group at Wellington.
I added it to bloglines, because the exercise said to, but honestly bloglines is not for me. I will be adding it to my iTunes at home though.
I added it to bloglines, because the exercise said to, but honestly bloglines is not for me. I will be adding it to my iTunes at home though.
The Tube of You
This is one of my favorite all time YouTube vidoes. I love music covers.
I also love poetry. There are tons of excellent poems you can hear on YouTube, which could make a really cool library program. There is a fantastic series of videos created by JWTNY. Check this one out.
Other videos that might be fun to have on our library site include clips of programs as publicity. Also I can see having small edutainment videos such as, How to videos related to recent programs (for people that couldn't make it to the program), and videos of librarians reading stories (for people that couldn't make it to storytime).
I also love poetry. There are tons of excellent poems you can hear on YouTube, which could make a really cool library program. There is a fantastic series of videos created by JWTNY. Check this one out.
Other videos that might be fun to have on our library site include clips of programs as publicity. Also I can see having small edutainment videos such as, How to videos related to recent programs (for people that couldn't make it to the program), and videos of librarians reading stories (for people that couldn't make it to storytime).
Friday, June 27, 2008
The Web 2.0 Winnowing
So I was researching a potential program I want to do on Science Projects and Graphing and came across an excellent site that makes it fairly easy for anyone to make a graph (it's much easier than Excel, but still requires a minimal understanding of how graphs work).
I was multitasking to see whether the last few of the 23 Things had been published while also looking for data to test the graphing software with. I decided it might be fun to graph participation in the 23 Things activities over the course of the nine weeks, using the numbers from the now updated 23 Things Progress Reports.
Below is the graph. We don't have any data (at least that a cursory exam could find) for Weeks 1 and 2 and Week 5 is absent because it was a Play week, so no data was collected. I did expect a downtrend just based on anecdotal evidence here at the branch, but I didn't expect the great purge. We've lost almost 3/4 of the participants! The steady downtrend makes me wonder whether it was something about the program itself, the way it was administered, or the difficulty of trying to squeeze this in to our daily schedules that lead to the decline. The big drop that occured presumably during week 5 also begs the question, What the heck happened there? Again from anecdotal evidence I am hearing that it was a combination of those factors along with simple information overload. People with next to no computer knowledge were overwhelmed by the number of things they felt expected to learn in such a short period of time.
I was multitasking to see whether the last few of the 23 Things had been published while also looking for data to test the graphing software with. I decided it might be fun to graph participation in the 23 Things activities over the course of the nine weeks, using the numbers from the now updated 23 Things Progress Reports.
Below is the graph. We don't have any data (at least that a cursory exam could find) for Weeks 1 and 2 and Week 5 is absent because it was a Play week, so no data was collected. I did expect a downtrend just based on anecdotal evidence here at the branch, but I didn't expect the great purge. We've lost almost 3/4 of the participants! The steady downtrend makes me wonder whether it was something about the program itself, the way it was administered, or the difficulty of trying to squeeze this in to our daily schedules that lead to the decline. The big drop that occured presumably during week 5 also begs the question, What the heck happened there? Again from anecdotal evidence I am hearing that it was a combination of those factors along with simple information overload. People with next to no computer knowledge were overwhelmed by the number of things they felt expected to learn in such a short period of time.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Currently Reading: Goblin Quest, Goblin Hero, and Goblin War
Just a quick note about Jig. Jig is an accidentally brave little (okay runtish) goblin who over the course of his three books so far has had to deal with dragons, necromancers, pixies (multiple times!), and multiple gods! This is a smart, funny fantasy series that still feels fresh three books in. Highly recommended for snarky teens, adults, and fantasy aficionados throughout the kingdom.
Goblin Quest, by Jim C. Hines
Goblin Hero, by Jim C. Hines
Goblin War, by Jim C. Hines
Goblin Quest, by Jim C. Hines
Goblin Hero, by Jim C. Hines
Goblin War, by Jim C. Hines
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Web 2.0 Award winners
This was a fun list to look through. Two special favorites are imcooked and guess-the-google.
Guess the Google is a game built on a google image aggregator. It presents a montage of google image results and asks you to guess what the search term was that led to them. It's a good brain exercise if nothing else and highlights some of the fun "unintended" results of Web 2.0 technology and its evolution.
Im cooked is a subject specific content collection of user made cooking shows! This is so great for someone like me who sometimes doesn't quite "get" the instructions in a recipe and could benefit from seeing exactly what poaching an egg looks like. In addition to simple cooking processes like these there are lots of entire recipes demonstrated, in cooking show style, with youtube-ish production values. It's fun to poke around in if you're a foodie.
Sara also had a super cool idea while doing her 23 things assignment this week. She suggested the library have a contest to make a song and a video promoting the library to appear on our myspace page! I love it. I suggested she pitch it to Nicole, who seems to really be looking for people's feedback and ideas on how to improve things.
Guess the Google is a game built on a google image aggregator. It presents a montage of google image results and asks you to guess what the search term was that led to them. It's a good brain exercise if nothing else and highlights some of the fun "unintended" results of Web 2.0 technology and its evolution.
Im cooked is a subject specific content collection of user made cooking shows! This is so great for someone like me who sometimes doesn't quite "get" the instructions in a recipe and could benefit from seeing exactly what poaching an egg looks like. In addition to simple cooking processes like these there are lots of entire recipes demonstrated, in cooking show style, with youtube-ish production values. It's fun to poke around in if you're a foodie.
Sara also had a super cool idea while doing her 23 things assignment this week. She suggested the library have a contest to make a song and a video promoting the library to appear on our myspace page! I love it. I suggested she pitch it to Nicole, who seems to really be looking for people's feedback and ideas on how to improve things.
Welcome to Zoho
So this is my zoho doc. It's cool to have access to a pretty full featured word processor even if you don't have one installed. It seems like an extension of the democratizing ideals behind Web 2.0.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Wiki Qwiki
Another great Lee LeFever video (I recommend the Social Media in Plain English video as a complement to this entire 23things exercise) and an interesting look at a thorny topic: Wikis.
Wikipedia is the bane of many teachers and librarians, but so many people use it, because honestly for somethings we are willing to trade veracity for convenience in the same way that we trade security for convenience when we have the computer remember our passwords or set our PIN numbers to 1234. If the information doesn't matter *that* much to you, getting it from a wiki is not a big deal. From what I find when researching things for myself, if I have an easily navigable vetted source for the information I'll turn to it, but if I have no idea where to even begin looking and it's not a matter of life or death I'll trust Wikipedia. It's like having a really smart friend that is overwhelmingly right, but makes mistakes occasionally. Having an incorrect understanding of the origin of pizza won't affect my life in any measurable way, and if I realize that it might, such as if I decided to become a pasta historian, then I know enough to know that I need a better source.
Wikipedia is the duct tape of knowledge... it's good enough for right now.
I can really see wiki functionality shining in areas such as the OPAC where patrons could review and rate materials and add tags that catalogers with limited time and mountains of items pending processing might miss. The OCLC open OPAC which was linked from one of the wiki articles this week did a good job of highlighting this.
I should also mention I played with our own Wiki, which is a collection of employee favorites. It would be neat to set up a staff Wiki to share best practices and coordinate more inter-branch publicity maybe.
That's all for now, I'm working on this at work for a change and the reference desk needs me. :)
Also I got an employee recognition award today. Go me!
Wikipedia is the bane of many teachers and librarians, but so many people use it, because honestly for somethings we are willing to trade veracity for convenience in the same way that we trade security for convenience when we have the computer remember our passwords or set our PIN numbers to 1234. If the information doesn't matter *that* much to you, getting it from a wiki is not a big deal. From what I find when researching things for myself, if I have an easily navigable vetted source for the information I'll turn to it, but if I have no idea where to even begin looking and it's not a matter of life or death I'll trust Wikipedia. It's like having a really smart friend that is overwhelmingly right, but makes mistakes occasionally. Having an incorrect understanding of the origin of pizza won't affect my life in any measurable way, and if I realize that it might, such as if I decided to become a pasta historian, then I know enough to know that I need a better source.
Wikipedia is the duct tape of knowledge... it's good enough for right now.
I can really see wiki functionality shining in areas such as the OPAC where patrons could review and rate materials and add tags that catalogers with limited time and mountains of items pending processing might miss. The OCLC open OPAC which was linked from one of the wiki articles this week did a good job of highlighting this.
I should also mention I played with our own Wiki, which is a collection of employee favorites. It would be neat to set up a staff Wiki to share best practices and coordinate more inter-branch publicity maybe.
That's all for now, I'm working on this at work for a change and the reference desk needs me. :)
Also I got an employee recognition award today. Go me!
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Magically Del.icio.us and the Technocrati Library 2.0
The best thing about this entire weeks exercise from my point of view was the discovery of Del.icio.us and the ...in Plain English series of webcasts on youtube.
Delicious lets me keep track of all the websites and especially blog and webcomics that I mean to read regularly, but never seem to remember to. I created my own delicious page (linked earlier) after adding a few links to the PBCLS Delicious site. (I can't believe no one had added Unshelved yet!)
I looked through Technocrati, and the idea seems to be that it is a highly specialized search engine that indexes blogs and social media and is driven through tag searching rather than more traditional keyword searches. It'll be a good tool to have at my disposal if I ever need to search blogs, but as a library student I'm a bit of a stickler for good sourcing and finding out what Joe Schmoe thinks about something seems of limited usefulness to me. I guess if I wanted to keep up on the buzz surrouding an event and get the unvarnished "man on the street" opinion it would be a good source for it.
The idea of Library 2.0 seems great, but I'm not sure whether our system is ready for it. We're doing the 23 things and we've got a new webmaster that seems to be making some strides (kudos on the incremental improvements of the homepage, though I would have probably taken it to formula and started fresh), but what I hear again and again from my peers is that at every level innovation is looked upon skeptically. From minor changes in shelving materials in the workroom to major rethinking of library policies, my friends in the system only seem to hear one word. "No." I think because the collaborative everyone's-ideas-matter nature of Library 2.0 is so counter to the way our system is run some retraining is going to be needed. We'll get to Library 2.0 eventually, we just need to get some Librarians 2.0 first.
Delicious lets me keep track of all the websites and especially blog and webcomics that I mean to read regularly, but never seem to remember to. I created my own delicious page (linked earlier) after adding a few links to the PBCLS Delicious site. (I can't believe no one had added Unshelved yet!)
I looked through Technocrati, and the idea seems to be that it is a highly specialized search engine that indexes blogs and social media and is driven through tag searching rather than more traditional keyword searches. It'll be a good tool to have at my disposal if I ever need to search blogs, but as a library student I'm a bit of a stickler for good sourcing and finding out what Joe Schmoe thinks about something seems of limited usefulness to me. I guess if I wanted to keep up on the buzz surrouding an event and get the unvarnished "man on the street" opinion it would be a good source for it.
The idea of Library 2.0 seems great, but I'm not sure whether our system is ready for it. We're doing the 23 things and we've got a new webmaster that seems to be making some strides (kudos on the incremental improvements of the homepage, though I would have probably taken it to formula and started fresh), but what I hear again and again from my peers is that at every level innovation is looked upon skeptically. From minor changes in shelving materials in the workroom to major rethinking of library policies, my friends in the system only seem to hear one word. "No." I think because the collaborative everyone's-ideas-matter nature of Library 2.0 is so counter to the way our system is run some retraining is going to be needed. We'll get to Library 2.0 eventually, we just need to get some Librarians 2.0 first.
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