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!
Saturday, January 17, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, January 3, 2009
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.
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
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
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