Thing 23 - Woo hoo!

This has been a very useful and very interesting experience. I've urged several other library staff and former staff to participate. I hope that the list of Things and instructions will remain up for a long time. 

Some of the Things have had a direct impact on my work and I've been able to incorporate some of them into my library website. The timing was great! I learned how to work with Flickr and PictureTrail just at the time that we began a big construction project. I've put photo slideshows up on both of those sites and then added a couple videos to YouTube. The timing could not have been better.

The online productivity tools were surprising to me - things I never expected to find on the web. Also the online document sharing abilities.

And then some of the things I'll probably never use again - like the avatar. But it's still useful to know something about the process.

I would definitely do the next 23 things.

I really enjoyed the Common Craft videos as part of the Things. Whoever worked on putting together this overall project did a good job. Most things were very clearly explained and the resources were useful. Thing 17 - ELM Productivity Tools - was the one that seemed to be the densest. I know there were some participants who weren't familiar with the databases and therefore had difficulty with the tools for them.

My overall feeling during this project was amazement. The variety of tools and software and web capabilities is truly mind-boggling. What a lot of truly imaginative and gifted people there are working on these kinds of sites! I'm so glad to be more conversant with what I hear or read about. Thanks for providing this opportunity!

Thing 22 - Keeping Up

I HAVE learned a lot from this project. And perhaps one of the most important things is that "I don't have time" - even when I DON'T have time! - isn't a good enough reason to not explore new tools/websites/services. I can't possibly finish all the work that I have to do, even if I don't try to keep up with technology trends. So I should find out about those trends and see if they can help me with my workload.

I clicked through all the links listed in this Thing and added quite a few to my Bloglines account and then added a couple websites to del.ici.ous (or wherever the dots are...).

I'm really glad that I've found some of the tech-related blogs and will make a point of reading them (and some others, just for fun!) regularly. Taking some time at the beginning and at the end of the day, if possible, is the easiest way that I've found to keep up with my email and check blog postings. It also eases me into and out of the work day.

There's a comment at the end of this Thing description about Things 24-56 - with a link. I followed that.....and there are certainly many more Things to explore! (It's called Library 2.1!) This is a learning/training project for the Charlotte & Mecklenburg County library system. I also looked at their first 23 Things list, which is a little different than the one we've been working on. So I will explore that as well. They seem to get started more slowly than we did, so I'll have to see if they covered as much territory as our 23 Things.

Thing 21 - Other Social Networks

It seems there are social networking groups for all interests and tastes. Are people spending more and more time online and less and less time in relationships with (gasp!) other actual people? Or are the social networks a way of connecting far-flung people with similar interests who may not know any "real" people with those interests? Do they lessen people's loneliness?

I joined the 23 Things Ning group, uploaded a photo, left a comment, explored around on this group, a couple other groups and a few other social networks. Lots of interesting things and lots of groups where you really need to spend some serious time in order to figure out their best use. I think of the Ning groups, I liked the MPR ones - Minnesota Readers and Minnesota Life - the best. 

I thought the WebJunction article on building social networks at your library was very interesting. And it had a couple links that I followed - a discussion board on how to create a social library led to a blog that listed that blogger's choices for the top Web 2.0 tools. So I found a new list of tools to explore and a tech-related blog to follow.

Thing 20 - MySpace & Facebook

55% of teens are on MySpace - that's a phenomenal statistic. At PLA there was a teen librarian talking about libraries who ban MySpace and Facebook, which is essentially saying to kids "we don't want you here in our library." What a dreadful message to the taxpayers of tomorrow: the library doesn't care about being relevant to you.

The Hennepin and Denver PL pages are interesting because they provide links to the basic library services. So I guess that's how a library should look at developing this kind of presence - as just another means of making the public (most likely the younger public!) aware of what the library has to offer. My library has not discussed whether we should be on MySpace or Facebook, but we're having a hard enough time right now keeping up with the blogs we've already begun.

 I guess I'd like to hear more about how HCL and Denver feel about their MySpace pages - do they think (or know) that they're reaching actual teens in their area, are they seeing an increase in library use, etc. It looked like lots of the "friends" listed on both pages are either authors or other libraries, and I don't know how useful that is.

The teen librarian at PLA (from a suburban library in Ohio) says she has a lot of kids contacting her on her MySpace page ...... OK, I guess it was her personal page instead of her library page. I haven't been able to find it through MySpace's search functions. But she's ended up using it to do a lot of promotion of library events.

The upshot of a lot of these tools, including MySpace and Facebook, is that they're only as useful or relevant as they are current. So time must be allocated in order to keep them updated and changing visually.

Thing 19 - Podcasts

I have listened to podcasts before and have subscribed to some through my iTunes software. As with lots of things on the Internet, the quality and usefulness of podcasts vary a LOT! I've listened to some that at first glance appeared to be potentially useful and interesting but turned out to actually be largely a waste of time --- unless you like to hear a couple guys making lame jokes and laughing a lot at what they say to each other.

I signed up for the Grammar Grater podcast at MPR and listened to a couple episodes from other MPR podcasts. In the Minitex podcast list, I found an interview with former Duluth Public Library director Beth Kelly. I also listened to a podcast of teens from Connecticut reviewing their favorite 2007 books. That one was really well done, with several kids talking and music between the sections. Nice production.

It would be great to be able to add podcasts to our website - things such as author talks, maybe somebody talking about new books. We considered trying to do a podcast when Greg Mortenson (author of THREE CUPS OF TEA) appeared recently as part of our One Book, One Community project. The response to his appearance was so overwhelming that I think being able to offer a podcast would have been wonderful for people who weren't able to get tickets to his live appearance. We just didn't have enough time to pull together the equipment or the logistics, although I think that it's not as difficult as it may appear.

Thing 18 - YouTube

How fun! I found library drill teams and library Christmas cards. The library dominoes were great. 

I added some video to my library website a couple weeks ago. We're doing a big remodeling project and I took 3 short videos with my digital camera of the stack movers moving a big heavy range of bookshelves. Here's the first one. The hardest part was converting the footage from the camera into a format that YouTube could use. It had to be compressed and took me a while to figure that out. But the process of uploading was really easy.

(My handbell ensemble also has a video on YouTube. I didn't take this, or upload it, but I'm in it!)

I think YouTube and Google Video are great ways to publicize library programs, present tutorials on how to use library resources or the catalog. There was a great video at PLA last week that Denver PL (I think) used to advertise their teen summer reading program. This was a great idea and I'm hoping that we can do more with video here.

Thing 17 - ELM productivity tools

I have some experience with the ELM databases, but it's mostly the technical "this-isn't-working-how-do-I-fix-it" kind of experience.

I did the search for social networking in ProQuest and found some interesting articles that I both downloaded and emailed to myself. 

I had the same trouble with the EBSCO db that others did (according to the comments at the bottom of the Thing 17 page) - didn't get a "create search alert" link or a way to add the RSS feed, and couldn't get the QuickTime videos to play. So much works so well - it spoils us for when things don't work!

I also clicked around some in NetLibrary. Many of the titles indicated they were unavailable to my library, but they did look interesting. Hmmm.....ILL?

Some other 23Thing-ers blogs have indicated that they were totally unfamiliar with the ELM resources. I've done a little bit of searching - partly to make sure things were working, partly to help create a training demo for kids when we were doing some outreach programming, and partly when helping patrons ask questions. Databases are one of those things where it is extremely useful to go back and do a refresher course periodically, both to remind yourself of what features are available and to see what features have been added. What a great service from the state these ELM databases are!

Thing 16 - Student 2.0

The Research Project Calculator looks great! I've had a note about this for a long time to add to our pages of useful links for students, and I'm going to make sure it gets added today! We also have pages of links for teachers and for homeschoolers, so I'll add the teachers' info links to both of them.

Links to our pages:

        Sites for Teens - Homework Help

Sites for Teachers - General Activities

Sites for Homeschoolers - Education

We've wanted to do some presentations to teachers about library resources and how we can help both them and their students. This would be a perfect resource to demonstrate! Our only problem (ha!) is time and staff.

The college level Assignment Calculator also looks great. What wonderful resources these both are for students! I like that this one breaks the project down into more steps. It's a less visually intimidating appearance (fewer links explaining each step), although since there are more steps, the amount of time the student has suggested to work on each step is shorter. 

I'm really impressed with these tools.

Thing 15 - Fun & Games

Aargghhh! I'm going fer Puzzle Pirates! Who doesn't like a good pirate!? But I downloaded the files.....and launched the game.....and got a "sorry, the server must be down for maintenance" message! Rats!

I have played a few games online - not the big role-playing ones (I don't have enough time to devote) but other, shorter games. In the iGoogle homepage I set up, there's an online version of Tetris - one of my all-time favorites. And when I was working on a catalog listing of a game my library purchased for use in the library, I found there was an online version. So I tried it. It's addictive! I had to buy my own copy. I have sucked up many hours playing Zuma. And I hear that Bejeweled is also fun. Find them at Pop-Cap Games.

I'm off to try Puzzle Pirates again....

[next day] Well, Puzzle Pirates didn't work when I tried it again yesterday and it didn't work today - on either my Mac or my PC. I tried both playing online and downloading their free client. So then I went to Second Life, registered, downloaded stuff, waited for the email verification.....and it won't play either. It could be there's just too much Internet traffic or - perhaps more likely - our computer systems are blocking these kinds of sites. And my Internet access at home is dialup, so way too slow to do online gaming.

I remember seeing a lot about Second Life a couple years ago, maybe when the Info Island was first set up, and then it really dropped off. I had totally forgotten about it. I was thinking that it was perhaps not as popular as it used to be, and then the Info Island blog talked about a big unveiling that happened two days ago.

We will hopefully be providing some gaming opportunities in our library in the future - first for teens but perhaps expanding to other groups, such as seniors. Gaming for seniors is a big thing now.

Thing 14 - LibraryThing

I kinda like LibraryThing for Libraries - I wish I'd had enough time at PLA last week to stop at their booth and get some more information. It would be very nice for patrons to be able to quickly get this kind of similar book recommendations - and particularly for fiction where there aren't as many subject headings.

I'm on a listserv of readers where a bunch of people are quite taken with GoodReads, so I need to check that out. (On the other hand, I seem to be creating a huge list of books I want to read very nicely on my own without getting recommendations from outside....I need to live a very long time!)

I've added a few books to my profile on LibraryThing and clicked around a bit. This is a site that probably requires you to spend quite a bit of time on it in order to reap much benefit.

Comments

One unfortunate thing I've noticed is that some of these online applications don't display in Safari. I've done all the reading and exploring on Safari, and nearly all the creation of stuff there as well and that's worked fine. But now for example, in Safari - on the same computer that created the Google Calendar - the Calendar Grid that's linked in the post below this brings up my website's html page with the title, the top navigation bar and a big empty space.

In a real-world application, I've been adding lots of PictureTrail slideshows to our website, showing our library construction project progress. And, foreshadowing of Thing 18, I've included videos of moving bookstacks.

Thing 13 - Online Productivity

The personalized homepage things are way fun! I experimented with each of the three ones mentioned - Google, PageFlakes and Yahoo - and I think I like Google best. I will try it as a personal homepage for a while.

Let's see if the 23 Things coundown widget worked:

Hmmm.....so far, it got the title and the colors right, but the countdown isn't running. Does that give me endless time to complete this??? Didn't think so!

I liked Google Calendar, and created a calendar of events grid for my library:

Calendar of Events Grid  (click ahead to April - that's where I started)

We've had a list of events, 2 months at a time, with links to the webpages describing the events, for several years but people also like to be able to see events plotted out on a grid. One feature I really like about Google Calendar is the ability to have events recur, so the storytime that is on the second Tuesday of each month actually appears on the second Tuesday of every month until you tell it to stop.

I tried the Remember the Milk to do list site. I love To Do lists! (I know, how sad... but it frees up space in my head!) I've used my computer word processor to create To Do lists both at work and at home for a long, long time, so I am a big fan of the concept. I was saying to a colleague that I wasn't sure what the work application of the online to do list is, and she immediately said that it would be great for join projects. So we may try that a little later in the spring on one of our big annual projects.

Backpack looked great! I think that would be very fun to explore if only the free version had more features.

This has been a fun "Thing." I'm looking forward to exploring some of the other sites when I have more time.

Thing 12 - Not Digging It

I looked through all four of the sites (Mixx, Digg, Newsvine and Reddit) on a couple different days and looked for the same kinds of information on each site. I liked Newsvine the best, I think, and also Mixx. It seemed to me that you have to work harder at filtering Digg in order to get the good stuff. The homepage list includes so much "junk" that it lessens the credibility of the rest of the stuff for me. Reddit is not visually appealing - it looks like a link farm.

I registered at Newsvine and added a link ("seeded the vine") to a news story from BBC-UK. In the process of clicking through a bunch of pages, I saw a story that later I wanted to go back and read. At that point, I realized you can't search for anything on Newsvine - at least I couldn't find a search box. There are plenty of lists and links and subject-like headings, but no search box. That's unfortunate! I also registered at Mixx and added the same BBC news story. Mixx does have a search box, but it took me a while to find the story I added, and I knew what the keyword tags were!

I'm much more likely to keep up with news by looking at the specific news sites that I like: BBC, NBC, CNN, etc. I'm sure you can find quirky, off-the-beaten-path stories not covered by mainstream press, but you're going to have to spend a lot of time on these sites and look through a lot of junk.

Thing 11 - Delicious!

Del.icio.us is a great way to keep track of all the various sites someone's interested in, on a variety of subjects. I followed some of the tags around. The usefulness of the sites varies, of course, like everything on the Internet. I also uploaded most of the bookmarks from my office computer; now I need an opportunity to access them from another computer to see what a life-saver it can be.

I see how it can work in an educational setting, but I'm not sure how useful it is for libraries. We keep subject lists of websites as html pages on our website. Do other libraries transfer these to del.icio.us tags? How is this more useful for the patron? I'm going to have to think about this and talk with some of our librarians...

I looked at the library sites mentioned. Some of them have seemingly random lists of bookmarks. Menasha Library does have a subject list, so there's some organization of sites, which seems more useful. San Mateo organized their links by Dewey number - useful to their own library staff, I imagine, and to other librarians but less accessible for the general public.

Thing 10 - Wikis

Well, wikis are kinda cool. I played around with Minnewiki (MN Public Radio's music resource) and Wikipedia, adding some things to both. Interested? Search for Strikepoint under Groups on Minnewiki. And I added a link to a MP3 file in the handbell entry on Wikipedia. What I don't know is how you know something has been changed. For example, in the Common Craft video about the 4 friends going camping, how did each person know when they should look at the wiki and who else had already seen and made changes? [OK, I have seen that there's a tab labeled Watch in some of these wikis, but I haven't -obviously - explored that.]

I expected more from the Library Success/best practices wiki. I thought there would be more narrative in a lot of the categories. The article "Using Wikis to Create Online Communities" has a section about using wikis in libraries that has some good ideas. I have seen a library online catalog that includes the ability for patrons to comment on/recommend materials. (Can't remember if that was an example for a Thing or if that was linked in a listserv email....) I really like the idea of doing a staff wiki for communication.

Test Doc

This is a test document for

Zoho Writer.

PA ANNOUNCEMENT

Thursday, November 6

6:45 p.m.

May I have your attention, please? This evening we present a free Library Lecture on the Literature of the Mesabi Range, at 7:00 in the Green Room. Library Lectures are sponsored by the Duluth Public Library  and Duluth Schools Community Education. Thank you.

Thing 9 - Collaboration

Well, Google Docs is not at all intuitive. I finally found the link for "take a guided tour." I can see that if you're starting with a text/Word document, it may be an excellent way for people to edit it and see group changes. I wonder if some of the problems with the Declaration is that we're working with an image rather than a text file?

I uploaded a Word doc and played around with it. Yep, this would be useful, and particularly if you were working on a project with people not in your building - something like an MLA or ALA committee or such. So I took my document and published it to my blog and it worked - it's the post two below this, the PA announcement.

I think I like Zoho Writer better, although trying to edit the Declaration was again frustrating. It must be the image vs. text doc thing. I did another sample doc and published it to the blog. I'd like to find a real-world use and try this out.

Oh, wait. I just published this and looked at it, and it posted this message BELOW the two sample documents from Google Docs and Zoho Writer. Hmmm....

I just looked at my last post. It's unfortunate that in the Flick of the new remodeling photos, the photos that I rotated didn't stay that way. I'm not sure what the problem is - in the photo album, they're rotated the correct way.

The other comment I have is that some of these tools are more browser- and platform-dependant than I expected. Some parts of Blogger even are working differently on my Mac than on my PC. So I'm doing some jumping back and forth between machines to work on these. And using IE, I don't even see the Flick/PictureTrail slideshow in the blog! But it does show up in Firefox.

Thing 8 - Sharing Stuff

We're doing a major remodeling project at my library and I turned a set of "before" photos into a Flickr slideshow and posted that link on our remodeling webpage:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/24225477@N08/sets/72157604068579503/show/




And I found a PowerPoint presentation one of our librarians did and uploaded that to Zoho:





Picture Trail. I have a number of friends who use this site regularly, but this is the first time I've tried it. Parts of the process were really frustrating. I uploaded photos in three separate batches, and it was really annoying to have to re-order the photos after each upload. The way to avoid that would be to upload them in the reverse order that you want them to appear....or not to care what the sequence is. I didn't find a way in Flickr to re-order the photos, but at least they showed up in the slideshow in the same order I uploaded them. I should look to see if there's a way to rearrange the order there. There must be. So anyway, here's the Flick of the next batch of construction photos:

Thing 7 - Communication Tools

Email is great - it's a great tool to facilitate communication both within the library and with the outside world. I do really dislike, however, when it is used exclusively within the library INSTEAD of face-to-face communication. Sometimes a phone call or a visit to another desk *is* the best form of communication. But on the whole, email has been a great boost to productivity. It's a way to shoot off a message/ask a question when someone is unavailable in person, it's a way to create a "paper trail" so you don't lose track of something. It's one of the great inventions of the twentieth century!

My problem with email is that I'm on a couple of VERY active lists, and the amount of posts I receive each day is staggering. I could just delete them, but I do get useful information and I hate to just delete unread. So I'm running way, way behind and several times a day I have to scroll through my messages looking for things from "real people." I'm trying very hard to catch up but am also trying to batch the email reading so I'm not constantly turning to it. 

I didn't know a whole lot about IM before reading the "how it works" article, so obviously I've never tried it. The only library application of it that I'm aware of is IM reference service. I think we'd like to try that here once our staffing is improved.<

I also haven't tried text messaging (my cell phone plan does not include it) but I certainly have seen friends use it. It seems a bit cumbersome to me - having to hit number buttons multiple times to get to a particular letter - but I know that people can do it really quickly. I think my library is much more likely to implement IM before doing much with texting.

I've done quite a bit of web conferencing. Some - probably most - has worked really well. Being able to see live demos of a product or get training on an application and at the same time be able to ask your specific questions of someone who really understands the application is invaluable. It's a way we can train many, many more people than we could possibly send to a conference out of town or out of state. But, when web conferencing doesn't work, it's dramatic! There was one notable webinar where about a dozen of our staff people had been freed up to attend, and the Internet connections were soooo sloooow that our screens were about 20 minutes behind what the presenter was talking about! It was a session we had all been really looking forward to - and our library had paid a lot for the webinar - and it was totally useless. When it works, it's absolutely wonderful. When it doesn't, it's pretty frustrating.

Thing 6 - Image generators

Trading card
Originally uploaded by Pointer7

Well, this is WAY fun! I can think of more personal uses than library right now. I'll have to think about that.

Thing 5 - Playing around

The "Spell with Flickr" mashup is fun. And so is Flickr Sudoku (I'm going to email that to my Sudoku-addicted friends!). Flappr is also fun - I'm not sure there's a really useful purpose to it, though.

I think that Flickr photo-sharing can be really wonderful in personal settings. I can also see that being able to house and share photos could be good to add to a blog. For example, we're going to be doing some remodeling at my library and this would be a great way to house the photos so people can see the process and the progress.

Tropical Snowman

Tropical Snowman
Originally uploaded by Pointer7

Here's one of the photos I uploaded to my new Flickr account. Isn't he cute?

Thing 4 - Flickr

I've heard a lot about people using Flickr and I think I looked around the site a couple summers ago, but this is the first time I've taken a little more time to explore. I looked at the photos that were uploaded on my birthday, and then I looked for photos from the Lake District in England, where I was a couple summers ago. Some people are truly amazing photographers! I like that this is a way to protect photographs from fire, computer crashes, etc. So I may need to look into this for my photos at home. I've had a digital camera for a little over a year and have uploaded lots of photos to my computer but haven't printed many yet. Flickr would be a good backup mechanism.

Next day.....well, trying to upload the photo didn't work well. I asked a coworker who blogged that she was finally able to do it with someone else's help, and that worked....sort of. The photo I was trying to do just showed up as a big white blank spot in my blog. And I tried another one of the same person's shots and had the same result. So for some reason she doesn't want anyone to be able to use her photos, I guess. They weren't labeled in any way. So I've looked for another photo (taken by "GA music maker") and was able to get it to display.

Here's the link:

And here's the relevant part of the instructions for why the first photo I wanted wouldn't work:

The things I wanted to paste in above - the link and the instructions - show down below but not in line with the rest of the text. Sigh. I'm going to publish this and go on.

Son of Thing 3 - RSS

Yep - pretty easy to read quickly through blogs using a reader. So I really should have figured this out before!!!!!!!!

Thing 3 - RSS

The problem that I have with blogs is that I forget/don't have time to go back and read them. So RSS should be a great help for that - right?? Now I just need to really MAKE time to check my Bloglines account. I had set this up after a workshop last summer and it was indeed very easy. And there are so many blogs out there on such an incredible variety of topics that it would be pretty easy to spend nearly all your time reading blogs! Not such a great thing in the workplace! 

But I did add some that I had bookmarked in my browser and I will make a point of trying to stay caught up. I have some others bookmarked on another computer that I'll look at and probably add to Bloglines.

As far as which tool was easier, when I set up the Bloglines account last summer, I did a little exploring and did find interesting blogs. But what I think will work better for me is rather than searching for blogs, I need to take note of blogs that I come across other ways - journal articles, listserv emails, websites, etc. - and follow through that way.

OK - off now to check Bloglines!

Thing 2 - Library 2.0

Well, this is both overwhelming and exciting! Where will we find the time? Stephen Abram is right in saying that we find time for things that are important to us, but sometimes that's a bit simplistic. Right now I have a little time to work on this - creating a blog, reading & watching the Library 2.0 info - and last week I didn't. No extra time, no matter how important I might have thought this is. But if we make learning about emerging technologies and envisioning the possibilities a priority, then at some point they will happen. It just can't always be at the "when-I-can-get-around-to-it" part of our to do lists.

I looked at the comments-enabled feature of Hennepin County's catalog. What a great addition! What a way to get people to "buy in" to the importance of libraries. I have no idea if that type of feature is in development for our automation system, but I hope so.

One of these articles talked a lot about staff participation and involvement in these ongoing changes. "We trust our staff and we know that when we expect the best of people that is usually what we get." Again, the "buy in" factor is vital to the success of Library 2.0-like tools. If most, if not all, staff don't believe this kind of change is even desirable, not to mention essential, then a lot of changes are doomed. In my library, we've been dealing with difficult budget situations for so long and the staff is stretched so thin, it's hard to muster up enthusiasm and energy for working out how to implement change. But if we can do so, it *is* invigorating to embark on something new. I don't know how we get beyond cynicism. If the workload were not so overwhelming, then there's more space for contemplating change and service improvements. This is pretty rambling and perhaps more negative than I intend. But it's kinda what I'm thinking about these possibilities.

What I'm looking forward to in the program? Direction. Possibilities. Ideas. 

It *is* exciting.

Thing 1 - Blog & Avatar

This is not something that I ever expected to do, as I don't feel a need to share my life on the Internet. On the other hand, I've found blogs I enjoy reading, so perhaps turn about is fair play!

One of the things we're really lacking at my library is time to learn and learn about new things, so this program, which mandates some learning time, will be great. Setting up the blog was very easy and took only a few minutes. I've been to workshops previously where we set up blogs, so I did know that it wasn't difficult. 

So, creating the avatar was fun! It's a lot like playing paper dolls, but with the instant computer-y gratification of seeing changes immediately implemented. I didn't realize there were all those choices available - fun outfits, subtle changes in things like eyeglass colors (!!), backgrounds and even pets (but no springer spaniels! :(  ). Very cool. I can see how these things (blogs, avatars, etc.) can become addictive time-suckers!