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.