Thing 36.1

I thought I saw a pdf-to-Word generator when I was looking at the online pdf generators the other day. Today I needed to manipulate text from a pdf in order to create a booklist we use as part of our Teen Summer Reading Program - the 2009 Teens Top Ten nominees. I've done this in the past with a lot of cutting and pasting, and then a lot of stripping out unwanted formatting.

Just now I downloaded the pdf to my desktop, uploaded it to the pdf-to-Word generator, waited 2 minutes and then downloaded an .rtf file. Easy! Useful! Woo hoo!!

Thing 37 - Photo Tales.....or, A Lesson in Frustration

Several of these items were not very successful....

Here's an Animoto video:

And here's one that I did of a trip to England:

OK - so those didn't post in the body of the blog.  They did post in the sidebar (eventually), but the width is cut off. In order to post videos to Blogger from Animoto, you have to have a Gmail account. With all of the things I've signed up for during this process, why didn't I sign up for a Gmail account? Just stubbornness, I guess. Perhaps I'll do that later and then try re-posting the videos here.

Here's my collage of the photos of Youth Services at the end of our remodeling last year.

Slide's slideshow:

This was really easy to do. I may delete the music, though.

CaptionBubble didn't work for me (a Mac issue??), but I could add a caption with Captioner. It wouldn't post to the blog, though...

How about a Tiltshift photo:

OK, here's my "story," done with Picnik (which I think will have library uses), Tiltshift and Flickr slideshows:

Thing 36 - Generating some fun

I'm thrilled to find the online pdf converters (Publisher files are often a problem), but when I uploaded a file to try it out, I got an error message saying there were server problems. I'll try that again later, because this would provide a real service for us. I think the password generators could be very useful as well ... as long as you remember to write them down somewhere! (My top tip for anyone doing the Things programs is to write down your usernames and passwords!)

I tried out the little READ posters and the newspaper generator, using a clever press release one of our former librarians wrote for a previous summer reading program.

And Wordle is fun - I did several versions for Strikepoint, which I'll post on the Strikepoint blog, but here's one of them.

I've seen these done before but haven't tried it. Just clicking the Randomize button after you get the initial image is fun. I did a Timetoast timeline for last summer's tour. If I had the photos of the churches where we played, I would have included them.

Oh yeah - way too much fun!

Nancy Eaton's Dewey Decimal Section:

585 Gymnosperms; conifers

Nancy Eaton's birthday: 6/28/1957 = 628+1957 = 2585


Class:
500 Science


Contains:
Math, astronomy, prehistoric life, plants and animals.



What it says about you:
You are fascinated by the world around you, and see it as a puzzle worth exploring. You try to understand how things work and how you can make them better. You might be a nerd.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

Thing 35 - Books, Books, Books

I will confess that I have not done anything with LibraryThing since the first 23 Things last spring. It seemed to me like a lot of work to enter what I own or what I was reading or what I want to read, and then to maintain it. That could all be time that I *was* reading! But there are quite a number of people on one of my listservs who love it and get lots of reading suggestions from each other. (On the other hand, I'm not going to live long enough to read the reading suggestions I have now!)

I tried librarious because I thought it would be a good way to keep track of DVDs I own. And it probably would - I'd just need to spend a lot more time entering information. I added Twitterlit to my iGoogle homepage, but my phone plan doesn't support the other services that will send info. Twitterlit could be diverting...

Then I tried both Reading Trails and What Do I Read Next. WDIRN offered some truly bizarre suggestions that were not at all similar to the titles I entered. There were some that *were* similar, but of course the weird ones are the ones that stood out! The BookStumpers site is always fun to surf through. I have a passion for reading series books in order, so the Which Book site may prove to be useful.

I wasn't very impressed with the various online book community sites. The listserv I'm on provides real book discussion, a lot of off-topic discussion and tons of book suggestions, so I'll stick with that. On the other hand, I like the book group resources sites; we have permission to use both the Reading Group ones when putting together our book club in a bag kits, and I'm glad to find out about the Lit Lovers site. I looked at several of the sites in the other categories and played around with Facebook's Visual Bookshelf a bit - that'll probably be the app I'd use the most.

With all of these book-related websites, and all of the people who are passionate enough about the books they're reading to support and maintain those websites, how can people think that the age of the book is passing? There's certainly room for both books and technology!

Thing 34 - Not Really Competition

Several of the answer sites were pretty fun. I liked Ask Metafilter and ChaCha. AllExperts and WikiAnswers required a lot of clicking in order to get to the questions. Yahoo also required a lot of clicking down into subcategories, and there are a lot of pretty useless polls (Chinese or Mexican food? Are you a morning person?) and questions that result in opinions but perhaps not answers (Should food be rationed to all in order to combat global warming?). Amazon's Askville is nice, but I didn't like that the first thing you see on a page is the sponsored ad links.

For me, if I wanted specific information, it would seem quicker and much more direct to ask a librarian (or even to do a specific Internet search). If I had extra time (HA!) and wanted to surf for anything interesting, these sites could be amusing. I'm not likely to spend much more time on them, though.

Where I do see a use for them is for some of the specific requests that the library - or at least my library - can't answer: how can I do this (insert task here) using this piece of software? or What are people's experiences with this particular restaurant or hotel in this location?

Thing 33 - Travel 2.0

There are some fun sites in this Thing. I found another blog to follow (swell - more to read...). I looked at several of the travel sites and searched Clearwater Beach, FL, which is one of my favorite vacation spots.

I tried the Mapness travel journal site, and it would be another way to do a map of Strikepoint's tour routes. It's easier to use than Google Maps, and gives the option of automatically connecting two points by roads, rather than the user having to draw the route on the map. On the other hand, it chooses the roads it will connect by, and there's no editing option.

Vcarious looks like a fun site and could be useful if you're planning a trip to somewhere where its users have posted info. Lots of options for creating online journals with photos and maps, lists of restaurants and sights to see, etc.

I suppose that some of these could be linked on my library's Internet sites by subject Travel list, but other than that I'm not seeing a whole lot of library application.

Thing 32 - Google Maps

This Thing was fun - a little frustrating at times, but fun. And very useful - perhaps mostly in a personal way but also professionally.

I created a map of the Duluth Public Library locations and linked it on my library website. The weird thing is that the first time I clicked on the link on each of my computers, I got a totally different map, of some place in Missouri!! So I'm a little wary of leaving it there.

It worked better on my personal project, which was on a blog for Strikepoint, my handbell ensemble. I embedded a map of a couple upcoming concert locations.

View Pequot Lakes concert sites in a larger map

My next project will be to trace the routes of our annual tours on a map, with placemarks for our concert stops. Our director would like there to be a single map showing all of our tours (for 20 years!), each in a different color, but I don't think Google Maps does that. 

Thing 31 - More Twitter

Twitter is one of those things for which I've had a hard time seeing a library application, but I guess I'm finally finding some interesting library uses for it. Luria Library (is that right?) used their feed to tell their students that first, the Internet was down in the library and then that it was back up. Hennepin County uses theirs to give reminders about programs. (I can only wish that we'd have programs to promote!!)

I've read a lot of the articles linked in the Thing instructions and signed up to follow several more people/organizations. (I've seen somewhere that Queen Elizabeth is on Twitter but haven't found her there yet. That would be fun!) Some of the techie tweeters put out so much that it's just too overwhelming to try to actually follow.

If my library had one or more Facebook pages - and I'd really like to see this happen - then automating a feed into Twitter would be great.

Some of the fun things - I started following the Mac v. PC tweets, looked at the Twittergami bird (very cool) and took the "what punctuation mark are you" quiz (I'm a comma). I didn't post it to either Twitter or Facebook - I've been seeing sooooo many "What (insert noun[s] here) are you" quizzes in the past few days that I just don't feel like extending it! (But I *have* posted results from some others on Facebook. As a children's writer, I'm Beverly Cleary!)

David Lee King's articles were very interesting, and particularly the one about who not to friend on Twitter or Facebook. While it can be interesting and idea-sparking to see what other libraries are doing with these media, I agree that the primary purpose of a library's presence on Twitter/Facebook should be to connect with their patrons.

So right now I guess I'm at the "kinda doubtful but willing to be convinced" stage of Twitter. I'll keep plugging away...