Hiya!

We celebrated Liam and Ava's 2nd birthday early when Nana and Papa were in town. One of Liam's favorite things to say lately is "Hiya!"

Ta-da! - thing 23

What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?
YouTube, online applications, LibraryThing and play week.

Were there any take-aways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?
I was happy to share google docs with my husband; I think it's a solution to his students' problems with saving and showing slide presentations in class.

In the larger scheme of things, I thought it was neat to see how my branch shared their blogs and helped each other. Two CAs were included in Posts Worth Reading and there was a lot of branch pride about that. In addition, having this program available to all levels of employees means that we value the personal development of everyone. And in reading about issues facing librarianship, like the library 2.0 discussion, I wouldn't be surprised if we inspired some CAs to look librarianship as a career.

If we offered another discovery program like this in the future, would you again chose to participate?
Yes! I really enjoyed it. Learning about technology is particularly empowering.

Audiobooks - thing 22

I first downloaded an audio book from overdrive two years ago when I was doing late night baby feedings. It turned out the feedings were so short and I was so tired that I never finished the book, but it was a fun thing to try. I've recently explained the process to two library customers on different occasions. I was amazed to see that the new Sandra Brown book had 41 people waiting for it, which suggests quite a few people are catching on to this method.

Podcasts - thing 21

Another thing I'm glad to finally get. I used yahoo podcasts and found a radio interview with author Sarah Dessen. And it was easy to add Libvibe to my bloglines account since they had a link specifically for bloglines on the page. I know that someone somewhere proposed posting a podcast of our zine presentation at ALA, but I didn't find it and I don't think it ever happened. That'll be another nice way to share conference information though. It doesn't seem like new types of content will be created for podcasting as much as it will be another way to deliver audio (like how we have storytelling over the phone and now Denver's doing it as a podcast).

Connect Four

YouTube - thing 20

In reading YouTube's explanation of what's protected by copyright, I realized that the last two clips I watched on YouTube were pretty clear copyright violations. One was the hilarious extra footage of FreakShow's song in Harold and Kumar go to White Castle. Since it was actually a videotape of someone's TV, I had guessed it might not be legal. So I won't include that in my blog, but instead give you one of my favorite commercials from childhood, with a closing line often repeated by my sister and me. A library website could offer tours of their buildings or clips from former programs, though I suppose you'd need releases from the people appearing in them.

I ended up creating an account with YouTube and linking my blog to it, so I think my video should just show up soon...

Web 2.0 awards - thing 19

This is a site I'd like to spend more time with later. For now, I looked at housingmaps.com as an alternative to zillow, since as cool as it is, I've found zillow to be a little unreliable (the picture of our house is actually of a house three doors down, and other stuff like that). And I used zillow the other day with customers trying to find housing values near the home they just purchased and had a little trouble with the interface. Housingmaps is actually pretty limited compared to zillow though. Then I looked at springwidgets.com, which had a lot of fun widgets to add to your blog or desktop, including a lot of countdowns to TV show premieres.