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.

Online applications - thing 18

I'm going to try to finish the 23 things by the deadline...this should be my last entry for the night. Google docs is really nice, and it was easy to post my document to this blog (see below). I also e-mailed it to myself, which would be a problem for customers if they went that route, because I believe our public computer security would stop them from opening the attachment. But they could still copy and paste into job sites from google docs.

This would be an excellent way to have a resume ready to go for different job websites that require them. Unfortunately, most people who are trying to post resumes at the library are at a basic skill level with computers and usually feeling rushed, so I'm afraid that even though this is easy, many of them wouldn't want to try it. Here's a try...

Name

Address

Phone number

E-mail address

Most recent job

Dates of employment

• exciting duty
• innovative project

Sandbox wiki - thing 17

I added my blog to the favorites and added to the list of "Favorite Places to Visit in Ohio," since my family lives there and I actually know of a great place (Hocking Hills) that wasn't on the list. Since the list seemed to come from one person, I added a comment to make it seem different.

I didn't even know an average person could make a wiki. I can't think offhand of how I would use one though.

Wikis - thing 16

I heart wikipedia. Understanding its pitfalls, I find it to be so useful when I want a quick answer about something, whether I'm feeling uninformed and stupid (it replaces my "Dictionary of Cultural Literacy") or when I'd like a synopsis or information about a book or movie. I follow with interest anything in the news about it, like how companies are altering negative information about themselves.


Of the other types of wikis I checked out, I thought the library subject guides were an interesting application of the technology. I imagine it takes a lot of time for our information services department to maintain and update the sites listed in ours...maybe it's something that could be a full staff effort, with some oversight so that it doesn't get too huge.


I found through a Bull Run wiki link that the number one song on the day I was born was "How can you mend a broken heart" by the Bee Gees. Don't know that one, but I guess I was busy being cute as a button, or crying.

2.0 - thing 15

Finally I get what everyone's talking about. That was some good reading, especially the iceberg analogy and the OCLC woman who looked way into the future. It's exciting stuff that makes me wish I were more in the thick of things than working 4-12 hours per week. So many thoughts come to mind: what role will our buildings play? (I think that's still really important); what about the customers who are totally behind in all things technology?; more likely in the future, what about the customers who don't have money for any of it?; how can libraries afford to keep up? I'm sure these questions have all come up in the past few years that this has been discussed in libraryland, but I don't imagine there are easy solutions.

Technorati - thing 14

I've often been curious about who looks at our family blog, and presumed anyone who knows about it heard either through me or someone who knows me. I think that's still true. As I mentioned in thing 9, I've searched the google blog search and technorati (posts and blogs) using really obvious keywords, and our blog never comes up. I don't really want it to, so I won't add any tags to it, but I think that's interesting and surprising. About half of the blogs that come up when I enter my kids' names seem legitimate, but others are just a string a random words that seem suspicious.

The favorite and popular blogs seem to indicate that mostly technologically-minded people use Technorati.

del.icio.us - thing 13

I tried to give this a chance - honest. I tagged some toddler game websites, looked around at what other parents (presumably) have tagged, and added del.icio.us to my computer at home. So I was able to access the bookmarks I researched at work when at home, which was nice, but since I work part-time, there's not much benefit to me in that respect. I think that a lot more people would have to get involved for the social aspect to be beneficial. Certain sites have tons of people who tagged it, while similarly useful sites have about 12 people who tagged it - it didn't seem that the number of tags was an indicator of quality at this point in its evolution.