Thing 23: The End?

I have enjoyed going through "23 Things" and reading other people's blogs.

Of the 23 Things I found the following to be the most useful:

Wikis--I never thought of using a Wiki to create a policy manual,and I think it would be a good idea to create a policy manual in this way, rather than as a static word document.

Google Docs--Because I rarely use G-Mail to access my VCCS e-mail, I had never really explored the document sharing that can be done on Google Docs, nor had I been aware of the fact that you can create surveys on Google Docs.

Jing--I had heard about Jing, but hadn't looked at it before 23 Things. I can see how Jing can be used for bibliographic instruction. You can only do presentations of 5 minutes, but I'm thinking of using it to demonstrate how to search on various databases.

Creative Commons--with it's flexible copyright permissions, and its open courseware, Creative Commons is valuable for both librarians and faculty.

Delicious and Tagging--This is a wonderful way to get control of your bookmarks and sort your selected web sites in an organized way. It's also nice to not have your bookmarks tied to just one computer.

Social Cataloging--I enjoyed looking at Library Thing and creating an account on it. This is something I plan to access for my own personal use.

Thanks to everyone who shared their thoughts on their blogs!

Thing 22: Podcasts

I listened to the Annandale Library at NOVA's podcast on banned books. I rarely listen to the radio, but since so many people have told me how much they enjoy listening to NPR, I checked out some of NPR's podcasts dealing with "It's All Politics" and NPR's "Around the Nation." I didn't see that any of these podcasts could be added to the RSS feed on my Google Reader.

Thing 21: Mashups

One of my favorite mashups was part of a mashup called DC Pedestrian, which is for people who like to walk around Washington, DC. The mashup has a section devoted to safety which includes a map of recent crimes. You click on each "thumbtack" and are given the address, date, and type of crime that occurred at that specific location.

One of the most eye-catching mashups that I looked at is the Wheel of Lunch. You enter your zip code and the type of lunch you want to eat, and the names of restaurants and fast food places which serve that type of food appear on the wheel.

I also enjoyed the Timb Tube and Montagr, which presents a photo mosaic of photos found on Flickr.

Thing 20: Tagging and Social Bookmarking

Right now I have a long list of Favorites on my computer which are completely unorganized, so using a social bookmarking manager like Delicious would be a way to organize and sort my bookmarks and gain some control over my unwieldy list of web pages. Not having my bookmarks tied to just one computer and being able to access the bookmarks from any computer would also be a big help.

I've looked at the vccslibraries bookmark collection on Delicious before. I read some of the comments on various bookmarks, but I don't usually spend much time looking at comments--I just don't find them to be that useful.

I can definitely see the potential of Delicious for research assistance. Has the vccslibraries on Delicious replaced the old VCCS Web Guides to different subjects? I've wanted to add some information on APA style to our website, and I found a number of bookmarks which Tara has placed on Delicious which I think will be very useful. My library doesn't have a social bookmark collection at this time, but I'd like to discuss creating one with my LRC Director.

Thing Nineteen:Multimedia

YouTube is like everything else on the Internet--there is a tremendous amount of useful information on it, but there is also a tremendous amount of fluff. Before doing this exercise for 23 Things, I had never really looked at YouTube as a valuable educational resource. A library co-worker who also is an adjunct instructor at my college pointed out that YouTube contains a wealth of tutorials on all different subjects. Because I hadn't really looked at YouTube closely before, I just viewed it as a site where people shared their videos, many of them silly or outrageous.

The video that I added to my blog is a tour of the Montana State University Library. The video tells people about the library's resources and services and takes you on a tour of the library that takes a little more than 5 minutes. Placing a video of your library on YouTube is a good way to introduce people to your library and its resources.

Thing Eighteen: Audiobooks

When the VCCS first acquired Overdrive, I downloaded some audiobooks just to learn how Overdrive worked. For the past few years I've made a point of telling students about Overdrive when I conduct orientations to the library for SDV 100 classes, but I haven't seen a great deal of interest in Overdrive in my library. A few times a year students may ask about it, and we've had community borrowers who have been disappointed when they learn they don't have access to Overdrive audiobooks. The article by Beth Farrell starts out with her writing about a public library patron who drove 150 miles round-trip to access audiobooks! I just haven't seen that level of interest here!
I was interested in learning the statistics on Overdrive use, so I looked it up and saw that for this year the monthly number of Overdrive items checked out ranges from 167 to 268. One of the questions for this week is what we think of the user rating option. From what I could see, many of the items on Overdrive haven't been rated by students ( I assume a green star means an item has been rated).
I looked at LibriVox, which I had never heard of before. It is apparently to audiobooks what Project Gutenberg is to e-books. All of the audiobooks are recorded by volunteers, and I listened to "Twas the Night Before Christmas," which was spoken alternately by a child and an adult. If you listen to audiobooks, it is a wonderful free resource for works in the public domain.
I didn't know anything about the cost of audiobooks, so I was surprised by the information on cost in Farrell's article. She indicates that "Downloadable audiobook prices themselves vary wildly: an individual title can cost anywhere from $25 to $100, depending on its length and publisher, while unlimited-access title sets can range in cost from hundreds to thousands of dollars."
I had never heard of Ingram Digital, which currently has a little over 8,000 audiobook titles, as compared to Overdrive's 38,000 titles. I didn't realize Overdrive was so far ahead of its competitors.

Thing Seventeen: Social Cataloging

I created an account for LibraryThing. Since I read a great deal of historical fiction, I added a number of titles dealing with British and French historical fiction to my personal library. I spent most of my time on LibraryThing reading reviews and looking at the ratings which other readers had given to the books I added to my library. The statistics on LibraryThing's "Zeitgeist" section were impressive--over 1 million members and over 54 million books cataloged!

One difference which I did notice among LibraryThing, goodreads, and shelfari, is the "cost of service." While both goodreads and shelfari are free, on LibraryThing adding the first 200 books is free; after you reach that amount you have to pay.

I enjoyed trying to answer some trivia questions on goodreads and also took some of goodreads' quizzes. Can't say I did too well on the quizzes!

The link to my personal catalog is
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Grether

Thing Sixteen: E-Books

I think the addition of PsycBooks to our e-book collection is really a terrific resource for our psychology students. When I provide orientations to the library I always emphasize that we have access to thousands of e-books through NetLibray, Safari Books, the Gale Reference Center,etc.

I think that e-books are definitely the wave of the future, with libraries increasing the size of their online book collections and adding fewer print titles. However, not all of the students I've worked with are interested in using e-books at this time. When I help students search on the online catalog, many prefer to look at just the print books which they can check out and have no interest in looking at the e-books.

I have to admit that my own preference is still reading a traditional book on paper. As the article on e-books from Educause points out, "For those who enjoy lying on a sofa reading a novel, e-books can seem anathema to reading for pleasure." If I want to read Emma or A Tale of Two Cities, I'm going to get a paper copy. It's nice that these works are available for free on Project Gutenberg, but that's not how I want to read them. I find reading books online to be somewhat cumbersome, having to click on Next or an arrow to go from one page to another.

I am constantly buying books on Amazon.com, and while I currently don't have a Kindle, I will probably purchase one in the near future just because I'm literally running out of room for any more print books! I've talked to a number of people who have purchased Amazon's Kindle, and they all tell me how much they enjoy using it.

Thing Fifteen: Creative Commons

I think it would definitely be worthwhile to include information about Creative Commons licensing in library instruction. The resources made available through Creative Commons are especially valuable for education, and faculty could make use of many of the materials. I was impressed by the open courseware available from a number of universities, and also by the photos and images, sound, and videos available under different licenses from Creative Commons. I decided to do a search for "Golden Gate Bridge," and in addition to numerous photos, I found a video dealing with the construction of the bridge and another video of it's opening in 1936. Creative Commons is a wonderful resource. As one of the presentations we looked at noted, while copyright gives a red light, Creative Commons signals a green light. It complements copyright and places an emphasis on sharing and connection and collaboration.

Thing Eight : Screencasting

I decided to use Jing for my screencast. I've never used Jing before, but I'd heard about it from a number of people. I used Jing to illustrate some searches on EBSCO's Academic Search Complete and to illustrate some features of the database. I didn't add audio to the screencast.(I had Jing installed on my station at the circulation desk, which is not a good location for recording because of all the noise around it). The information I read about Jing indicates that it can be used for short presentations of up to 5 minutes. I plan on making use of it in our library.

Thing 14: Online Surveys

Week 12: Document Sharing

Here's my mother's recipe for manicotti. Hope you enjoy it!

Manicotti recipe

Week 11: Shortening a URL

I decided to use Bitly to shorten the URL for my library's e-Library page. The URL is:
http://www.dcc.vccs.edu/lrc/E-library/elibrary.htm

The link was shortened to the following using Bitly:

http://bit.ly/c6k16P

Week 11: Searching Twitter

I guess I should start out by saying that I haven't spent a great deal of time on Twitter, but based on the searching I've done I don't see myself using Twitter as a research tool. I went into advanced search and saw that it does have a lot of options. I did searches for British Petroleum, oil spill, and Tony Hayward. I found myself paying more attention to the links that some people provided on their tweets rather than to their personal comments. If I'm doing research I want the facts, and people's tweets are their own thoughts, feelings, and observations.

Twitter's gift of its archive of public messages to the Library of Congress has been greeted with excitement by some historians. The article The Library and Twitter by Matt Raymond states that "Twitter is part of the historical record of communication, news reporting, and social trends...It is a direct record of important events...it is a platform for citizen journalism with many significant events being first reported by eyewitnesses." I can see Twitter being used by future historians and sociologists to look at life during our time.

For myself,I see Twitter mainly as being a social network where people share their thoughts and opinions and also follow what other people have to say. That's fine, but that's not where I'm going to go to do research. While Twitter may be of value to historians, it also contains a tremendous amount of junk.

I looked at some organizations on Twitter, such as the Va State Parks, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the VCCS. The state parks and the museum used Twitter to provide information on upcoming events and exhibitions and classes, and I noticed that the VCCS had a number of tweets on the problems we had with accessing Ebsco recently.

Week 8: Generators

I looked at Spell with flickr and Image Chef. The image I'm posting is from Image Chef.

Week 8: Flickr

I decided to search for photos of Paris. I hope I'll be able to visit Paris again in the near future, but until then I love to look at photos of this city. I found a collection of photos of Paris by a photographer named Rita Crane on Flickr, and have selected one of her photos to share for this assignment. It's entitled Quai des Orfevres from the Pont Neuf, Paris and the link to it is available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/44548980@N00/166613256

I can see using Flickr to provide a photo tour of the library, to promote events, and to highlight special collections or advertise new books or other additions to the collection.

Week 7: Sharing Slide Presentations

I think that slidesharing would be useful for bibliographic instruction, and could also be used just to share information about the library or news or special events being held in the library. Since I'm interested in its use for bibliographic instruction, I did a search for this topic and found a presentation entitled Bibliographic Instruction 2.0: Using New Technologies to Market Your Library's Resources and Services to Freshman Students. This presentation was developed by a librarian named Fiona Grady at Stony Brook University. The link is http://www.slideshare.net/fgrady/bibliographic-instruction-2-0-final

In addition to discussing many of the items we've been covering in 23 Things, such as blogging and social networks and virtual reference, Ms. Grady includes information on a program that is available to students at Yale University. At Yale, each student has his or her own "Personal Librarian." This librarian is assigned to students in their freshman year, and continues with students through their sophomore year or until they declare a major. Once they declare a major the Personal Librarian introduces them to a subject specialist, a librarian with an advanced degree in their discipline, who will help them with the research they do for their major.
I checked an old issue of the ALA Directory in our library, and it indicated that Yale had 138 librarians with a MLS degree and over 60 non-MLS librarians. When you have a staff of this size, you can provide a service like this. The librarians send a letter to freshman before the semester begins, and also provide ongoing communication via email throughout the year. It's a way of establishing a personal connection with students. Providing a personal librarian acts as an icebreaker and reduces library anxiety. It also serves as "proactive introduction to the library before students arrive on campus."

With all the emphasis on new technologies, Grady reminds us not to forget about "Old School" outreach: "Don't underestimate the importance of a random act of kindness to a new student on campus."

Week 6 :Chat

I chatted with two co-workers for this activity, and one of them is participating in 23 Things. I am not one of the librarians who serves as a volunteer for LRC Live, so I'd be interested in hearing about their experiences. The article on e-reference from Library Journal discussed some of it's challenges, one of them being the demands by some users for "quick (almost instantaneous) answers." If I were providing e-reference, I think I would feel pressure to find the needed information as quickly as possible, and it would take me some time to become comfortable providing reference services online. It would also take a while to learn how to deal with patrons like the one described in the article Virtual in Vegas, where the patron "chatted" with the librarian very little, remaining mostly silent for the 20 minutes of their session.

A number of years ago our library made the decision to ban chatting. We had a situation where patrons were sitting at our stations and chatting for hours on end. This created problems for students who needed to access stations to do research or access Blackboard.

Under "Best Practices for IM," the Library Journal article lists loading IM software on public PCs. "Let users in the library get help without having to go to the reference desk." We always stress to our students that we are here to help them, and emphasize that they should come to the desk if they need assistance. It doesn't make sense to me to go online for assistance if you have a librarian a few yards away who can help you, so I don't agree with this "best practice."

One of the other comments I noted in the LJ article was the statement that with IM, "we are able to talk about things that we would hesitate to say in an email. Office politics and more "feeling types of things are best said without the thought of an everlasting email trail." However, my understanding of chat on G-Mail is that your chat sessions are saved unless you choose to delete them or turn off the save function.

I enjoyed looking at the techdictionary of text message abbreviations. I tested some friends to ask if they knew what certain abbreviations stood for, and got some interesting wrong answers! Well, at this point it's time to say BFN. G2G.

Week Five: Wikis

Before doing the activities this week, I have to admit that when I thought of wikis I mainly just thought about Wikipedia. I was very impressed with the library at Antioch University's training and support wiki. The level of detail on this wiki was amazing! I would never have thought of making a library policy and training manual available as a wiki, but it's an excellent idea, and it's something that I could see our library doing. I also liked the Book Lovers Wiki at the Princeton Public Library. I liked the idea of having a wiki where library patrons are able to write their own book reviews and share their thoughts with others. I've bookmarked the Library Success best practices Wiki. I've only skimmed what is available on it, but it looks like it's full of a great deal of useful information.

I wasn't sure what to make of the University of Limerick's Cataloguer's wiki. It seemed like a strange hodgepodge of different things. It contains a cataloging manual, but then it also has links to sites such as the Catholic Encyclopedia and the Internet Movie Database. I found the fact that ads kept popping up on this wiki to be bothersome. The St. Joseph County Public Library wiki seemed more like a website than a wiki to me.

I haven't looked at it closely yet, but I know VIVA has an ILL wiki.

Week 3: Social and Professional Networking

I am not currently a social or professional network user, and I've decided not to establish a personal profile on any network at this time. For me, the main reason is lack of time. It's all I can do to keep up with email! If I was looking for a job, I could see many advantages to participating on LinkedIn.
I enjoyed looking at ALA's Facebook. If I was going to set up a social network presence for my library it would definitely be on Facebook as opposed to MySpace or Ning, mostly because Facebook has so many users (more than 400 million). I enjoyed skimming the news and some of the articles on ALA's Facebook, everything from the news which came out yesterday that teens are texting more than actually speaking on the phone, to an article about Mark Twain as a book critic, to the history of library cards, to how to clean books. ALA also provides a lot of interesting links to the organization's website, including various Factsheets and recommendations for viewing and listening and best websites. It made me realize I really need to check out ALA's website on a more frequent basis.
I have to say that I got one of the best laughs I've had in a while when I came across two librarians on MySpace who have started something called "Project Brand Yourself a Librarian." They are urging librarians to "brand" themselves with tattoos to show their pride in their profession. One of the librarians has had the image of a person reading a book which you often see on library cards branded onto his forearm. On his other forearm he has a musical scale, which I first thought was a barcode until I zoomed in on the image. It's demonstrates pride in your profession, and if you're planning on attending the ALA Convention in June they're hoping someone can recommend a local tattoo parlor.

Week 2: RSS Feeds

I am interested in politics so I decided to subscribe to a number of RSS feeds that deal with this topic: top stories from Politico.com; the politics feed from Msnbc.com; politics from Cnn.com; latest news from the Huffington Post. Since I usually visit these websites on a regular basis, I didn't have any problems finding RSS feeds on this topic. I also subscribed to News Releases from the VCCS and news from the Library of Congress. I noticed that for some sites, when I indicated I wanted to subscribe to the feed it was placed in a Microsoft Feeds Folder, so I didn't place these subscriptions in the Google Reader. Has anyone used RSS in the Ebsco databases?

Week 1: Getting Started

This is the first time that I have blogged, and I am looking forward to participating in 23 Things. I guess you could say that participating in these activities will help me to migrate from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 in my own personal web usage! I mainly use the web to just retrieve information and I have to say that I share some of the concerns on the social impact of Web 2.0 as enumerated by Andrew Keen in one of the articles we were given to link to and look at for this assignment. I look forward to reading everyone's blogs each week, and I want to start by thanking Jami for sharing some blogs for librarians, which I definitely plan to look at.