Thing #22

1. Take a moment and look back at the first Thing you posted to your blog. Reflect on how far you've come since then.

Blogs do grow -- they really do -- if you give them regular attention.

2.Make a resolution to maintain your blog, use the tools you now know, keep up with new tools, and apply them in your library. Give yourself the gift of time—15 minutes a day, a Webinar now and then, conversations with colleagues about Library 2.0, whatever—but don't quit now! Put your resolution writing in your blog!

I'm sure there will be things I stumble upon online that I'll want to store away, ponder, and keep around for later -- where better to do this than right here.

3. Every day, ask yourself, "What did I learn today?" Record your responses in your blog.

Yes it would seem that regular updates are what keep a blog interesting and fresh. Fortunately, it is a convenient medium that can be updated in just a few minutes.

Thing #21

How might the RPC and the Teacher Guide help you help students plan and manage research projects?

This looks like a good way to pace yourself through a project -- and would be helpful to have during a busy semester. Also, for someone that has no idea where to start, or how to proceed, this thing could provide valuable help in pointing out a path.

Can you think of any uses for library projects—could you use it to help manage a timeline for a project of your own?

Most of the projects I have worked on have short and sometimes unknown timetables -- or -- are done routinely on a monthly or weekly basis.

Thing #20

What are you observing in your library about books and reading?
Our circulation stats keep going up.
Do you think these Book 2.0 tools hamper or enhance one's reading experience?
It is a personal preference.
Which of the sites/tools did you visit?
The flickr vintage books photos.
What are they appealing features?
The artwork.
Any features seem unnecessary or just there "because"?
Nothing jumped out at me.

Thing #19

Are you a member of any online communities?

Goodreads for books.....Webjunction for library stuff......and one or two for other personal interests.

Are any of these social networks appealing to you?

Goodreads is great. I've gotten a number of book recommendations there.

What did you find that was interesting and that you might use later?

last.fm

Thing #18

I've been active on Facebook for the past few weeks. And joined the group Libraries and Librarians.

Thing #17

iTunes offers many podcasts -- I'm currently subscribed to NPR: Planet Money, Onion News, Real Time With Bill Maher.

Thing #16

Embedding this took less than a minute -- I don't know how many "Chicken Fight" sequences there are in "Family Guy" but this one claims to be the first one.

Thing #15

*Veggie Burger*



Here's a link to my Rollyo veggie recipes search engine.

Thing #14

I'm giving iGoogle a try out -- so far it has not taken off (like Bloglines) as a place I visit on a regular basis. If I can figure out how to move all my favorite stuff to iGoogle things could change.

My gmail account was more or less dormant for a long time -- then when my use of Facebook increased, my gmail account suddenly sprang to life.

We are using googledocs at work. There are some personal documents I'd like to store at googledocs if I get the time to move them there or just create new ones from scratch.

The only calendar I use is my Outlook one at work. "To-do lists" I probably do not need right now. Anything that is really important I add to my Outlook calendar.

Thing #13

Based on what I've read in other 23 things blogs I'm leaning towards Goodreads over Library Thing....

Goodreads -- somehow I found out several co-workers were using it and I decided to try it out. So far, I must say that I like it -- I've already added books to my "to read" list from reviews I've read here. Like Dan says, my personal home library is modest but I think it is a good idea to keep track of what you've read (even if they aren't your own books), make recommendations, write reviews and comments, etc. We have a small Goodreads group at SJCPLS -- it would be great if more of our staff folks signed up. This type of online community works really well -- recommendations lead to things you may never have been exposed to -- thereby opening up vistas that may have otherwise gone unseen. (I've added the Goodreads gadget thing to my page also).

Addendum: just a note to say that since starting work at this particular library, I've been surrounded by some of the most interesting folks, who read neat books, watch cool movies (and TV too), and listen to inspiring and valuable music. My own personal reading, viewing, and listening adventures have been enhanced in ways I could never have predicted.

Thing #12

I've contributed a thought or two to the SJCPLS reference wiki.

Thing #11

I've shared a PBS "Frontline" video and a humorous piece from The Onion on Facebook.

Thing #10

Is tagging consistency a problem? When I set up my profile here on blogger I listed "veggie food" as an interest, but later found out that "vegetarian cooking" was the term more folks were using. This blogger out of Stanford is wondering the same thing as me:

"Research problem -
Tagging as a new information organization and retrieval tool, one greatest shortcoming is its inconsistency. The tagging consistency is threefold:
Personal consistency that one user are tagging similar contents using consistent tags;
Collaborative consistency, that a community of users tag similar contents using consistent tags;
Cross-platform consistency, which means users among different internet applications tag similar contents using consistent tags."

Curious Creature is also calling for tagging standards.

Thing# 9

I created this using the Warholizer from the bighugelabs website (thanks Tasmin).

Thing #8 -- Ask A Librarian Day 2009

Hurrah!

Today (Friday, February 20,2009) is Ask A Librarian Day in Florida.

The statewide Ask A Librarian service recently moved over to InstantService. The service saw a 21% increase in December 2008 from the previous December. Ask A Librarian reported 2,312 chat sessions in December 2008.

Here at Saint John's County Public Library we are covering approximately five one hour shifts per month. We also handle questions via email and try to get back to the patron within 24 hours.

It didn't take too long to find a comfort zone with the new chat system. Plenty of training is available via Traci and Diana at TBLC.

The questions that come in range from the very silly to the very serious, and everything in between.

Here's the Ask A Librarian photostream on flickr.

Thing #7

This poster was created with Big Huge Labs poster maker.

I found the UFO photo on Google Images.

Thing #6

Thing #5 assignment

(photo by Jason Kraft)

These folks are in the business of selling allergy-free pastries in California. This photo looks more like lunch -- titled "Soba Noodle & Tofu Bento" and includes the description "Soba noodle salad, cucumbers, mango and strawberry slices, golden tofu bites with ponzu dipping sauce ." It didn't take long find this dish by searching keyword "tofu." Jason and Amanda have loaded many more photos of their food creations on their photostream.

Thing #5

Added a flickr badge to the lower right hand corner of the main page -- another addition to the gadget collection. Photography is one of those mediums that has done really well in the digital age.

As easy as it is to load photos from a digital camera into flickr, I like that you can take a shoebox full of old family snapshots, scan them in and archive them someplace. In the old days, you would always fear that if the negative was lost, reproducing and sharing a photo would be problematic.

I was at a family reunion in 2007 where ALOT of photos were taken -- rather than try and load them all into a site like flickr, all the photos were loaded on a flash drive, and the flash drive was passed around. I actually added a couple of photos from the reunion into my flickr photostream, but I wouldn't want them all there.

flickr's free account has some limitations which they remind you about every time you log on.

Thing #4

Thanks to the very informative NEFLIN workshop "Library Blogs and Newsfeeds" which I attended back in '05, I've been using the fantastic Bloglines for a while now.


A blogger I've been reading (and keeping up with via Bloglines) for the past two years or so recently commented, "One of the best — and strangest — things about the internet is that you can become pretty good friends with somebody you’ve never actually laid eyes on."

(Drawing of Plankton by Joey W.).

Thing #3

"With so many online news sources, how do you find the ones that relate to you? Learn about blog search tools."

How to find your way through the labyrinth? -- for me, perhaps the most important factor has simply been total amount of time spent searching the web, using it, running into dead ends, and then successfully finding stuff I'm that interests me -- articles, bloggers, websites, listservs, RSS feeds, and other things that matter to me. Once you've found some sources that you like, they lead to more sources, and those lead to more, and so on.....

Serendipity plays a big part.

As far as subject specific searches goes, I like that Google will let you specify if you are looking for images, news, maps, etc. Haven't tried their blog search much, but will make a point to give it a try.

For folks taking a more academic approach, verification of a source is essential. Here's a guide from UC Berkeley on how to evaluate web pages. If you are just surfin' for fun, anything goes...you'll know after you've followed a feed for awhile whether or not it is worth your time.

It was back on March 15, 2006 (yes, I found my certificate of completetion and handouts), that I attended the NEFLIN "Library Blogs and Newsfeeds" workshop. I believe the entire class signed up for a Bloglines account that day. My account just sat there for awhile. Months, probably. It looked to me like one of those things I'd never use again -- then all of sudden I started adding some RSS feeds from blogs or news sources I read regularly, and pretty soon Bloglines was a page I was visiting every day. I'm up to 96 feeds now. If I'm not sure if a webpage has a feed, I put the URL into the Bloglines add subscription box, and it lets me know.

The feeds require pruning now and then. But I love Bloglines. In fact it might be the webpage I visit most often. It's easily in my top 5.

evernerve likes it too.

The NEFLIN class offered up a list of blog and RSS search engines but I can't find it right now. I think icerocket was one. Unless I am looking for something really blog-specific, I hardly ever use these.

Thing #2

What is Library 2.0?

"Believing in our users - trusting them, listening to them, giving them a role in helping to define library services for the future." -- Meredith Farkas

According to this entry in Wikipedia, a guy named Michael Casey coined the term Library 2.0 in his blog LibraryCrunch. Casey had an interesting entry on October 30 -- he talks about the 37,000+ people who were part of the Twitter group following the Mars Phoenix lander. The @MarsPhoenix updates on Twitter have now gone dead -- this sounds like it would have been a really neat thing to have been a part of.

Rob Horning reports on a different type of experience in an entry in PopMatters titled "Twitter: the ultimate advertising medium." Horning says "My personal Twitter experiment has failed miserably. I created an account and tried to post for a while; I even set it up so that I could post messages with my phone. But I discovered I had nothing to say in that forum. I didn’t want to share what I was doing with the world, and I didn’t have enough witticisms to keep it thriving. It was tiring trying to think aphoristically—it turns out that most would-be aphorisms require a lot of developmental context to be comprehensible."

Following the update links in Horning's article, we find, via this post in Mother Jones, which says that Twitter has ruined Robert Scoble's life! He has Twittered away 2,555 hours in the past year! Mother Jones contributor Kevin Drum concludes "one of the problems with Twitter: like Facebook, it doesn't really make too much sense unless you spend a lot of time with it. It doesn't have to be 2,555 hours a year, mind you, but both Facebook and Twitter strike me as things that are perhaps moderately useful if you use them occasionally, but potentially highly useful if you're logged into them constantly and use them as primary tools for keeping in touch with people. That's unlike the blogosphere, where most people pick three or four blogs to follow and read them once a day for 20 minutes or so, and it's one of the things that makes these services hard to 'get' unless you're totally committed to them."

Meanwhile, one of Robert's friends is calling for an intervention.

...(later)...OK, I just stumbled on this interesting blog entry by Meredith Farkas, who works in Vermont, and has spent a lot of time in Florida libraries. Meredith states: "Believing in our users - trusting them, listening to them, giving them a role in helping to define library services for the future" is at the core of Library 2.0.

Thing #1

This blog has been created and registered. (This looks like it could be fun).

NEFLIN offered a workshop awhile back (can't remember the title) but I was introduced to bloglines. I created an account which sat dormant -- then, all of a sudden, I started adding feeds from blogs I liked and now I have several dozen subscriptions. A few random favorites are listed on the right.

Joined the SJCPLS Goodreads group -- pretty neat.

Backyard sunset, January 7th, 2009, Palm Coast, Florida