Thank you, Winston...

Maybe the analogy isn't perfect, but I am going to use it anyways. During the throes of WWII when things were still going pretty badly for the British, Winston Churchill rallied his fellow countrymen time and time again. This one applies to my 23 Things learning journey the last several weeks. "We are not at the end, nor even the beginning of the end, but perhaps we are at the end of the beginning."

This learning process never ends but it has helped me... get...more...organized! My digital world has had too many loose strings the past few years. My learning more about Del.icio.us, Letter James, RSS feeds, podcasts and dozens of other "organizers" has made a big difference in how I "handle" business- and personal-related "stuff".

PBCLS will need more of the same programs to keep its staff up-to-date. We also need forums where staff and patrons can brainstorm what is do-able within a library setting. Thank you, Winston, for helping us realize that this is a long road...

Digital Media Collection

I like downloading these books and listening to them while I'm working on something else on my laptop computer at home. My next title will be A New Earth. I listened to the excerpt read by the author, Eckhart Tolle, and I was convinced to now do the rest. Actually, my wife read the book (hello, Oprah) but I found the print very small and light. This is the next best thing. I am always convincing my neighbors to make use of this library service -- especially people who say they don't have time to read anymore.

Casting for podcasts

You know, we're always weeding our library collections. Guess what? I am going to have to start weeding my Bloglines account. Too much is going in and nothing is being taken out. Just a thought...

I looked in Podcast Alley for something library-related and found a nice little library orientation tour produced by Emory University entitled Library Survival Guide. In the NPR Podcast Directory I went for the books and found a ton of them under the Book Podcast section. Of course, Fresh Air podcasts are always entertaining and informative. In the library, we could set up an NPR section where patrons could be entertained and informed all day long!

YouTube

I have utilized this site often over the last year or so. The family always sends funny or thought-provoking vids -- depending on one's mood. Of course, whenever I tried a search, the library's server blocked it -- so that's a minus. But a patron could get some great videos if they browse. I liked the 2008 Port Townsend (Washington) Blues Fest where artists were jammin'.

Read, View, EAT!

Wow, there's so many sites to choose from. My favorite of the half dozen I looked at and the other dozen or so that we have learned about recently was Im Cooked. It labels itself as "a web community for video recipe sharing". The motto is "cook it, film it, share it" -- that pretty well sums up the purpose.

So, you have a favorite recipe. You gather all the ingredients. You get yourself a cheap video camera or camera that is video-enabled. You start to put together a script (or not). It turns out to be: educational, informative, selective, and -- last but by no means least -- funny! I'm talking about some pretty raw yet creative videos here, folks. Besides the instructions for creating and uploading your vids, the homepage directs you to groups (based on food interests) and channels (all different kinds of recipe groups such as "soups and stews", "cakes and pies", seafood, meat. cocktails, barbecues, etc.).

Can I see any use for this in a library setting? It would make a great comedy program on a rainy afternoon. It would also be great for anyone remotely interested in cooking (even the "Unchefs" group is worth it). I can see patrons utilizing this site for a searched-after recipe. It's also a great vehicle for uploading your first created video onto the world's stage. As the old commercial said: "try it -- you'll like it!"

Soho Zoho

I need all the bells and whistles I can get when I type. I love the toolbars and all the extras, except the smiley faces! Maybe I'll write from here and just send the doc over to my blog. Another thing I like about this Zoho tool is that I use meeting agendas, planners and PowerPoint. Soho has all these and more. Plus they are easier to share! What more can you ask for? Tough to find the Spell Check (my most used tool)!

Sand...

Okay. I played in the sandbox. And I now know how to utilize peanut butter (goes good with jelly, on bread or toast). I expressed to my fellow pbclsers what my favorite music and food is. I am almost fulfilled. After reading the music favorites, I have got to know how one "shreds" a banjo!

Why Wiki?-- Water Cooler!

I've been gleaning info from Wikipedia for the last couple of years now. So it's refreshing that I'm discovering all these "niche" wikis that can give me a better flow of information about a specific subject.

I was a bit disappointed, though, with the lack of breadth of subjects for library wikis, especially the public library ones. I thought there would be lively articles on library management subjects, for example, that would have a certain back and forth debate. There was little. Oh, sure, there were library mission statements and some project management stuff, but not what I expected.

The library wikis did better when it came to providing info to their public. The Bull Run Library wiki was chock full of reader's advisory and online catalog info. Grand Rapids PL had seemingly everything linked: from their reader's resources to the presidential candidates' webpages to Wall Street Journal's D3 Conference. The D3 blog was cool: this techie was ticked because at this "all things digital" conference the organizers pulled the plug on the WiFi in the conference room. A great debate lingers on whether people should be connected with back info while their getting fore info. And I thought asking people to turn their cell phones off during church services was tough!

But I digress. What types of applications within libraries might work well with a wiki? Well, from what I've seen-- the forerunners in the field are giving us good examples for keeping their customers informed. I would like to see more research and management topics covered. I think we need to share our best practices with one another and get an ongoing dialog established. Wikis would be perfect for that! Consider it, if you will, the old "water cooler effect" where some of the best (and most risky) ideas of an organization or field are discussed around the water cooler, not at formal meetings. The "wiki water cooler" -- it has a certain ring to it, ya think?

Web 2.0/Librarian

What's it mean to me? As a librarian? As I have mentioned in a couple of posts, this collaboration among users is different than what we older librarians went to school for. We were (well, not THE dispensers of knowledge or facts or data but) the facilitators for our users. Now, things have changed -- and that's okay -- but we have a new role and older role in the collaborative community. Other writers have used "tour guides", "harnessors of collective intelligence", "trainers" to describe the librarians new role in the collaborative effort. These are all right and, yet, alright. It's all these and still (not to be stubborn!) as facilitators where we can do the most good. Users add value to the ultimate answer, we provide the string. The speaker from OCLC last year at a SEFLIN luncheon summed it up best: "people FIND things on the Internet; librarians SEARCH on the Internet. You, as librarians, know that difference.

Everyone want to be a librarian...

We librarians were aghast when Wikipedia first came out because, as I said in an earlier post, we couldn't quite believe the wisdom of the masses. Studies have proven us wrong. Well now we're really astounded by the tags that the masses can make on their own and people can actually find what they're looking for. Amazing! Tecnorati does this and more. In "What is Popular", you can find Boing Boing, tabs for videos, the Olympics Channel and even Green in the Lifestyle tabs. It like everyone wants to be a librarian!

The PBCLS website had over 50 reactions to it and covered topics like audiobooks, E-Gov research, book clubs, 23 things and our award-winning Mousercize.

The tag search for Web 2.0 yielded over 25,000 posts. It's interesting that the number of posts per day ranged from about 7 to about 83 over the last several weeks. Some of the related tags were technology, web, internet, ajax (feed) and blogging. One very interesting blog I read was by a library director out west. In his "Gather No Dust" blog he listed several functions of his library as a result of his user survey. We have often mentioned the term "the library as place", but he added to that by saying his small business users capitalized on "the library as office." Now there's a new term I can research...

Yum--Yuck

Del.icio.us is definitely something I am going to use. The "favorites" on my home computer is long and unwieldy. I will fix that tonight! I looked at a number of library blogs that we all seemed to view. My favorite was Annoyed Librarian. Oh, the tags were normal (librarian, librarianship, library, libraries, 2.0, etc.), but it was the user notes that slayed me ("edgy", "whatever it is-- I'm against it", etc.).

It led to other, shall we say "contrarian librarian" sites like The Vampire Librarian or The Bitter Librarian. You have to appreciate the dour sense of humor when a YS librarian talks about "chicken parents" who yell at their kids for shouting in the library. "You'll upset the librarian." Like it's us that are raising and disciplining their kids! The librarian's idea of a good time is watching library patrons pull on the locked library doors on a holiday. That's "yucky" but some how perversely humorous. Sometimes ya need a little yuck with the yum.

Would You Buy a New Car from this Site?

Okay, so I went to WebFeat and entered "Rochester NY" and found 100 million articles to read. I figured my time was limited so I cut the search to the businesses in Rochchacha. In this one interesting article, came up with a new site in 2007 called Carzoomrochester.com which creates a database of new cars. Yeah, right, like no one has ever done that before! Well, apparently not without giving away all your demographic and personal info. This article claimed that it would list the car you want (of course at the MSRP) within 50 miles of Rochester, the test site, without asking any questions. Well, it worked. Next time I'm in Rochester I'll buy that car.

My Own Library!

Wow, do I feel organized! I always have these slips of paper lying around that have the titles of books I have read recently. My intentions are to get them in a log every once in a while, but I lose the slips! This definitely helps.


http://www.librarything.com/work/book/33645243

Wave or James?

I wandered around the generators. They were fun, but I was also thinking of some very practical uses. Tried Letter James and thought it may make a good electronic Post-It Note. That's to remind someone or myself of a simple task in a startling way. Also have fun with Animated Wave.

Newspapers on my driveway...

RSS is better than having all those newspapers delivered on my driveway. It's uses less trees (occasionally I'll print an article). It's less messy (no newspaper print all over my hands). It saves me money (no newspaper subsrciptions). But the #1 reason is obviously that it gathers news/information that might interest me in one concise spot. From there I can peruse them. That has an effect on both my personal and professional reading, thank you.

I would think, tough, that it would be beneficial if we change our feeds on a regular basis. After all, we wouldn't "feed" ourselves the same food all the time, even if it was our favorite, right?

Wii Thoughts

Just got back from vacation. Spent a week cruising around Jupiter with my my son and daught-in-law from Houston. My wife also joined us. We gave "the kids" (in their 30's!) the Wii game console for an early Christmas present. Figured playing video games -- with self-imposed time limits -- would help relieve stress. We were right! After staying up until 1:00 or 2:00 a couple of nights, it did relieve stress and was a learning experience.

I'm also thinking how we could apply this seemingly very realistic video game to our library experience. With the "remote" (a great double-sided word if there ever was one!) wii (sorry) we could, for example, have our patrons tour the stacks a lot quicker. We could just line then up and go for the strike, ball, net, face, etc. with ease. Or how about checking their material out on the fly, like the SunPass lanes, as they're leaving the library?

While I'm working on further comparisons with Wii, let me tell you about our deep sea fishing excursion last week...

Blogaries

Blogging in libraries? How? The field in unlimited. You know, when Wikipedia first came out, we librarians were skeptical of the the "wisdom of the crowd". We information professionals said it would be totally disorganized, untruthful, untamed because it smacked of the crowd mentality. Actually, the wisdom of the crowd is quite intelligent in information gathering-- and it has been proven in several studies. It is similar to people standing in long lines. There's certain unspoken and unposted rules, courtesies that are followed. And it works.

So, we information pros just have to go with the flow. The rest will follow.

7 1/2 Habits...

The 7 1/2 Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners reinforces what we know about learning as adults: that we learn best by doing. Believe it or not, the toughest part here is the new technology. Those of us that are Boomers didn't grow up with a silver computer in our mouths. Paradoxically, my approach is "okay, let's just have fun with it!" And I am.

Round Two...

You know, sometimes you just can't-- or don't want to -- get away from work! I mean, We're in the Eastern Caribbean on a cruise ship many, many miles from Florida. My wife and I can't help but overhear several conversations during the week dealing with libraries. She smiles and is amazed.

During one lunch, Mary Ann and I were talking to a couple from Delaware. They were in the beginning stages of planning a library in their home. I gave them some practical advice on shelving (no pine, maple or oak only, flip them every few years). Well, they were fascinated with the fact I'm a librarian. The questions kept on coming about the inside machinations of libraries. It was fun answering their questions. But after about 15 minutes of goodwill I finally said, "I would love to talk more about this, but... I'm on vacation."

You know the feeling...

Getting started...

Just back from the Eastern Caribbean, so I'm a bit late getting started. See my photo? I have been dressing a lot like that lately. What with all the renovations, moves and weeding going on in the north area branches.

To the OBB staff who are scattered about the county. Take heart! The TQB staff has their new home back. Some day you will too!