Thing 17 completed

Well, not entirely, but completed enough to move ahead with 18. I tried the Ebsco page composer and got it mostly, but I couldn't get the photo into the web page. I know that playing around some more would help, but I didn't have the time. I did the Proquest web page and that worked slick. I can see using that to share articles with patrons as well as with colleagues. The ability to send whole search strategies and results as one web page rather than as a bunch of individual emails is actually really cool.

I've got an account at NetLibrary and have used it for both ebooks and downloadable audiobooks. I haven't used the notes feature, and with the way I use it, am not sure I would ever need to, but it's nice to be able to mention in my working with patrons using it.

Thing 15, part 2--Second Life

I looked at the YouTube video, as well as several other of the listed resources, on Second Life. I have to say I still don't get it. Oh, I understand the idea that it's a way to exercise one's creativity, and that it's possible to create venues for online communication and training opportunities for people from all over. But what I don't get is the whole creation of avatars to represent individuals and of virtual locations in which this communication and training can take place. It seems to me that the types of "serious" uses of Second Life described in some of the resources can be accomplished in other,less time- and technology-intensive ways. I admit that some of the images that I saw were really beautiful, and showed a lot of creativity, but ultimately the question is, to what end? Since I'm more of a gomer than a gamer, maybe it's just me, but I just don't get it.<em>

Thing 15, part 1

OK, so I just spent (wasted) about an hour playing Pirate Puzzles, and I have to say, I still don't see the allure. Granted that this particular game is free, and thus pretty primitive, but other than figuring out the keyboard commands for the various puzzles, it doesn't hold much of a challenge. I can't claim to know how the multi-player part of it works, but based on what I have seen, don't really care how the multi-player part of it works.
I know I keep saying this, but tomorrow I intend to watch the Second Life video, but don't hold out much hope that I'll be enthralled enough to actually investigate further. I know I should reserve judgement until I've actually looked at it, but everything i've heard and/or read about it leads me to believe that it's nothing I'm interested in using. However, as I've said before, it is important to know enough about it to, not only know that I'm not interested in it personally, but also to know why others are. So I'll watch the video, and hopefully understand something about it. I'll post the results as soon as I watch.

Librarything--Thing 14

I'm thinking that this is one that I might actually use on a regular basis. For a long time I've wanted to figure out a way to keep track of all the series I'm reading. I'm anal enough that I NEED to read them in order, and when there's a lot of titles in the series, it's sometimes hard to remember where I am. So I'm thinking I cound use Librarything to keep track of the ones I've read. The one problem is that I've got to figure out a way to be able to list the titles that I've read in each individual series in order. I'll work on that. In the meantime, I'll explore the other features, such as the reviews, etc. I'm also still trying to figure out why i can't import stuff into this blog. The latest failure is the Librarything widget. I'm going to keep working on that also. But, first it's on to Thing 15.

Thing 13, part 2

What I meant to add to my last post is that I've tried online calendaring before with an Outlook calendar, and, because I'm not as tied to my computer as others are, it was difficult for me to keep it up in any organized way. One of the lessons I'm taking away from all of these tools is that unless an individual was organized prior to the appearance of these Web tools, all of online tools will not help someone to get organized. Or maybe it's just that I'm not all that interested in being that organized. I can see the allure of the group calendaring function for those who need to schedule meetings, and I've looked with interest at online reference desk scheduling programs; but for the type of scheduling I do for me as an individual, my little pocket calendar that I bought for $2.00 at WalMart does what I need it to. And it comes with me wherever I go.

Thing 13

I think I've figured out why I'm not really interested in these so-called productivity tools. In order for them to really help improve my productivity, they would have to help me organize or streamline activities which I am already undertaking. If I had, for example, a dozen or more web sites that I routinely checked for updates, having a site like PageFlakes organize them on my homepage would be very useful. That's what Bloglines does for the blogs that I follow. However, and this is a BIG however, I don't have that pre-existing set of sites to watch, so anything I do with one of these tools is extra work, and I'm just not that interested in keeping up with a bunch of specific sites.
That being said, I did create a PageFlakes page for myself, and put a bunch of stuff on it that I probably won't be able to keep up with. I'd make it my home page on the computer on my desk at work, but there are some days when I never log it on, and I can see the stuff piling up, much like posts from "Stephen's Lighthouse" does on my Bloglines account.
I tried to put a countdown to my vacation to Europe widget here, but the code wouldn't transfer right. I'm not sure if it's not working because it's not working, or because I'm incompetent--"the nut behind the wheel" as my father-in-law puts it. I'd like to believe that it's the former, but it's probably the latter. Oh well. On to Thing 14.

Thing 12--I'm halfway there!

Coincidental to looking at the sites related to this thing, I was watching Almanac on Friday night, when they had a guest talking about the consolidation of broadcast and print media and how that meant that the audiences did not hear about lots and lots of stories, important or otherwise, because of it.  The guest was representing an organization that is trying to use the web to counteract that tendency.  It's an important issue, I know.  But, that being said, I don't think I'm willing to spend the time to become my own editor.  I want someone to distill the events of the day me and tell me what I need to know.  Admittedly, that's not necessarily what the mainstream media is doing, what with its fascination with Brittany, et al, but that's what the hoi polloi seem to want, so that's what we all get.  But the blogosphere  doesn't really do what I'm asking either, and the question arises about who's news selections I should trust.  So I don't think I'll be using any of these services; both because i don't have time, and because I'm a little too lazy.  And so on to Thing 13.

Thing 11

Well, I read through the stuff on tagging and del.icio.us and have to say that, as an old fuddy-duddy librarian, I want a controlled vocabulary for tagging. I looked through the tags used in the minn23 account on del.icio.us, and there were numerous examples of the use of both singular and plural forms of individual tags as well as multiple synonyms for the same concept. While I understand the idea that the tags should represent the language we would use to describe something, if what we call something is not consistent over time, and we don't call something the same thing as someone else does, the collaborative nature of the process breaks down. That being said, I can see how valuable applying a consistent set of tags could be to someone who needs to create the online equivalent of a filing cabinet, especially given the ability to apply more than one tag to a particular document. But as one who uses the "create a couple of really messy looking piles on the top of your desk, and then paw through them until you find the paper for which you are looking" method of organization, the idea that I'm any more likely to follow through on any organized way of maintaining access to online resources is pretty laughable. As we move forward on the major building program over the next year, however, I might be much more motivated to try to make something like this work for me.

I'm up to double digits--Thing 10

We've been using pbwiki software for over a year to do a reference department wiki. I have to say that it's pretty clunky to use and kind of ugly-looking, compared to the software packages that cost money like wikia or mediawiki. Although it wasn't just the software that led us not to use the wiki very much. I think we just didn't develop a sense of the value of communicating in this way.
I was impressed with the range of uses to which others have put the wiki, and was really impressed by the Library Blogger's Wiki--the list of public libraries having there own blogs was both impressive and depressing at the same time. I noticed, for example, that Hennepin County supports 5 different blogs, and that many very small libraries all over the country have their own, while we here where I work have none. But I'm supposed to be talking about wiki's here, so I won't go on a blog rant. But honestly--it's embarrassing. Anyway, I really liked the look of the Library Success Wiki--clean look, clear outline and lots of direct links to other places. Same look as the Wikipedia.
As opposed to my comments on Thing 9, I really think the wiki is a marvelous tool to capture the expertise of the online community, but of course, there does seem to be a need for some monitoring of the contributions. I noticed that one of the wikis required an email confirmation prior to allowing contributions to articles. That's an unfortunate, but probably necessary precaution.
I'm hoping that the exposure to wikis during the 23 things process will give us here more interest in using our own wiki, and that we come up with more uses for it. We'll see.

Thing 9

Well, it's been a while since I've been here, but I have to admit I haven't been excited enough about the idea of collaborative editing of documents to forgo using Micorsoft Word--which I admit to hating, but at least it's familiar. On the rare occasions that I work on a document with someone else, sending attachments back and forth works just fine. Also the whole thing of inviting collaborators into the editing process just seems kind of clunky compared to just sending an email with attachment. And I never did get to the document in Zoho Writer. I kept getting a message saying "Document not found". And after playing around with Google Docs for awhile, I wasn't intrigued enough to follow up with Zoho. I suppose if a large enough community wanted to collaborate on something--say an online encylopedia--these kinds of tools would seem more useful to me. Oh yeah, that's Thing 10.

Thing 8

I know I should be more excited about all these photo editing and display tools, but I'm not really a picture guy, and while the photo box thingie is kind of fun, I can't say that I'll use it or really any of them routinely. I barely care to look at pictures generated by my family, much less other people's. I mean, my grandson is pretty freakin' cute, but really, how many pictures of a six month old baby do people want to look at. It's not like he's actually doing anything yet.
I can see the use of providing a set of pictures for the library's public of, say, the progress of a library construction project(in fact, I hope we do something like that when we start our major addition next year), but all the add-ons like the flicks seem a little over the top to me. But we'll see how I feel when I get around to thinking about sharing the pictures from my trip to Europe this summer. Course with my lame-o photography skills, they probably won't be interesting to me, much less anyone else.
Well, in any case, on to thing 9.

bill's 23 things

Thing 7

Yeah, I know I promised to do a slide show of my grandkid, but I never got more photos, so I'll come back to that later. I did the reading and viewing of the materials related to Thing 7 this morning. There wasn't much there with which I wasn't at least familiar, but we're only doing a few of the things here. We've had internal email for almost as long as it's been widely available, and I've got Outlook on my desk pc, so I use some of the organizing features of that with my work email--for example, I get a lot of suggestions from patrons about particular titles we should add to our collection through email. I've set up a separate folder for those, and as I make decisions about whether to buy particular titles, I move the email into either an "ordered" or a "rejected" folder. But that's as sophisticated as I feel the need to be.
We've been using Instant Messaging internally for about 6 months, and it's really useful. We're in a two story building, and it's handy to ask questions of my colleagues upstairs while I'm at my desk downstairs. Saves many a trip up and down the stairway. We have also begun using it to eliminate overhead announcements about phone calls etc. Another way we've used it is to rpelace meetings. We hold discussions among the librarians on a monthly (give or take) basis related to some particular topic. We've held a couple of these meetings using IM with a moderator inviting all the librarians logged in into the discussion. It felt kind of weird at first, and those of us who are, shall we say, typing-impaired were at a distinct disadvantage i9n keeping up with the discussion. But it was a fun experiment. We'll probably do it again as the need arises, and the topic lends itself to a non-face-to-face meeting. We'd like to move towards proving IM reference for the public, but the closest we've gotten is an "Ask a Librarian" email reference service.
It may just be my inner fuddy-duddy coming out, but I've never really understood the attraction of text messaging, especially when I see people driving down the road texting as they drive. I guess I can see individuals texting the reference desk from remote parts of the building as in the Youtube video, but I'd be surprised if that happened very often. And it seems like it would be really hard to have a real conversation via text.

Thing 6

Another fun time waster. But I can see where this would be a fun way to connect with users.

When I get a new influx of photos from my daughter, I'll try out the slideshow creator tool. Maybe tomorrow. Then it's on to Thing 7.

thing 5--a real time sapper

I've been playing around with Spell with Flickr for what seems to be a really long time. I was trying to get it to appear inside the post with the picture of my grandkid, but I'll be darned if I can figure a way to do it. So I decided to leave it as a header, just to show that I did accomplish(?) something after all my mucking about with it. I also made a puzzle of another photo--let's see if I can import that to this post:
Yeah, it worked!
I can see that the permutations and combinations of all these Flickr tools could create some really interesting products, but I can also see them taking over one's life, if one is not careful. So I'll stop with these two options and move on with my life to Thing 6--which unfortunately also involves playing with images. So it goes.

keep spooning it in!

keep spooning it in!
Originally uploaded by billmichel53

This was the first time he ate semi-solid food --he loved it.

mason and his papa

mason and papa
Originally uploaded by billmichel53

Yeah, I know, you can't really see him, but the back of his head is pretty freaking cute too.

Thing 4--Flickr

OK, it's been way too long since I've posted here, but in my defense, it took me a long time to figure out how to import photos from my wife's Picasa web album into Flickr. In the end, it was kind of clunky, but not all that difficult. I expect it'll be easier to import directly from the camera or the pc. Picasa allows some editing of the photos, which is why we use that. The pictures are freaking cute, albeit not very interesting pictures of my no longer new grandson, who is 5 1/2 months old now. I like the way that Flickr allows fairly lengthy comments about the photos, both by the owner of the account, and by other viewers. I've posted a couple of the photos from the Flickr account to this blog, but in other standalone posts. I'll have to play some more to figure out how to bring the pictures into an existing post, as well as if I can link directly to my Flickr account from this blog.

at long last, thing 3

Well, it's taken longer than it should have to get to this one, but it seems like everyone but me has been sick around here lately. Anyway, I've been using Bloglines as an aggregator for awhile now, so I decided to use Google Reader for this to see what the differences are. I've subscribed to some of my colleagues 23 things blogs to test Google Readers features. I actually like the way Bloglines works pretty well. The biggest problem with it is that it's always working collecting posts that I then have to remember to read. And some of those bloggers are so darn prolix that it's hard to keep up. If I don't check it for a couple of days, I've got 50 posts from either Michael Stephens or Stephen Abrams or both. If I don't have time to read all of them then, I don't read any, planning to go back later, but then there's 100, then 125, and then, when it gets to 200, it empties them out and starts over. Don't ask me how I know this, or how many times I've been reminded of it. But, for the most part, it's good stuff, so I don't want to just unsubscribe. It's like all those Professional journals that I'm on the routing lists for--I want to see them to see if there's anything worth reading, but they just kind of pile up.
I also like how, in Bloglines, I can e-mail an interesting posting to my colleagues, adding a message of my own to the email. I'll be exploring Google Reader over the next couple of days to compare the two for those kinds of advanced features. And then to Thing 4.

Musings on Thing 2

This one was kind of interesting. I've done a fair amount of reading on the whole Web/Library 2.0 concept, but I'm not sure I get what's so very revolutionary about it--especially as it relates to libraries and how they relate to technology and to the patron. Librarians have historically been early adopters of many new technologies, as they determined that whatever it was could positively impact the services they offered to their patrons/users/customers (if only the Library 2.0 geeks could come up with a new name for all those people we attempt to serve, they would have done us all a valuable service). I understand about the convergence of user-based technologies necessitating a change in our thinking about how we relate to them and them to us, but so did adopting the telephone.
I agree that we as a profession need to make sure that we understand the new technologies and how they can help us, and more importantly how they can and are being used by our patrons. I also think that, as I said in a meeting just this morning, the amount we don't know is always growing. So it's important for us to listen to what people like Stephen Abrams and Micheal Stephens are talking about, and to play with these technologies to figure out what they are, but we do need to be judicious in our adoption of them--something that, given the financial constraints under which librarians have always operated, we have also always done. But even if we don't adopt them into our service models, it's important that we know what they are, and what they're used for, since our patrons are asking for our help while they use them. For example, I'm not sure that it's necessary for all of us to have a presence in Second Life, but we need to know what "having a presence in Second Life" means, because our patrons know and do. On the other hand, how is that different from knowing that we can use AllData to find out how to replace a serpentine belt versus actually going into our garage at home and replacing one. On the other other hand, we do need to serve our patrons where and when they are, so at some point, we're probably going to have to expand our presence in whatever online environment is then in use. I'm just not convinced that there's a need yet that takes precedence over the real needs of the people coming into my buildings. Maybe when I'm done with the 23 things, I'll be convinced--or maybe I'll just go on to the other 23,ooo things I also need to know.
Well, now that I've totally depressed myself once again, on to Thing 3.