Reflection

Some of the other participants in this North Texas 23 Things Round-up made the comment that this was like taking a graduate level course without the pressure of writing papers. I would wholeheartedly agree! I confess that I was even a participant largely due to the fact that I am a distance SLIS student at UNT and had to take the summer off, so, in a sense, this was my graduate level course this summer.

The things I enjoyed the most (and will continue to use) are Facebook, Googlereader, and Delicious. It is weird that, even though I had my Facebook account set up a year or two ago, it really took off this summer, reconnecting me with old friends. I got totally addicted to Farkle, along with my sister and her friends. I will have to study more on using Facebook to promote libraries and my author friends.

A pleasant by-product of learning all this new technology this summer is simply the empowerment one feels when conquering new territory. It has made me more confident in other areas of my life and more willing to take on challenges. Change does not always have to be scary. Change can be cool and fun!

Developing 23 Things for My Library

As a school librarian, I was the only one at my workplace that did the "23 Things" this summer. There are a couple of ways to go forward in my situation with the 23 Things.

First of all, there are the teachers at my school. I have already talked to some about specific "Things" that I know that they as individual teachers would like. I need to talk to our tech guy after the flurry of beginning of the school year stuff settles about a school-wide 23 Things for staff. Our school is only K-8, how many of our students could use instruction on these things in computer class?

I also belong to a Region VIII Library Co-op. We have meetings three times a year. Perhaps a class or workshop at our Library Academy?

Podcasting

I both loved and hated this "thing"! I got frustrated over the number of podcasts that required an RSS feed (what if I didn't want a subscription after listening?) or a download to your computer in order to listen, or worse yet, had a link on a webpage, but were no longer available to download or listen to. Very user unfriendly! Also, the more people involved in talking, the more problems with sound. Some conversations reminded me of my old undergrad days, where anyone could sign up for time on the college radio station and talk about anything, whether the topic was of interest to listeners or not.

On the other hand, kudos to those libraries out there that recorded and archived author visits, book reviews, and book talks with embedded players, that all you had to do was click on a link and listen. I was mesmerized by a program by Laurie Halse Anderson, and had to go back to my library and check out one of her books, even though the program was an hour long!

YouTube

After watching several videos, I have decided that there are three essential elements that make a video effective:

1) Short--even some of the 5 minute videos were too long! Perhaps this is because we are used to 30 second commercials on TV, but if you can't make a point and move on in a minute or less, you are toast!

2) Lively--The ones that held my interest had upbeat music and kept an energized pace.

3) Informative--The new Azle, TX Public Library may be poised for the 21st century, but other than lovely architecture and sweeping views from the balcony, I can't tell from the video how this library is different from other existing libraries. It would have been better served to explain new services---or better yet, show them in action, instead of repeating slides over and over.

Google Docs

Pretty cool! I enjoyed playing around with the document and presentation function. I had trouble with the spreadsheet (none of the tools were working) and tried to set up a form, but without the spreadsheet working, I don't know how useful the form is. The video had me excited though, for setting up schedules and such using the form.

Wikis

I love Wikipedia for all sorts of quick answers. Like last summer, when my book club was reading Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey" and the characters kept going to "the pump-room". What exactly is a "pump-room"??? Wikipedia to the rescue, complete with pictures and everything!

Or when I had to prove to my husband that "Big Yellow Taxi" (...they paved paradise and put up a parking lot) was written by Joni Mitchell, not Maria Muldair....

Or now that the movie "Julie & Julia" is out and KERA is showing episodes of Julia Child's TV show and I want to know a little more about Julia Child. (She really led an interesting life....)

I had never bothered with the other tabs before this 23 Things assignment. It is good to know about the grading system, and the discussions on the articles.

The WetPaint account was pretty easy to use. I was curious about the templates, but decided against checking them out. It was taking a long time to load pages just being plain!

LibWorm

Who knew that there were so many RSS feeds for librarians and library issues that someone would have to create a search engine just to sort through them all? My "ah ha!" moment for this one came when I started to research open-source software on Yahoo and one of the articles near the top of the pile was written in 2002! Sometimes information is changing so fast that one wants the latest. LibWorm is helpful in this regard.

Subject links and tagging also proved useful in LibWorm, although some of what was considered "humor" was downright macabre. "Wicked" humor??

LibraryThing

I had a hard time getting through this Thing, mainly because I couldn't find the sections on ThingLang, MarcThing, and ISBN check. Once the links were posted on the North Texas comments (Thanks again, speedylibrarian!) I read the articles, but didn't gain much insight.

On ThingLang: perhaps it is useful if you have a lot of foreign language books (academic library perhaps?) but my limited experience as a German major in college and occasional cataloger of a Spanish book is that foreign language editions generally have a different ISBN just as a different edition would in English, so I didn't understand the need.

HTML and XML are more foreign to me than Marc, so I probably wouldn't use MarcThing either, but it is a good thing for those "outside" the library field, I guess. And I haven't done enough cataloging to run across needing to do an ISBN check (usually the mistake is mine if I can't find a record through ISBN).

However, that said, I loved the discussion threads on "Librarians Who LibraryThing" and being able to get recommended reads based on current books. I may even use the social aspect to discuss books later...

Digg

I found Digg to be quite an eccletic mix of news articles, images and videos. I thought that it would be more serious and intellectual than it was. Still, I found an article about the world's largest cave interesting, and I was totally sidetracked by the article "Ukeleles Have Gone Viral" when I clicked on the YouTube video of Jake Shimabukuro playing George Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". Who knew that a ukulele could be that awesome?! After checking out a couple more videos ("Crazy G" and "Thriller" yes, on the uke) I returned to the homepage and was saddened that "Ukeleles Have Gone Viral" dropped down the page because it had fewer "diggs" than a video of a turtle having an orgasm or John Madden's 2009 football predictions. That the site continues to evolve that quickly (this had all happened in the course of about 40 minutes) made me wonder at the legitimacy of the information. Overall, as a library tool, I would probably stick to safer bets.

Delicious

Tagging makes a lot more sense, now that I've set up my Delicious account. I really like this application and can hardly wait to try it at work. After importing and sorting the bookmarks I already have on my home computer, I added "LibrarianInBlack" , "The Shifted Librarian" and Teri Lesesne's webpage for her fabulous reading lists.


What I learned about tagging is that a tag has to be all one word "NorthTexas23" or you end up with a bunch of useless tags like "North" and "Texas" and "23". This took some getting used to, since I am not a digital native!

I like having the Delicious toolbar across the top. It makes accessing my bookmarks easier, and being sorted by tags, much easier to find what I want.

Tagging

It makes sense in Web 2.0 applications to have some sort of organizing tool, especially if one has 100's or 1000's of photos, bookmarks, etc. I am not sure how tagging would work in a library setting, but it could be helpful to add access points to records via tagging. After all, controlled vocabulary only works if the catalog user happens to know the correct term. I see this often as a school librarian. Kids will type in "scary stories" rather than "horror" and wonder why the only thing that comes up is "Scary Stories to Read in the Dark".

Twitter

I created an account, poked around some on the ALA and #ALA2009 posts, but felt like I was intruding on someone else's party. So I deleted the account.

The most recent news item I heard about Twitter was from my son's college, UT Dallas. One of the profs there used Twitter in her lecture class. She had her Twitter page projected up on the screen behind her, and students could ask questions during her lectures. A grad student videotaped a couple of sessions and reported the project on YouTube, which caught the interest of U.S. News & World Reports, and was then mentioned in an article on technology.

Here is the link: http://www.utdallas.edu/news/2009/06/11-001.php

Instant Messaging

I created both a Meebo account and a Yahoo account, but never did get the hang of creating a buddy list. My experience with Instant Messaging is at my work, being the librarian at a K-8 school. We have instant messaging just among staff (no students) preloaded for us. I use it a lot for managing Accelerated Reader. Teachers will IM me to unlock a student, I can IM the office for information on new students when setting up AR accounts. Teachers also IM me if they want to make an unscheduled library visit, or check on students they have sent individually if they are taking too long. Sometimes teachers will ask if we have a certain book or books by a certain author rather than looking stuff up for themselves on our online catalog. In short, (no pun intended) there are many uses for IM for any quick, immediate communication between staff members.

Ning

Quite frankly, I just don't get this thing. Why do you need to create your own social network when you are basically doing the same thing on Facebook? I can see perhaps the value of setting up an invitation only ning account for a school or business group, but again, why use ning and not some other tool?

My interests are pretty mundane, and the sites I visited reflected that. The titles for the groups were sometimes the most interesting part of the webpages, as I found page after page of forums unattended, blogs posted with no replies, and groups yet to be formed. One library page had scores of tulip photos. They were lovely, to be sure, but what did they have to do with "reader's advisory"??

Time to move on to the next Thing!

More Facebook

There is more to Facebook than I realized!! It was frustrating to find groups to join, because there are so many groups but so few filters. Now that I've found 2 (thanks again, Jeff and speedylibrarian!) I am actually excited to see if anything develops....The 2 I chose are the UNT SLIS Unite! and Texas Library Association.

Facebook

Ha! For once, I am not a complete newbie to one of the "23 Things". I joined Facebook a year or two ago in order to view a video a friend of mine made of his mission trip to Kenya. Since then, I've collected 24 friends, mostly people from church. Oddly, about half are teens from my church that I don't know really well. Why they want me to know their musings, I don't know. Perhaps they want to collect lots of friends and I am a safe one, or the youth minister suggested trusted adults as a way of having a conscience about posts, or maybe, perhaps maybe I made some sort of impression on them when I was their school librarian way back in 8th grade????

I found the link to the articles on privacy helpful, especially grouping friends.

RSS Feeds

Okay, I was aware of RSS feeds for some time now, but didn't know that "RSS" stands for Real Simple Syndication. I also found the videos helpful. I went to Helen Blower's Library Bytes feed and signed up after watching a video about how news is being reported as it happens now via the Internet. Compare that to the Battle of New Orleans being fought after the War of 1812 was already over, or Juneteeth recently being celebrated because the slaves in Texas didn't know until June that the Civil War was over. And now we don't even have to wait for a newspaper to publish or a TV newscast to tell us what is going on in the world. Amazing, truly amazing.

Blog Reader

Interesting concept for those who spend more time on the Web than I do! Someone commented that Foxfire had a drop down menu to check on feeds. Perhaps this is what Explorer is doing with its new "slices" tab?

Image Generators

Of all the options for this post, I found imagechef.com the most fun and intriguing. I might even use some of the apps on my Facebook page! I also found the link to the various social networking sites (including Blogger) to be very helpful and useful.

By the way, the "fortune" I chose is meant to tie in with today's date (Happy July 4th!) but like most fortunes, is general enough to apply to just about any day during the summer!

Flickr Mashup

Thank goodness for instructions! Otherwise, I would be saving and adding each picture one at a time, like this:

I am not sure why the "L" doesn't want to line up, but I guess it adds to the whimsical look. Spelling with Flickr is fun! Even when there are small glitches...as with all technology, one just has to keep at it, learn from it, and be patient with oneself!

Flickr has very cool photos. This means that there are a lot of people out there with way more creativity and time to spend with their cameras than I do! I just scratched the surface of digital photography for a few years, working on the school yearbook. It was fun but frenzied.

I found that searching for photos was like a treasure hunt. If I were trying to do a school project, I might be a little frustrated in that there is just too much stuff to choose from. Searching just the tags helped to narrow it down a bit. Here is a photo that I like.

Time to get Moving!

My goodness, how time flies! I revisited the two videos to get me motivated and to remember why I am doing this: to keep me learning this summer. Only it isn't quite "summer" yet. Although Memorial Day has come and gone (us old school fashionistas can wear white shoes now) I have four more days of regular school where I work, and then 3 weeks of summer school. But as Stephen Abrams says, I just need to carve out fifteen minutes a day. So starting today, that is what I plan on doing, but like exercise, it probably won't be every day, just most days!

Hello Everyone!

Hi! I am looking forward to learning 23 Things!