Week 10 YouTube

Youtube
I'm definitely on a home town kick today. My video link will be to the Thamesville Corn Maze where I spent three hours being lost, on the Saturday night before Thanksgiving.
Lesson Learned: corn mazes are a LOT harder in the dark!
Just when we had finally worked our way back to the entrance (trying to find the exit), the owner's son came along and led us all the way back in to the maze. (Oh No, I thought... not deja vu all over again!!! However he did lead us to the bridge, and showed us how to get out.)

btw, I'm not really from Thamesville, I grew up in Dawn Mills. But no one in Dawn Mills has a corn maze... yet. I'll have to talk to my brothers!!!

Youtube @RWL?
omigod, that reminds me of a Mockumentary a friend posted on her facebook:
CSI: Library Instruction

One video is worth a million cautionary notes... don't you think?

Week 9 (b) AWARD WINNING 2.0 STUFF

This is a pretty cool site, and I'm going to add it to my delicious list.

It's interesting the Zoho is an "organizing" tool. I don't think I "get" Zoho yet. I'll have to browse around other's blogs and see if somebody else figured it out better than me.

Week # 9 ZOHO blog post

I will try writing my blog post within Zoho, and see if it's as easy to post to my blog as they say it will be.

Can it be harder than DOCS? doubtful

I was excited to see there was a Zoho Project Manager -- not that I have ever used Project Management software before--- but if we get to be the next Bibliocommons library, then it could be really cool to have something like that available for all to use.

I am really impressed by Pat's slide showthat he posted in his blog (this is one advantage of being a week behind the group: I get to see what everyone else has done first.. )

And since I'm playing around, why not stick in another one of the many goofy photos of myself my husband seems to have on file. Now how does this happen???

This didn't work, sorry. The first time I tried I got an error message that Zoho thought the file had a virus. The second time, I dunno. Maybe there is a downside to free.

But now what? Can I email this file to someone who doesn't have Microsoft office installed? Will s/he be able to read it?

HELP! how do I really use Zoho. I don't get it yet. Jenny .... help ...

Week # 8 Wikis -- I did it!

I have wanted to learn more about wikis for a long time, especially how to make or edit one. I've been at several conferences where people like Stephen Abram have encouraged libraries to edit wiki entries, as a way of publicizing special collections the library holds on the wiki topic.

Great idea -- but I've never done it. Wikis have always seemed complicated to use. And yes, they are. The help pages really take some concentration.

But I persevered, and I was able to post a correction to the wikipedia entry about my home "ghost town" of Dawn Mills Ontario.

Would wikis be a good thing for our organization to use? It depends how easy they are to use.

For at least a year, I've been thinking of creating a wiki around Library Materials Selection / Collection Development. This thought started when I began job-sharing with Jill.

I set up a DOC (as in Hummingbird), and gave access to various people so they could read and edit it. (nothing much happened with this.) But DOCS is hard to use: you have to remember/guess exactly what someone called the doc to find it. You have to be logged in. You can open more than one version at a time, to compare versions, but you can only edit one version at a time.

Would a wiki be easier than a DOC?

hmmm.... I wouldn't want the Collection Development wiki to be public. So I think the login and finding problem would be the same.

Would a blog work just as well as a wiki?
People could comment on comments and eventually make a new post. Skip wikis, we could "harness the collective wisdom of the users" with a blog, couldn't we?

However, what I don't like about blogs, as a content repository, is their chronological nature. I would have to scroll back to 2007, to see the first version of my Collection Exchange guidelines, for example.

But wait, can you get around this by tagging your entries -- so all the posts about, say, Collection Exchange, would group together?

Obviously, I'm thinking out loud here. Does anyone have any answers or comments for me?

BTW, while I was exploring the Library Success Wiki, I found Thing 67: Stress Savers, and within that, something that might help end password schizophrenia [aka what username am I here and now?]. It's Where is Your Username Registered? Of course that helps only if you keep your username constant (or almost constant).

Week 7 The Essence of 2.0 = Leave the Library

I like one thing John Blyberg said in the blog post Meredith linked to (the one where he talked about the failure of tagging in the Ann Arbor online catalogue)
"... when we use technology, it should be transparent, intuitive, and a natural extension of the patron experience."

For years I have been thinking our catalogue should be so simple we shouldn't have to teach people how to use it. Knowledge Ontario should be that simple. OverDrive downloadable audiobooks should be that simple.

It's not.

But is that the REAL problem? I don't think so.

I think the real problem is that we don't know how to tell people about the great tools we already have. Heck, at least 2/3 of the people who live in our area never use the library.

And the reason we don't know how to tell them about these great things is because we don't know what they need or want. We are so stuck in the approach of "you should do this, you'll love it, I know what you need".

I wish I could do what Pat Wagner says: leave your library, get out and talk to our users, figure out what they want, then start to build it. Her talk "Marketing as if your library depends on it" is the essence of 2.0, in my books.

I just wish I had the guts to toss the other things on my "to do" list aside, and just be Pat Wagner.

Another idea I liked:
The comment from Dale about the 70 year old librarian in the 1980s who figured out that non-standard call numbers and pasting reviews in books would work for her library's user group. Totally 2.0, without the technology.

Week 6 Assignment del.icio.us & technorati

I LOVE love love LOVE del.icio.us.
It has kept me sane -- what with using different computers at work, at home, and at Western when I was teaching.

• I use it to keep track of articles when I'm making up a reading list for my course.
• I use it to keep track of my user names and passwords for various accounts -- I keep those bookmarks private and encode my password, to boot.
• I LOVE IT!

My only complaint is that ITS yells at me if I install the delicious toolbar at work. I've been trying for six months to live without the toolbar, and just tag by copying the URL, the way Lisa showed us earlier this year. It works. But it's such a drag. Three steps instead of one.

Definitely one of the first 2.0 things I would bug ITS about. But it depends who else at RWL cares. Does anyone else like del.icio.us?

Thanks for getting me to check out a popular tag -- I had forgotten how to see other people's comments.
Ironically the one I picked was the New York Times new API service. Ironically because what they are sharing is their set of tags -- a consistent well thought out set of subject headings.
Doesn't this remind me of something???
Yikes, it's like letting people use the Library of Congress Subject headings -- at their desktops.

Technorati
I can't see the video -- it may be my husband's computer.

As I am currently tutoring an electronic information course for SOLS, I was fascinated to see the different search results, depending on whether it was a search of indexer-applied subjects/tags -- or a keyword search. Boy, keyword searches are certainly screwing up some of my students!

Would it be useful? Hmm.
I wonder if that's how Oakville Public Library and Bibliocommons found out I had mentioned them in my blog. I got emails from both of them the day after I made my post.
However, don't you have to register for Technorati to add you to it?

Week 5 Assignment: CD 2.0

Library Thing:
Well I finally used this! after hearing about it for years.

Things I liked about Library Thing:

• fun to find other people who've also read the book
• quick way to catalogue a home library: I liked how you could quickly re-use someone else's record

Things I didn't like

• once I found people who'd read my book, I wanted to see what they thought about it, but I found it very clunky to do this. Maybe I didn't do it right? It took me about six clicks to go see how they had catalogued the book. (Here is what I did: find members -- search member library (but some had 1500 books!!!), and I kept ending up on my own page.:-(
• For the initial book record, I kept having to change my search where? criteria. I wish LT could have searched multiple sources at once.

I like the list-making possibilities more in Bibliocommons, I think. However, I haven't been "inside" Bibliocommons yet, so maybe it's only lookin' good from the outside???

Facebook: The GREEN page was downright scary.

• Someone hacked their website http://www.greenbecauseyoucan.com/
• This happened three weeks ago
• But no one from the page/group did anything about it.
• Good thing: lots of discussion going on. If people were this passionate about our library I'd be happy.
• Bad thing: overwhelming to try to figure out what's going on. Seems to be a long conversation between a couple of virulent greens and anti-greens.
• I can't figure out how to interact with this page.
• Oh, I guess you have to be logged in to do that. But it didn't tell me.

Week 4 Assignment - Community Development 2.0

I have tried many times to get in the flow of using RSS feeds, and find it hard.

One thing that makes it VERY DIFFICULT, at work, is the way the Region discourages, and even prevents us from installing toolbar gadgets. So I can't easily install the cute little orange RSS feed button on my PC.
Which means I have to think about going somewhere else to click on the feeder link. GRRRRR

But even at home, I haven't found it an easy habit to get into. I've tried 3 approaches

• I put the RSS button in my IE & Firefox toolbars
• I signed up with GoogleReader and subscribed to some very cool library blogs that I knew I wanted to keep up with, for my teaching last summer.
• And now I've signed up for Bloglines.

But in each case, I have to do something outside my normal routine -- which is check email, open DOCs, open Workflows.

And worse, if I do break my routine, and find something cool in my news feeds, cripes, I hate to think how distracted I would get.

Who has a good solution out there?

I want to figure this out, because a lot of people LOVE newsfeeds, and I want our library to keep in touch with them.

For me, I really really prefer getting things emailed to me. I started getting email alerts from PC World Canada magazine of their latest news stories, and I find it easy to skim these, save the few articles of interest (by bookmarking to my del.icio.us account) and delete the rest.

But that's so old school. How can I get into using RSS and newsfeeds more regularly? What's the habit I need to form?