The End (Thing #23)

Now, to reminisce:
I've really enjoyed the 23 Things, especially the hands-on exercises when we created something--a rollyo search engine, a trading card, a bloglines account. (Less so, the exercises where we read something.) I liked that the tasks came in manageable chunks--I didn't have to learn everything all at once, and I had more structure than if I'd just gone madly off on my own. Other people's blogs have also been good resources for information and entertainment. Finally, can I just say what a ridiculous sense of accomplishment I feel when I look at my beautiful, beautiful blog?

Three things I will take with me:
1) My rollyo search engine--how I love that thing! I keep adding more sites to search to it.

2) My bloglines account--I wasn't very excited about this at the time, but since I made it, I've managed to keep up with book reviews from the Pioneer Press, the New York Times, and Library Journal.

3) Wikis--I'm making one for my bookclub! I'm going to convince everyone that a central place to keep track of what we've read, what we want to read, and what we're reading on the side will not only be useful, but easy to do.

Thank you, SPPL Learning 2.0 Team!

Google Docs (Thing #21)

I tried GoogleDocs instead of Zoho because I keep hearing about it. It seems like it would be great for working on a project collaboratively--I like the ability to post comments on the documents. I also love, love, love the ability to revert to previous versions. That said, I don't think I would use it unless I wanted to work on something collaborative or needed the ability to access my document from anywhere--it seems to have limited options for fonts, formatting, etc.

(Small technical wonder: I uploaded this poem from my computer. Very easy. GoogleDocs preserved the font I orginally typed it in and I can make changes in that font, even though it's not available when you create a document. How do they do that?)

ATLANTIS—A LOST SONNET
Eavan Boland

How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder

that a whole city—arches, pillars, colonnades,

not to mention vehicles and animals—had all

one fine day gone under?

I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.

Surely a great city must have been missed?

I miss our old city —

white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting

under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe

what really happened is

this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word

to convey that what is gone is gone forever and

never found it. And so, in the best traditions of

where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name

and drowned it.

More Web/Library 2.0

I just read an article in American Libraries about promoting your library beyond your own website--an example being, say, putting a link to one of your special collections on the Wikipedia page about a related subject.

As I was looking at the Web 2.0 award-winner Yelp, I noticed that under Public Services, the Central Library was listed (one poster wants to live there!), along with the Highland and Hamline Libraries. My question is this: is it unethical--or at least against the user-generated-content ethos of Web 2.0--to put postings for the rest of the libraries up ourselves? We could sneak library references onto all kinds of sites.

Web 2.0 (Thing #22)

I can't believe how 2.0 I already am! I was looking at the winners of the Web 2.0 awards--I shop at Threadless and Etsy and listen to music on Last.fm, and before that Pandora. My new 2.0 crush: One Sentence. My current favorite one sentence stories are from Finster and Walker, VA Ranger.

Library 2.0 (Thing #18)

So, Rick Anderson says: "We need to focus our efforts not on teaching research skills but on eliminating the barriers that exist between patrons and the information they need, so they can spend as little time as possible wrestling with lousy search interfaces and as much time as possible actually reading and learning" and "[I]f our services can’t be used without training, then it’s the services that need to be fixed—not our patrons."

This makes so much sense, but it's not happening. Every day, I explain how to use the Internet sign-up and that we have online resources. Part of it, I think, is that technology in any form is still a challenge for many of our patrons--we spend a lot of time troubleshooting email, word processing, and filling out forms. If 2.0 technology can make our services more transparent, I'm all for it. (And maybe it will make our tech-savvy, ebook reading, online bill-paying patrons happy, too.)

Sandbox (Thing #20)

I learned something important about wikis playing with SPPL's Learning 2.0 Wiki: it's very easy to fix things if you break them. I accidentally erased all of the Favorite Movie entries, and all I had to do to get them back was delete the revision. Hurray!

Also, I found two ways to deal (at least partially) with the things that bothered me about the wikis I'd seen. You can change the skins to alter the aesthetics to your taste. I liked Qua on PBWiki. You can also add a sidebar, which makes navigating from page to page a little more direct.

Wikis (Thing #19)

Wikis seem great--you can create a website without needing any technical know-how, and unlike a blog, the content can be organized by subject rather than chronologically. They seem ideally suited for subject guides and could fashion as a reasonable intranet. They'd have a leg up on what we currently have in that they can be edited by anyone (within the limitations you set) and are accessible from anywhere. Based on the examples I saw, libraries are already making good use of them. The only things that bother me so far are that they seem uniformly ugly (is there a reason you can't choose from lovely templates as on blogger?) and somewhat awkward to navigate.

Tagging and Folksonomies (Thing #17)

What do I think about tagging and folksonomies? I'm of two minds about it. When I originally heard about it, I though "Great! No more cookery!" On the whole, I think it's common sense to let people label things in the language they use. However, I haven't been so very impressed with it in practice. For example, I looked at some of the titles users had tagged at Ann Arbor. The first, The Da Vinci Code, was tagged, among other things, "Mary Magalene." Now, this should be great--Mary Magdalene is not one of the LC Subject headings and might be a useful point of access. Unfortunately, for those of us who use the more traditional spelling "Mary Magdalene," it doesn't do any good.

One of the articles we read noted that tagging works best when a lot of people tag the same item, and this seems like a good example. If 100 people tagged The Da Vinci Code, surely some of them would come up with Mary Magdalene. It might also take care of one of the other problems of tagging--that nobody calls anything by the same name. On LibraryThing, the book Soon I Will Be Invincible is tagged "genre:scifi," "Sci-Fi," and "Science Fiction" (and, mysteriously, "gaiman"). The more people tag a thing, the better chance you have of someone tagging it what you would think to look for it under.

Lingro

I heard about a website called Lingro on Future Tense yesterday. From Lingro's homepage, you can open any website. When the site opens up, you can click on any word for a translation. It currently translates to and from English and either Spanish, French, Italian, and Polish. There's also an English dictionary for those needing help with vocabulary. You can create and save wordlists, and practice those words with electronic flashcards. I looked at it today, and it seems like it could be a great tool for language learners. (It has a 2.0 aspect as well, in that users can add or add to translations.)

Del.icio.us (Thing #16)

I've had a del.icio.us account for a little while--it seemed like it would be a useful way to bookmark sites for reference work, since I can't count on being at the same computer every day, or even every hour. It's since devolved into the place I store all the articles I mean to read one day and never quite get around to, but that's useful, too.

For this exercise, I looked at the Seven Habits of Highly Successful Del.icio.us users. I checked out some of the tools (you can see the last five items I bookmarked on the side of my blog now!), and subscribed to some tags. I also discovered that you can see what other people who have bookmarked sites have to say about them by clicking where it says "saved by 423 other people." It's amazing what you can learn when you read the directions.

Rollyo (Thing #15)

I had some trouble setting this up, and more trouble getting the search box on my blog, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I meant to create a place I could search for directions on how to do crafty projects, but I included sites where you can buy handmade things, and now I have my own little shopping center, just in time for the holidays. Fun!

Library Thing, Again (Thing #14)

I cataloged all of my books on Library Thing a while back (see Thing #7), but I just now put the Library Thing search widget on my blog. You can search my library!

Image Generator (Thing #13)

I've always liked David Hockney, so I jumped at the chance to create a photocollage at the Hockneyizer. The results are so much greater than the effort required. I also very much enjoyed the Bob Dylan Message Generator.

Finding Feeds (Thing #12)

I did not have much luck finding feeds using Topix or Technorati (though it's nice to finally know what Technorati is--I keep hearing about it, but haven't ever cared enough to find out what it was). I tried library, libraries, and librarians, and found some blogs that looked interesting, but an equal number that didn't actually seem to have anything to do with library, libraries, or librarians. Maybe I haven't quite figured out how to use them? Or maybe it would work better if my searches were more targeted?

I also tried looking for Winona, MN, my hometown. Judging by the feeds, the biggest news out of Winona lately is that a woman is suing her petsitter for letting her potbellied pig get too fat while she was taking care of it. Sad.

Generally, I've had the best luck with blogs I read about or hear about from other people.

Pretty!

This was posted on the Craft magazine blog.

Audiobooks (Thing #10)

I've been kind of sulky about NetLibrary audiobooks ever since I learned they wouldn't work on my Mac or iPod, but I went and looked at the available titles today. I was, at times, confused by how they were organized. For example, when I browsed by subject, Eragon and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants were listed under Young Adult Fiction, while their sequels, Eldest and Girls in Pants, were under Popular Fiction. On the upside, the titles seem high-quality.

Podcasts (Thing #9)

I'm skipping back a little to Thing #9. I subscribe to two podcasts through iTunes--This American Life and NPR's Sunday Puzzler--but almost never listen to them unless I'm going on a car trip. For this exercise, I spent some time browsing Podcast Alley and Podcast Directory. I briefly considered signing up for "A British Computer Reads a Paragraph of Moby Dick" but then I realized it had never gotten past the third paragraph...in 2005. A lot of podcasts I looked at seemed to have petered out around the same time--I wonder if podcasting's golden year was 2005.

I know some libraries are still podcasting--I found three browsing on iTunes: Denver Public Library podcasts children's stories and nursery rhymes, Kankakee Public Library podcasts programs, and Hennepin County has a teen podcast.

RSS Feeds Celebrity Endorsement

Bill Barnes, one of the creators of the all-too-true library comic Unshelved, pushed RSS feeds in his latest blog post. Check it out (and subscribe to the feed for the comic) at: http://www.unshelved.com/blog.aspx?post=928.

RSS Feeds (Thing #11)

I set up feeds at Bloglines for book reviews from the Star Tribune, Pioneer Press, and the New York Times, as well as a few for restaurant reviews and one for my favorite crafty magazine. There were a couple of things I thought would be fun that I couldn't make work, like the flickr feed and the news subject feed.

As entertaining as I can imagine this being (all my favorite timewasters in one place!), I'm just lazy enough that it still feels like work to have to log into another site--I like things that come directly to my email or show up when my browser opens.

I can imagine this being useful--HCL has RSS feeds on its subject guides, library news, book lists, and on catalog searches.

You may view my feeds at:
http://www.bloglines.com/public/KFS

Card Catalog

LII sent this out in their latest digest--a catalog card generator. You can find it at http://www.blyberg.net/card-generator/. Not really useful, but fun.

You Tube (Thing #8)

I searched YouTube for "library science," looking for these 1950s-era library recruitment videos I'd once seen, and ran across this hysterically dated video series, produced by Mississippi public television in the eighties. Boy, is a lot of library practice/technology obsolete. And it's not even 2132 yet!

Blogs

I've added a new feature here: Blogs to Watch. In addition to checking my horoscope every day (I might need to curb my temper a touch today!), I now intend to look at In the New, the blog of one Jen Mac, who is trying something new every single day this year. In the spirit of our shared trying-new-things, learning-through-play project, I thought I'd let you all know about it, too.

Learning 2.0 Synergy

This picture was referenced in something I was reading--Lansing Public Library got 339 people to vote for which teens represented various emoticons the best. I was idly considering if/how we could adapt the idea for the SPPL MySpace page. But get this--the screenshot was posted on flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/hblowers/416017750/) by Helene Blowers, who originally developed the 23 things program upon which our very own 23 things are based!

Thing #7

Inspired by the pretty cover art on the ever-educational blog, Learning 2.0 w/Debbie, I finally put my home library on Library Thing. I can't believe I didn't do it before. What I love about Library Thing:

1) Seeing my mish-mash of books--my mom's 1961 copy of Ulysses (and accompanying vintage Cliff's Notes), the copy of What Katy Did I got for my eight birthday, the copy of The Woman Warrior that was the common reading my freshman year at college, stupid Anna Karenina that took me nine months to read--all at once.

2) The surprisingly good recommendations based on books I own.

3) Spying on the libraries of people who own the same books you do.

4) Seeing alternate covers for books.

I'm sure as I continue to waste time on this site, I will find more to recommend it. Hurray for web 2.0!

Week Three

Well, this was fun.

Lifelong Learning

It isn't that long ago that I completed the most recent phase of my formal education, so I'm still adjusting to the idea of learning for/as fun. The lifelong learning skill that comes the most easily to me now is to have confidence in myself as a competent learner. The hardest is to view problems as challenges. They mostly still stay problems in my mind--I generally believe I can solve them, but they almost never present themselve as opportunities to learn and grow.