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.