SL

I don't see how so many people have so much time to create a Second Life. I can't seem to find time to put away the clean laundry in my first one. Or maybe people are abandoning their in-shambles FL and enjoying a fresh start in their second. It looks like all the female residents have big boobs, long legs, and tiny waists, so I guess wish fulfillment is part of the game. Though with recent publicity about some broad "killing" her SL partner, it looks like things don't always work out so well in SL either. I didn't see any gray panthers in any of the slides--though I saw at least one sexy bald (prematurely?) dude. Usually I'm pretty good at thinking creatively, but I'm having trouble coming up with any uses that RPL could put SL to. I'll look forward to reading other AIT students blogs on this topic.

Podcasts

I was somewhat familiar with podcasts, having listened to a couple of NPR's This American Life shows that I had heard parts of on the radio (I'd recommend "Switched at Birth" if you want to hear an unusual story of two Wisconsin babies who were raised by the wrong families until age 40) and also a couple of author interviews on the Teaching Books (Badgerlink) database. I looked at what a couple of other libraries were doing with podcasts with mixed results. I found Denver PL children's stories really disappointing, partly because of the reader's voice but mostly because while the stories were being read, the screen was showing really annoying abstract frenetic graphics. Photos of the pages or no graphics at all would have been more appropriate. I tried to watch NYPL's video program with Lidia, the Italian cookbook author, but the download was extremely slow with about 40 seconds of frozen screen download time between each 4 second segment. I've had that problem at home too occasionally, once when I tried to show a friend a short video that I'd already watched. It played straight through for me the first time, but repeated plays were jerky beyond belief. I suppose I have to admit that I did not complete the assignment, because I really don't want to subscribe to any feeds at this time.

Knock knock

Finally found the list of AIT bloggers sent out in an early email. It took quite a while to find two that I could comment on, that is those who were still active and who had already enabled comments. I've enabled comments on my own blog now, but since mine wasn't listed on the emailed list I don't suppose I'll get any comments from other bloggers.

Feedback

Except in electronic situations, feedback is usually a good thing. However, having read some of the really vicious, vitriolic, or just plain redundant anonymous posts on local blogs, like the JT and RacinePost, I'm not so sure the information is always useful. We all know there are folks in the community who really appreciate and value the library. And while it is always nice to hear from them (Man, I loved that "Automatic Flatterer" even though I knew it was faux), adulation doesn't really help us improve. There are others who have an ax to grind. Perhaps they had to pay a fine or claim to have returned a book which never made its way back to us or found the library closed just when they needed us most. I'm not sure we want to give them a platform on which to chastise us. If we could structure our blogs or surveys to elicit helpful opinions--and not have to spend too much time moderating--I could see the usefulness of encouraging these sorts fo feedback. I could also see online comments responding to other people's questions--a sort of open party line for household or consumer questions or for reader guidance inquiries. I'm always open to comments from readers so comment away. Thanks.

Chasing cows

I'm running as fast as I can today, trying to catch up with my AIT homework. "Remember the milk" is probably not something I will ever use. I won't say definitely. But to me having to sign in to make a to do list--and then be signed in to get reminders just isn't very practical--when I'm rarely at a computer that isn't shared with the whole department. Perhaps if and when I ever get to the point where I have a portable device that is on all the time....
I did post a task, but had to have Mark help me out to find it on the list--were there really only four tasks on the list after all this time or was I missing some. At one point I thought I saw eight or more but then some went away. I was thinking there would be an actual list, but it looked like just a bunch of messages that you had to hover on or click on to see what the task was.

Tagging: You're It

While I've noticed tag clouds before, I've never really used them or even paid much attention. Chirag's inaugural address timeline tag cloud of inaugural speeches were really cool. (His cats, Giga and Tera, were pretty darn cute, too). I'm not a big bookmarker, but I can see the great advantage to a delicious account over bookmarking since I regularly use at least 5 different PCs. Our reference homepage, with its subject heading grouped links, serves a similar purpose for reference related activities, but it's pretty static and we can't add links to it by ourselves. Of course that does prevent an overload of links that might really mushroom if someone is aggressive at adding things to a collaborative account. The primary advantage that I see with tagging vs. LC subject headings is in currentness. Seems like the collective public arrives pretty quickly at terminology to describe a new phenomenon, activity, etc. LC moves ponderous along and eventually comes up with something close--or sticks to something only remotely accurate that they globbed on to early in the history of something. The situation in library catalogs improved significantly with the advent of keyword title searching, but we shouldn't have to keyword title search in order to find an appropriate book to check subject heading wording for additional titles--which are often assigned some equally obscure but different subject. However some of the patron assigned tags appear to mimic library subject headings (like fantasy or science fiction) so provide little advantage.
Delicious: While it's interesting to search for what other people have bookmarked on a topic--and to see how many people (and who) have tagged it through delicious--and to see that else they have tagged, the social aspect of it is a little scary too, having people able to see what you've bookmarked personally--though I realize they'd have to guess your identity if you don't use your real name. Of course with so many people sharing common names, someone else might to tagging, blogging, posting, whatever under your name.

I'M IMING

Since I've been using GoogleTalk, this week's assignment wasn't entirely new, but still there was a lot to be learned. I found the chat about Meebos in the catalog fascinating. Our catalog is so NOT user friendly that I think having a widget handy there would be a huge service to our patrons. I especially like Paul Pival's comment that there should be one on the results page as well as the error page, since I've found people often build a search that nets them tons of inappropriate hits and they have no idea how to narrow it down to what they really want. We'd need to enable some sort of audio indication that we've rec'd a message though since we're often doing something other than using our computers when we're at the desk. I looked at the IM pages of several of the libraries on the list and contact LaX public with a question about their Oktoberfest and got an almost instantaneous answer. Prosit!

Relaytor results

Not sure how Relaytor compares to Survey Monkey which seems to be more popular, but I just got results of my first survey: 7 recipients, 5 views, 3 responses--and the three who responded were unanimous. Yipee!

Old Dog (Chinese Zodiac) Learns New Tricks

Thank you, Emerging Technologies Team! At my performance review this past winter, I listed learning about Library2.0 or Web2.0 as a goal for the coming year. Little did I know you were going to make that task so convenient and pleasurable. My plan was to do a little reading--a book, some articles in library lit or online and try to get a little familiar with the terminology. How much better this has been. Of course there have been frustrations; of course I've already forgotten some of the things I've learned--reviewing the lessons this morning had me wondering if I'd really done them all--and if so why I hadn't written an entry. Oh, yeah--blogging wasn't the week 1 assignment, duh. But, by and large I've learned so much--and even if I am now a bit or a MB behind on my regular off desk tasks, this learning tool was much more efficient that attending a conference or signing up for an off-site class.
As for a favorite week, it's hard to pick. The one I've used the most has to be the wiki assignment. We now have two library employees and two non-library employees using the wiki I created to plan Latin@ Voices. I'm hoping to have another five people included sometime soon, though I suspect they are a bit hesitant to use a tool they are not familiar with. I've sent them the link to the instructional video you provided us, so we'll see. I used the relaytor this morning to send out a survey to the folks who aren't using the wiki yet to try to nail down a date for Latin@ Voices. No response there yet either.
I haven't made much use of Flickr since I don't have a digital camera yet (that will be happening sometime soon since I can't find my old APS one), but I have checked a few times looking for photos of Cart Attack in this year's parade--and found one from 2005.
While I haven't used it yet, I was pleased Darcy accepted my suggestion to make the quarterly report a googledoc that we could all update as the quarter progressed. That should save her some time.
Saving time, however, is not the name of this social networking game as far as I'm concerned. Checking feeds, reviewing facebook accounts, writing blogs, uploading books to LibraryThing, and doing fun stuff like creating a "for dummies" cover are all consumers of large amounts of time. Meanwhile the reviewing, the gov docs, the weeding, the programming tasks pile up.
Nevertheless I would like to continue with semester two. And a thumb drive would be my preferred incentive.

Born Forty Years Too Late

Okay, now I'm feeling really hassled! I absolutely loved this week's assignment and was very excited to discover these sites. I had written a long post about it but somehow lost it when I was trying to find the URL of my LibraryThing page to create the link! AARGH. So here goes again and I will probably need to write this in installments because I'm jumping back and forth between the desk and the backroom all day.
I was somewhat embarrassed that I did not know about these sites and I'm sure I'll be spreading the word. I've belonged to a book club for about 35 years and every now and then we try to resurrect, from memory, a list of the books we've discussed, when, and who recommended them. This would have been the perfect tool if we had known about it then--but, oh wait, Al Gore hadn't even invented the internet yet then, had he!
Actually I liked the more personal history/reading plan features of goodreads, but I guess you could use LibraryThing the same way by putting reading history or plans in the notes field of each title. It would be interesting to know whether the various editions of a book are somehow linked in the database. I know I chose newer or different editions of several of the books that I had read in the past, partly because I like having the picture and many of the older editions don't have that feature.
Just as an aside, it was interesting to note how few of the libraries on the list of those incorporating LibraryThing in their catalogs use iBistro/Sirsi-Dynix. We do get a fair number of reader guidance inquiries and I can see how it would be handy to have it right in the catalog and not to have to haul out reference books or go to a separate website like Novelist or LibraryThing to get recommendations. Still I don't know how useful the recommendations are, especially for those of us whose reading taste is pretty eclectic. I noticed that the majority of the titles recommended in the LibraryThing listings in the catalogs I searched were just other titles in the series or related to the series, with a very few things outside the series. Perhaps that's okay since many people would just want more of the same.
Several of the titles I added to my LibraryThing page did not show any additional suggestions in the Danbury catalog. For example, The Boxcar Children had no LibraryThing recommendations. However if you chose one of the other books in the series, it recommended other titles in the series (but not The Boxcar Children itself). Others, like "The Black Pearl Mystery," listed other titles but none in the series, so it's not consistent. When you clicked on the "boxcar children" tag you got a list of several other titles in the series, but not the original. I suppose that's because most people don't tag a book with the title words--even though in this case, someone might not realize there was an original book without "mystery" in the title.
When I was working in youth services I loved doing reader guidance, introducing children who were stuck on a lower level series into something with some of the same elements, but with a higher literary merit. Now that I'm working with adults, I find reader guidance a bit overwhelming--possibly because I don't read much popular fiction and don't remember a lot of the titles I'm reading, possibly because adults who are stuck at the fluff level in their reading are more resistant to challenging themselves. There are a few patrons whose tastes are similar to mine who come to me for recommendations, but it would be nice for them to have a tool in the catalog to use for reader guidance.
I was eager to try to suggester and unsuggester, but when I tried a title I read recently and liked in suggester I got no hits (except the title itself) and when I tried unsuggester to try a title I hated I got a list of mostly the author's other works which to me is a no brainer.
Anyway, here is the link to my page.

Networking for the quasi-social being

Okay, I did it. Signing up wasn't hard at all. But since I'm not a particularly social being--at least that's what the personality test we took pointed out--I had a problem coming up with anything to put on my profile. Also I didn't have a picture--or rather I spent quite a while finding and cropping a jpg I had (thanks to Melissa for the training on this quite a while ago) that included me in the group photo, but then it wasn't a jpg anymore and couldn't be uploaded as a word doc. But that's okay. I started looking for friends using some of the ways facebook suggested. High school--no hits (okay so it was a small school, but still). College--9 hits, all strangers. Place of employment--RPL (no hits), my daughter's employer (no hits), her boyfriend's employer (no hits). So I'm getting the idea it's not cool to reveal your true place of employment on your profile. Finally I searched for, and found Jill Lininger. Also searched for my daugher and sent a message to someone with the same name in the Milwaukee area. We'll see if I get a response and/or if it's her. Once I found Jill, I was able to find a few other RPLers and send messages/friend requests to Jessica, Terrance, and Melissa. Someone at a picnic I was at on Saturday was talking glowingly about his recent facebook experiences, about all the classmates he had reconnected with and what they were doing. And I thought, that's nice, but who are your wife and three preschool kids and your students and the rest of your extended family and current friends social networking with while you have your head online talking to people you haven't cared enough about to keep up with all these years.
Re: library facebook accounts--if its active, interactive, making itself useful, up to date, and well designed, I think it could be a good thing. If it's just sitting there doing nothing, I think it makes us look pathetic.
In spite of my somewhat negative tone in all this, I'm really grateful for the technology team for putting together this well organized training. I find it very helpful to at least know how it all works, even if I don't use it as intended on a regular basis.

PhotoSharing

I'm a little behind due to vacation, but just completed the photosharing (Flickr) assignment. Didn't really have much trouble with the assignment, but then I couldn't remember my password for the blog (a variation of my usual password) and had to dig down several layers of the sediment on my desk to find it. Then after I got in I got an error message when I tried to post. But having closed out everything, I started fresh and everything seems to be working now. Once I get a digital camera, I think I'll like photo sharing! I also hunted around for photos of our 4th of July parade, hoping to find some photos of the book cart drill team and the Mexican guests from Zapotlanejo. No luck--but I found some parade pictures from former years so I'll check again later.

wikid

This was a fun assignment. I'd used wikipedia many times but never taken the time to read about it's history or how it operates, though I had a general idea. After reading/watching the assignments I explored the French version, reading about Racine's sister city, Montelimar, France. On the wikipedia article there were links to all Montelimar's sister cities and I linked to Racine (still in French). I noticed that there was no photo, but rather a mention that they would welcome a photo so I emailed a couple of people at the RCCVB who went to Montelimar last year and suggested they might want to send/post one. In perusing the list of "Residents Notables," I was amazed to see the name "Max Hardcore--pornographe." Surely this was a cruel joke! Mais, non! The porn star's name also appears on the English language edition and further exploration on the internet seems to corroborate his Racine roots (though one place said he was from Racine, Illinois, which doesn't exist). By that time my internet searches were starting to return some rather questionable hits, so I went on to the safer ground of the assignment, looking at Racine county communities articles, and found a link to RPL on only the city of Racine article. Were there more I missed?
I decided to try creating a wiki, using pbwiki. The one I did was a planning tool for a program the HOLA team is working on for Hispanic Heritage month. While those of us in the library could have used googledocs for this, there are a couple of people in the community who will be involved in the planning and since they don't have google accounts a wiki seemed like a better way to go.

I like the idea of a library creating a community calendar, events, info-sharing, wiki. Always was disappointed that the library world has not been more of a leader in this type of activity. Seems like we should have been there to take up the slack when Party Line folded, but, no, we let the JT beat us to the punch with Glad You Asked. YPR created a community calendar, beyondyourdoor.com, but the posting wasn't as open as it could have been and apparently it didn't catch on--or perhaps it caught on too well with lots of postings that the YPR community wasn't interested in, since it is basically defunct--still exists but only Racine Theater Guild and RAM have anything posted in June and the rest of the summer is completely empty. Of course this sort of project doesn't run itself. Somebody has to be creative to get it off the ground and also have the time to maintain it, supervise postings, and weed outdated stuff. Would that be one of us?

Finally, a calendar

Been trying to access the calendar all week, but even though Melissa had posted it when I contacted her earlier in the week, it wasn't showing up in my calendars. Today, with her here, we straighted it out, and I made an entry for RefUSA training, sending an invitation to Melissa and Jill, just for practice. I think this has great potential for PR--sending invitations to people, groups, organizations, every time we schedule a public event in one of our meeting rooms. We'd need to organize mailing lists of people/groups interested in particular topics. Would they be able to view the information without a google account??? Would the message of the invitation show up in their email? Or would this only work for people with gmail? Comments please.

It's all about sharing

This seems to have great potential, but I'm wondering how it will really work. As per usual, I tried to follow the instructions, but there were a few things that didn't quite work out. The instructions told me to log in, but when I hit the link in the AIT lesson instructions it was already open. I couldn't figure out how to see previous versions? And if people don't sign their name, like we are apparently doing in the sample doc (and who wants a signature after a revision anyway), how do you know who made what changes? If this were a "real" document we were working on together and someone made a drastic change that the rest of the group didn't like, how do you get back to the previous edition--or even know who made the outrageous change. How do you prevent someone you've collaborated with from making changes after people have agreed on a final document--or after you, as the original author, are satisfied with the final draft? I couldn't find the revisions tab referred to in the AIT instructions, nor the drop down menu referred to in Google Apps help. Also many of the people I would want to collaborate with on projects outside of the library don't use google docs, so is there a way to share with them other than cutting and pasting and sending as an attachment?
It was fun to create a new slide (sorry for being piggy--I did two) though I had to feel my way.

Whew!

I thought I was a fish (pisces) but maybe I'm a dog, because I'm starting to think I'm one of those creatures for whom new tricks are, if not impossible, at least very difficult. After viewing the videos (the one the AIT team linked us to and the one done by the cute google engineer) as well as reading the online instructions I thought I was all set to start subscribing to rss feeds. Signing up was a snap--though I didn't get the email confirmation referred to in one of the presentations. I decided to try three websites I visit occasionally as my first three feeds, but none of them offered a rss option and cutting and pasting the url didn't work either. Then I decided, what the heck, I'd just pick from the AIT list so I picked Adventures in Technology as my first subscription and then the troubles began. Nobody warned me I'd have to choose from a drop down menu which said "Subscribe to this feed using....." So I just went with the default (live bookmarks) and that lead to another drop down menu: Add live bookmark..create in (seven different choices). Okay, let's back up and try again. Choose "Google" this time instead of "live bookmarks." Ouch! Now I've got a pop up notice that my Reader items were beginning made available to my friends from Google Talk--and listed a bunch of people I'd never heard of. Time to scream so loud that Jill Lininger must have heard me all the way downstairs (or maybe Mark called her when I asked him a question he couldn't answer) because she magically appeared at my shoulder and said, "Oh, just ignore that...." Of course while Jill watched me add a couple more from the list, there were no glitches or strange messages. I did ultimately add a few which were not on the list: webjunction, the Federal Depository Library Program Desktop, and death notices from the Journal Times. So if you don't see my homework for week five on this blog, just check my google reader feeds to see if you find me in the JT. Oh, yes, one small success, I figured out how to delete one I had inadvertently added twice.

After another short night's sleep

Now, I'm getting into this a bit. Had fun finding and posting a photo and creating a shabby little profile. Guess I won't be anonymous anymore if someone stumbles across my blog--unless someone mistakes me for the candidate. Still I'd rather be weeding (books or garden).

Homework

Okay, I finally got this far. Perhaps it's due to sleep deprivation-- trying to plan for a dinner party for 13 tonight and a gift opening brunch for 24 on Sunday is seriously cutting into my snooze time--cause I'm not exactly understanding what I'm doing--or why. Seems to me that there are way too many people spouting off their opinions for all to see/read and it just takes a lot of time to even attempt to keep up--and why would I want to. I'd much rather be reading a book than listing to chat or twitter or blogwash. Sensory overload bigtime. Maybe it's just the introvert in me trying not to come out.