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.