Thing #15 Thoughts on Web 2.0 and Library 2.0

I thought the articles from the OCLC Newsletter were very thought provoking. Working in public service we often get burned out and bogged down and lose focus of why we went into the field of librarianship in the first place. Speaking for myself, I choose a career in libraries because I loved connecting people with books and helping them find that information. Libraries today are so different than when I was a student worker in the local public library. People came in for help with their homework projects or asked for recommendations on their next reading choice. The Internet has changed everything. But, in a good way I think.

I really enjoyed Rick Anderson's article "Away from Icebergs". It really resonates with me. I used to be one of those people that thought we needed to have that book on birdhouses even though it hasn't checked out in years because it was the only book we had left on birdhouses (maybe birdhouses is not a great example, but you see where I am going!). This idea is totally outdated. With the internet, anything is obtainable as long as you know how to search. Unfortunately, in today's society, libraries are not the first place that people look to for information...Google is. Even as a librarian, I usually go to Google. It's just easier. It can be done from the comfort of your couch. It also kind of goes back to that "give 'em what they want, or give 'em what they need" debate. Who are we to say what they need? I ceretainly don't want to make those decisions for someone.

The other point that really made me think was Mr. Anderson's views on the "come to us" model of service. As I said before, technology has changed everything and we need to think of ways to become more valued to our customers and give them what they can't get out there. I'm not sure of how to do that, but we have so many great thinkers at PLCMC, I'm sure we will come up with something!

Thing #14 All things Technorati

Technorati...another cool idea. I just don't know how much I will use it. I've read blogs before. But, mostly it's people that I know. I'm not sure how interested I am in finding a random person's blog to follow. I have a personal blog and I just can't understand why anyone that is not my friend would find it interesting. Just my opinion.... Just another why to social network I guess. If you are interested in that sort of thing.

Thought the various searches in Technorati were interesting. I didn't find many surprises. Mostly PLCMC blogs. When I searched "Learning 2.0" as a blog post I did come across a Management Coaching blog from a person from Hawaii. I think that one came up because she was wondering if there was a "learning 3.0". I'm sure there will be one day.

When searching "Learning 2.0" in tags I found a math class blog from Corgilabs. I have no idea why that one came up.

The top searches was a mystery to me. Searches like "jonny", "pinky", and "cicarelli"? I'm a little behind in my news reading but are these names I should know?

Another fun exercise on the Learning 2.0 highway! :)

Thing #13 Del.icio.us

I was briefly introduced to del.icio.us by a friend a little over a month. She was showing me her del.icio.us page and explaining the virtues of it. I thought it was kind of cool, but didn't really think it was something I would really take advantage of. Having del.icio.us as one of our exploratory "things" has been good. It's made me examine del.icio.us a little more in depth. I do see the potential of using del.icio.us as a social networking tool. Doing a search on car reviews led me to several sites that I may not have found otherwise. I still don't think I will use it a lot. Just as easy to search google and get a majority of the same hits. I do think I will use it as an easy way to bookmark the sites I use most and "travel" with them. So, thanks for that tip.

Thing #12

Thing #12 is to explore this thing called Rollyo. Rollyo is actually a cool idea. Being able to group similar websites and search them simultaneously is great. I've been in the market for a new (used) car and it's such a pain to keep going to individual websites to find similar information. I made a Rollyo for finding car information and also, for my guilty pleasure, celebrity gossip.

One thing I found very interesting...I searched "To Kill A Mockingbird" in one of the example Rollyo's, Public Domain e-Books Search. I was surprised to get my hits for criticism of the book. I'm not sure what I thought I would get. Maybe I thought I would just get hits to link to the netlibrary sites where you could download the book. I thought the criticism were good because we can use them in our job.

Here is a link to my Rollyo for car research.

Success

After many trys...I finally got my Library Thing on the sidebar! YAY!

Thing #11 LibraryThing

I created my LibraryThing account. I added some of my all - time favorite books. It's been quite some time since I've been able to read a book. No time. The last book I read was Nora Roberts' Morrigan Cross. Excellent read. I read purely for pleasure and that's exactly what it provided.

I can see the value in LibraryThing. When I read avidly, I could never remember what I read. With LibraryThing, we can keep track of our reading and how well we liked them.

Here's a link to my catalog. I'm also going to try to add it into my blog on the sidebar.

Thing #10 Image Generators

Thing #10 is to play around with image generators. It's not really hard, but there is a lot of pressure to come up with something witty and creative. I am not that talented. So mine is kind of boring. I went to the Ben and Jerry's Flavor Generator. That was kind of cool. I couldn't figure out how to save the image though. Here are a couple others images I created...

Happy Blog Day

So, I'm a little behind...I know Blog Day was August 31st (2 weeks ago!) but I wanted to give a shout out to my favorite Learning 2.0 blogs...

http://lifeisbetterwithcommas.blogspot.com/
http://morethanlettuce.blogspot.com/

Thing #9

So, I've set up my RSS feed. I've added all my Learning 2.0 friends blogs and the news feeds I like to keep up with. Thing #9 was to find more RSS feeds using other tools to find newsfeeds. I love celebrity gossip so I decided to find some feeds about that. I used Google's blog finder. I really liked it. I found a lot of blogs that I can use. I found gawker.com and perezhilton.com. Pretty cool that I can get all my work news, world news and guilty pleasure news in one place. Then I moved on to Feedster. I have mixed feelings about this finder. I tried to look for blogs about my favorite college sports team, the NCSU Wolfpack. A little disappointed in my results. Didn't find many blogs. Don't know if I was not searching correctly or if there just aren't that many blogs about the Wolfpack. I did try various ways to search. I think these RSS finders are pretty useful but the trick is don't search for anything too broad. You just get too many results that are all over the place. My favorite was the Google blog finder. I had the best luck with it.