Library's Cat

Exercise 23: Final thoughts

2007-07-20T15:33:00.000-05:00

First, I want to thank you Alicia and PLAN for pulling this together for us here in the Panhandle. I attended a Sirsi Dynix workshop about the PLCMC 23 Things and hoped that someone would do this same thing for us! PLAN stepped up and I have really enjoyed the program. Sorry my 23 things have now ended, but surely there has been enough food for thought to keep on investigating new technologies.

1. What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey? I loved the digital generators because they are delightfully fun and we have used them for a number of promotions. I also liked working with Bloglines again (from a previous workshop) and now it is the first thing I open every morning - at work or at home. Mostly, I love, love, love Library Thing! In fact, they have a future release review program which members can apply for - and first application, I am going to get a free book in the mail and all they ask is that I read it and write a review - they really do not care if the review is well-written or not. Must say I am going to try not to embarrass my fellow Cats by not trying to write well. Anyway, I love free, so I am very happy that I was encouraged to sign up for this program.

2. How has this program assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals? I think because I wrote about the lack of progress with the crocheting and because we learned in the first powerpoint that we should state our goals - I have now learned (interpret this loosely and kindly please) to crochet and am working on a lovely blanket. I am also organizing myself to learn Italian. If you are interested in languages, the BBC has some wonderful free materials to assist you in learning a new language. Also, I have now been exposed to many different technologies that I know will help me in the future. And I have ideas of how to use some of the technologies we learned. I am a fairly tried and true type A personality, always looking for something new, so this program has just pushed me a little to keep at things as a lifelong learner.

3. Were there any take-a-ways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you? I found that I was surprisingly emotional about the lack of progress in our field of librarianship. I wasn't aware that I felt that strongly. I love what we do, but I think we could do it much better. And we better. Another problem was that I hate that more people (especially from my institution) did not participate in this program. I guess you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make him drink - just such a loss for people who will not rise to challenges.

4. What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept?And last but not least… I thought that this was wonderful - the only thing I would consider offering up would be to somehow make it mandatory that people communicate more. I posted a few comments to people, but never got any kind of response back - so sometimes, I felt like I was posting here just for Alicia. Never sure if any of the other participants were checking what everyone else was doing or not. I learned from them and perhaps they could have learned from me. Maybe that you had to interact with 10 people per week or something.

Again, thank you for a wonderful experience and I look forward to anything new coming out from PLAN...loved the format because I am not able to get out of the office too often.

Exercise 22: NetLibrary & Project Gutenberg

2007-07-20T14:50:00.000-05:00

I am very familiar with NetLibrary as my instuitution has had a subscription for many years. In fact, it saved my life as I was working on my thesis. My topic was very narrow, so I was able to view a large number of books through NetLibrary and use the search text function to look for instances of required words within the text of the books. This saved me tremendous amounts of time as I did not have to read entire books during the research phase - I could very easily determine if the book would be useful and which chapters to read. However, try as I might, I cannot read an entire book from a computer screen and cannot even imagine doing so from a very small book reader device. For now, then, I am supporting the local bookstores and libraries. Still, I am a big fan of NetLibrary. However, to complete this assignment, I decided to look a little more deeply.

1. Our collection from NetLibrary contains 42,371 items
2. Of these, only 3,450 are for public access - in other words, you do not have to be affiliated with the institution to access these books.
3. The primary sources for these free access books were Project Gutenberg, University of Virginia, and Bibliobytes.

I was rather happy to see Project Gutenberg books integrated to some degree with NetLibrary, because I must admit that I have visited Project Gutenberg before and did not care for the site organization or search functionality. I visited the site again today and felt the same way. I know that this project provides a much needed service for books out of copyright, but the broader question is not addressed as well as the Google desire to scan every book in print.

The Internet Public Library is one place I always look to see if there is anything newly available - they have a much nicer interface than Gutenberg.

As for audio books, I think there are a number of sites providing this - perhaps one that provided USF with all of those podcasts! We have looked into purchasing downloadable audio books and will probably continue to research this for some time before deciding on a provider. I think too that it will be helpful to have a standard format - that can go on a Zune or mp3 player or computer. Also, I tend to think this is something the public libraries have been in the fore-front for developing.

Library Cat

Exercise 21: Podcasts

2007-07-19T14:44:00.000-05:00

Preliminary info: My husband and I bought a Zune - yes, I know - one of three people who own one. Shortly after we bought it, I attended an Apple workshop for the use of podcasts in education. The fella insisted that my Zune would NEVER play a podcast that I could easily find on the iTunes site. Well, we listen to Lex and Terry Radio every morning and found that we could subscribe to their podcast free from iTunes. After a few minutes of despair, I am happy to report that my Zune player has no trouble with those files and in fact automatically pulls them from the iTunes location when synchronizing the Zune. So - a bit of a marketing lie!

The purpose of this story is to say that I am already fairly familiar with podcasts and prefer the iTunes format to any of the three suggested in the 23 things exercise. I did take a look at them, but really had difficulty with finding anything that I wanted to subscribe to that I wasn't already aware of before now. So I went back to what was familiar and here is what I found.

First, unless other universities have not been as aggressive in marketing their podcasts, the University of South Florida is way ahead in our state system. If you visit, iTunes U you can see that they have almost 3100 podcasts. Good grief, I was hoping we could produce about 10!

But these USF podcasts are not recurring, so I did find one called Stash and Burn which believe it or not is about knitting and crocheting. You might remember that I said early in the 23 thngs that I was trying to teach myself how to crochet - I have now made some progress in learning and I am pleased to find a podcast to help me.

I think podcasts would be wonderful for libraries - as well as streaming video. We plan to make quite a few of these for the library web page, using student workers to record or video them to make available for their fellow students. I mean, after all, no matter how technologically talented I am, the students would rather see their peers. We just need to provide the platform and now I know how.

Have a good evening - tomorrow I think I will finish this up.
Cat

Exercise 20 - YouTube

2007-07-19T11:59:00.000-05:00

My Trainees - Not quite ready for prime time:

A Manifesto we should all adopt - (just a note, if tasteful nudity offends you, you might want to skip this one, and yes I debated about posting it here, but I think the content is so close to the heart of what we are trying to do here that it is worth it even with brief nudity)

Love, love love YouTube for all the craziness, and fun, and information.

Cat

Exercise 19: Web 2.0

2007-07-19T09:04:00.000-05:00

I spent so much time "playing" yesterday as I browsed through those wonderful sites that I did not get my post posted! I was pleased to note that many of the winners were sites mentioned in 23 things or sites that I was familiar with already. But there were also some that I had never heard of and I spent considerable time looking through these - I mean, who can stop at just one.

However, I specifically wanted to talk about LuLu.com! What a wonderful idea. I suspect there are many people who are unsure of how to go about publishing something they have produced, be it a book or manual or whatever. But they feel that there might be something worth sharing. People might wonder if that means (with no content control as with a f2f editor and publishing company) there will be tons of useless material marketed as wonderful books you just have to have. I feel certain that the market will dictate whose materials will be successful and whose will "die" after the one copy is purchased by the author. My great aunt who grew up in rural Tennessee right on the Mississippi River wrote a book in the last years of her life - she lived to be over 90 - and sent my mother a copy. She has since died and I would give anything to have another copy of her book which was somehow privately published with relatively few copies produced. Had she used this site to publish her book, I could probably get copies for myself and my children. The nice thing about the site is that the author does not have to pay to have the book produced. When, or if, someone purchased a copy, the author is paid 80% of the price set by the author and the website gets paid 20%. So in many ways, it is a win-win situation.

Here is a good description of this service quoted from the site:

"Lulu.com is the premier marketplace for digital content on the Internet, with over 100,000 recently published titles, and more than 2,500 new titles added each week, created by people in 80 different countries. Lulu is changing the world of publishing by enabling the creators of books, video, periodicals, multimedia and other content to publish their work themselves with complete editorial and copyright control. Lulu empowers these individuals and corporations to create high quality content products to sell directly to their customers and the rest of the Lulu.com marketplace. With storefronts provided as well as other marketing assistance, creators are fully supported to profit from their work. With Lulu offices in the US, Canada the UK and Europe, Lulu customers can reach the globe."

One day, I might try this!

Cat

Exercise 18: Zoho!!

2007-07-18T10:02:00.001-05:00

At first, I tried to use one of the templates to do something fancy for this assignment, but I wasn't able to resize the template to fit on my blog page. I tried all the things that would have worked with Microsoft and none of them worked. Still, I like the idea of having a word processing software available anywhere. I can see this being useful for people who know in advance that they will be working on a project in a number of different locations on a number of different computers. I know that we all have seen many students who think they have something saved to their personal school web drive or their flash drive only to find out that they didn't save it properly. With this application, a student could just log in on every computer, work a while and then save it one time - and have immediate access. As an instructor, I would not like for students to turn their work in to me via this format because our course software would not recognize the format. However, once the document was completed, it would be relatively easy to copy the document into a Microsoft document. Apparently it is also possible for you to share documents and allow others to contribute. This would be very useful for group projects. I am pretty certain that I will use this in the future - possibly even for my students.

Exercise 17: Sandbox

2007-07-17T09:00:00.001-05:00

The PLAN sandbox shows exactly the type of use I was referring to in my previous post. Often staff in a library feel some sort of disconnect from other staff members and a "staff sandbox" would be a nice virtual space where the staff could come together to discuss a specific topic or just connect with a themed discussion. This would not need to be an elaborate intraoffice website - it could be a PBWiki with every person adding to the fun whenever they have the time to play for a minute or two: shared websites, shared books, shared photos, shared concerns. I think with an administrator monitoring for any potential cantankerous posts (come on folks, you know that happens in libraries!) this could be team building!

thanks,
Cat

Exercise 16: Wikis

2007-07-16T13:31:00.000-05:00

I think the idea of the wiki is wonderful but I worry about it considerably in practice. As an instructor, I hate to see my students reference wikipedia in any way. However, I know many people who start their research questioning in wikipedia. On occassion I have looked at the content there, but it still bothers me just a bit that anyone can change the content. Then it hit the news that someone had indicated a new person was implicated in the assassination of John Kennedy...which was false of course and mean spirited, but who would know? As I looked through the information provided in 23 Things, I found the following in an article by Brian Lamb and thought it was a very humorous was to describe my feelings:

Please, grant me the serenity to accept the pages I cannot edit,
The courage to edit the pages I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference
—The Wiki Prayer

But still, I am afraid that many people won't have that level of wisdom. Now on to how these could be used in libraries - I think there are some wonderful possibilities for internal use - best practices for work flow, information updates, new books and reviews...I do think this one will take more convincing with staff members who are a little worried about the technology.
Cat

Exercise 15: Library 2.0

2007-07-10T14:36:00.000-05:00

I really enjoyed the articles regarding Library 2.0 and I think the overall message is that if we are not careful libraries and librarians are going to miss the boat and find themselves out of the information business. I agree with many of the authors who suggest that many librarians need to have a new mindset - for example, we have talked a little about allowing social tagging in the library catalog and for some this is almost a cardinal sin - what about the MARC record?? What about crazy subject terms that students might apply? What about integrity?? And while I understand exactly why they might ask these questions, I also know that Amazon and other online bookstores have somehow managed to keep things in order and increase their sales and site views dramatically. I suspect this is because people not only want to find information, they want to find it using their own words (not ours) and they want to know what other people think about the information as well as where they might look for other useful information. Just as a side note - I recently earned my MLS and in my cataloging class, the only format we used was Dublin Core...trying to make sure that every thing had metadata and would be locatable on the WWW. Of course, in the real world of my library, no one uses Dublin Core - anyone know why?

Of course another key discussion in libraries today is about the percentages of monies to be alloted to electronic vs. print sources. For the acquisitions librarian, it is almost a death match, because we all know that "real" books are the mainstay of the profession - well, not if there are no users in the building, right?

I think the hardest part for me to understand is that while we (library faculty and staff) often attend workshops or classes about the newest and the trends, it takes an Act of Congress to get consensus for change. So that new Wiki or Blog just sits and gathers dust when we could be meeting the students where they are instead of maintaining our stereotypical identity of stagnation.

Sorry for this rant, but it gets a little tiresome to read about people who are going places with the new technologies while others are entrenched in the same old things.

Cat

Exercise 14: Technorati

2007-07-05T12:33:00.000-05:00

After creating an account in Technorati, it was quite simple to claim your blog and add other's blogs to your list of favorites. It was also not too difficult to add tags to the blogs to sort them. I am not sure that I will use this in the future, because I feel like bloglines does something similar and will suffice for what I want it to do. There are so many applications available - all designed to save us time and effort - and I think the best practice would be to pick one and stick with it - monitoring of course new technologies.

One thing that Technorati did provide was a means for "advertising" your blog. If you had a Reference blog or departmental blog, it might be nice to see if you can get others to link to it as a favorite.

I did add the clickable Technorati button to all of my blogs - this too was fairly simple.
Cat

Exercise 13 Delicious

2007-06-25T12:07:00.000-05:00

Here is my Delicious cloud:

I have used Delicious for quite some time and I really enjoy using it for research needs - just to get some ideas. I think I have posted about this before.

As for tagging, we spent some time with this topic when I attended library school. In fact, in my cataloging class, we did not even talk about MARC records - we only used Dublin Core. Thanks to some good training by my fellow library workers, I did learn about cataloging with MARC records. I have also done some research on using student tagged records in an academic library setting and while I wonder how the catalog would maintain its full integrity, I think using these types of tags would certainly provide some insight into word usage and why students often fail to find what they are seeking.

Library Cat

Exercise 11: Library Thing Revisited

2007-06-15T13:53:00.000-05:00

Finally LibraryThing was repaired and back up for adding books. I am so glad, because I absolutely LOVE it. Rather than just add a post here about it, I added a list to my blog. The social functionality is particularly appealing to me. When I went to library school, we used to 'recommended" function in Amazon to think about classifications of books. This is the same type of application.
Hope you enjoy it as much as I am.
Cat

Exercise 12: Rollyo

2007-06-13T13:34:00.000-05:00

Here is my search - for cheats for XBox 360.

I must admit that I did not care for this product. I think that it might have some good applications, but not for me! One application I thought about would be for a teacher to create a search for students to use - limited to valid and appropriate sites.

Cat

Exercise 11: Library Thing

2007-06-13T10:14:00.000-05:00

Unfortunately Library Thing has been down this week and therefore I have not had the opportunity to have a new experience with this play toy. I can tell you that people are quite passionate about it if the comments about the downtime are any indication - when last I checked there were over 200 comments and two songs posted about the situation.

Fortunately I have been to the site before and I know the basics. I think the social aspects of the site are phenomenal with reading groups and other online activities. Linking out to specific selling communities is also good. I am sure that there are many uses for this in a library setting but one that comes to mind is a reading list for a specific class. People could have the link to the list and comment on the readings. I think that would work as well as other things which people have tried to use for this purpose.

While waiting, I searched about and found this site Bookmooch, which looks like it would be perfect for a voracious reader who does not horde books or work in a library where books are readily available for tasting before purchase. At any rate, I am going to look around the house and see if there are any not-so-dear books that I can bear to part with and sign them up!

Anyway, I am going to move on to the next exercise but plan to keep checking library thing because it is the perfect nerd activity!

Waiting,
Cat

Exercise 10: Generators continued

2007-06-06T12:12:00.001-05:00

Others have talked about how much fun this exercise was and now I know why. While most of the templates seem to be geared toward children, I have seen some of the images created by other participants that look wonderful and are geared toward patrons. I had to fess up to my latest addiction - which is guitar hero. My husband, kids and I play this game quite a bit. I will try to put up some sort of crazy video later if I can manage it.

Now back to Image Chef to see what more I can create today. OK - this is not really work related, but I had to do it. Precious little kitten! Anyway, it could have said Food and Drinks Allowed...which is a sign that I would post on the door for our patrons.

So for now, I am done for the day (at least with generators).

Cat

Exercise 10: Generators

2007-06-06T09:44:00.001-05:00

I was inspired by other magazine covers created by PLAN participants. So I was very excited to get to this Exercise. The photo is one of my favorites from Flickr and if there was a library there, I would go!

I think I will reserve comment on this particular generator until I try a few of the others listed.

Cat

Exercise 8 & 9: RSS and Bloglines

2007-06-04T12:17:00.000-05:00

My Blogroll:

Sometimes as I go through these exercises, I feel like I am cheating. I already had a bloglines account. And it isn't that I am so technologically advanced or bright...rather it is that I have been exposed to these things before but never forced to interact with them. So I have a digital camera and I know how to take pictures and how to transfer pictures. But I have no clue how to change the exposure, turn off the flash, make a movie. I think you get the idea. I am a basics only kinda girl with a brain that can only contain so much at a time. In a way, it is good that these exercises force a level of interaction that a face-to-face touch on this and that workshop never could.

So RSS and Bloglines. Perhaps because I had already set up the account, I found it very simple to add some feeds to the system. I visited syndic8.com and completerss.com for some ideas, but did not find their classifications or sorts to my liking because I really do not care what Bubba from South Fork subscribes to...the best list for me was the Bloglines Top 200. And I picked a few from their list to add to some I already had listed. I set up a shortcut on my desktop, so I am ready to face the morning with some instant news.

Working in a library (yes, I love to read - I mean, isn't that what library people do?), one would think that I have enough reading material to last another lifetime, but I love to read book reviews to find the one book that is just waiting for me to read. So, for my personal use, the blogfeeds with book reviews will be great. Saves time because I don't have to go figure out where in the NYT to locate the book reviews and then repeat that step for three other sources two or three times a week. Also, in this world of insanity, it is good to stay on top of breaking news. Better get back to learning about cats and dogs!!!

Library Cat

Exercise 7: Technology

2007-06-04T10:11:00.000-05:00

I know that it is coming up in another exercies, but I just wanted to say how much I love Delicious. I use it as a starting point for almost every personal knowledge question that I have. I mean, why should I go through a zillion Google articles when someone else has already done that and selected their top 5? And the next person has done the same. So, I know that I might miss out on that perfect article, but I really use Delicious mainly for a starting off point.

For example, I love to write in books - my personal ones of course. My favorite book to look back and read my notes from is:

I absolutely loved this book and have written in almost every margin - something I found humorous, astounding, or different from what I previously believed; or maybe just a little tidbit I wanted to hold close to mind. I spend a great deal of time on the internet and would love to have an electronic notebook that would serve somewhat the same purpose - a place to put notes on webpages I love (or hate), a reminder to check back for something, or even a what would so and so think. So thinking about this blog and what I might like to know about electronic folksonomies and beyond, I went to Delicious and here is the first article I looked at - voila! Exactly what I needed.

Seven apps for online note-taking : Mike Gunderloy reviews seven applications for posting notes etc in an online notebook. If you are interested, take a look. I for one am going with the Google notebook. Looks simple enough and I use Google for everything else, so why not?

Moral of this story: Between Google and Delicious you can find just about anything in the world.

Library Cat (off to take some notes)

Exercise 6: Commentary

2007-05-14T15:01:00.000-05:00

Finally to talk a little about the idea of mashups. The first thing brought to mind from reading some of the articles is that necessity is the mother of invention. In many cases, an individual had a need which could be easily (well, easier for some than others - me included) fulfilled through the combination of two different software components. Certainly does my heart good to know that it isn't always about a profit. Sometimes it is about knowing what you need, creating it, and knowing that others might have the same need - rather innovative shareware, don't you think?

According to Robert Hof: The upshot: People are seizing far more control of what they do online. In the process, those efforts are putting skin on the bones of Web services, the long-delayed promise of software and services that can be tapped on demand.

And finally...here is my trading card!

Have a wonderful week.
Cat

Exercise 6: Bubblr

2007-05-14T14:24:00.000-05:00

There are so many different mashups to look at and work with that I am having trouble limiting myself. So far, this one has been the most fun:

You may need to click on the image to scroll through the three slides! I think I will enjoy making these for friends and family!

Hope you are having fun as well.
Cat

Exercise 6: Montage!

2007-05-11T11:07:00.000-05:00

I have been exploring mashups and I loved the Montage maker! One of the "problems" with all of these technologies is that I can get lost in them for hours on end. So many different uses and fun activities. This is not my final post on this exercise, but I wanted to share my montages.

The first one is of Catholic Churches.

The second is of the countryside.

This particular mashup uses Flickr API and Macromedia Flash! By accident, I learned that if you click on the montage you can actually see a little thumbprint of the individual pictures. I tried a few with cats and they just were not clear enough in the montage, but I loved the others.

Still working,
Cat

Exercise 5: Flickr

2007-05-10T14:44:00.000-05:00

I am not really new to Flickr, but I was amazed at the number of libraries who have collections of photos available. It is truly fascinating how many different ways these social tools are being used. I saw that Florida State had a Flickr site for viewing pictures regarding a new information commons. While I suppose these photos could have been uploaded to a University website, why reinvent the wheel? With the capacity to upload photos, tag them for identification, and solicit comments from a wide group of people, Flickr seems perfect for this type of use.

The most interesting collection of photos that I saw were here. This is the Day in the Life of Flickr page and 3,891 people posted photos of their own lives on March 21, 2007. What a cool idea! To give others a better idea of what happens in libraries, each department (or staff person) could do the same!

As the library cat, I decided to look for other library cats and I was not disappointed. I really liked this tabby from Tel Aviv and posted by TLVshac :

Back to the library collections on Flickr - I saw some wonderful photos of libraries I have visited as well as some I hope to visit one day. It was nice to see that the search interface makes use of the same tools we are all used to in Google! I know, I know this is a Yahoo type product, but doesn't Google co-rule the earth with Microsoft? Another thing that I liked was the assignment of rights in Flickr. The photographer, or account holder, can allow total access to the image (with credit given, of course), limited access, or no access. The help screens explained all of this to me quite nicely and I was able to easily locate a photo that met my needs and allowed copying with credits. Students doing reports and seeking pictures for use in illustrating said reports should perhaps be directed to Flickr instead of Google image (where photos are lifted and copied by the second). At least in Flickr, the word copyright does seem to hold some validity for posters and users.

Moving on -

Cat

Week 2: 7 1/2 Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners

2007-05-08T09:43:00.000-05:00

Hello again - after viewing the Lifelong Learners presentation, I had to stop and think about how I think about learning or go about learning new things.

The easiest habit for me seems to be the first habit - begin with the end in mind. My head is always popping with new ideas and new things that I would like to master. I also am pretty good at accepting responsibility for my learning - I love to read about what I am studying and talk to others.

Perhaps my most difficult (non) habit is confidence in yourself as a competent effective learner. It isn't that I can't learn. The problem is that I get easily discouraged. For instance, I want to learn how to crochet so that I can make a throw for my daughter. I looked at every SINGLE internet how-to guide, I bought books, and asked friends to help. The yarn and needles are sitting on my TV side table...I just cannot seem to do it right. Every time I sit down to watch TV, these supplies are sitting there as signs of my failure to learn. Instead, I should just keep trying until I get it!

Thankfully I don't usually feel that sense of frustration with technology or learning new skills for my work assignments. I am looking forward to the learning experiences here with PLAN and look forward to sharing what we have learned.

Cat

In the beginning!

2007-05-03T14:31:00.000-05:00

I have created this blog as part of my participation in the PLAN Navigating New Technologies program. I have worked in libraries for the past 12 years. I have participated in Circulation and reserve activities, cataloging, collection development and many other aspects of librarianship. By far, however, the favorite part of my job is working with students. Because we are in a unique location, we often find ourselves serving under multiple hats. Technology questions come as fast and furious as reference or research questions. I keep my ears open and try to stay current - I am hoping this 23 step process will assist me in that endeavor.

I also participated in the Sirsi Dynix Institute webinar entitled "Learning 2.0: Make 'play' your New Year's resolution" and I am delighted to see that PLAN is offering this opportunity to people here in Northwest Florida.

Thanks,
Cat