Exercise 20 - YouTube

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

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!!

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

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

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

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

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