Thus endeth 25 Things for me. I’ve really enjoyed the experience and I’ve come away with a couple of web applications that I plan on using for awhile. I sign into Google Reader at home and at work to follow my growing collection of RSS feeds – better than the finicky reader that comes with IE. The library-related RSS feeds in turn help me create Twitter tweets and posts for the new website. Flickr has helped me better manage my club website and I’m seriously thinking of using it to host my photos on my own hobby website. LibraryThing is definitely worth further study – can we do a sort of library account? Only one way to find out.
And that kind of sums up the answers to a whole bunch of questions. Are these services useful? How do we use them? How can we help patrons use them? Should we recommend them? The answer is…only one way to find out. And that one way is to get our hands dirty and use them. Try them out – if they’re useful, great. If not, well, I’ve wasted more time in my life doing things that were less useful.
Thanks for the chance to mess around using work time. And maybe we’ll have to have 25 Things 2.0 in a few years to deal with all of the new stuff that comes along in the future.
OK, this one isn’t really fair. I’m actually responsible for all of the NetLibrary stuff here at the library, so I’ve done all of this. I’ve had a NetLibrary account for ages and poke around it all the time for patrons (and try to resolve any access issues). I’ve downloaded e-audiobooks a couple of times to test everything out as well. The only thing I haven’t done is upload one to my iPod, so I’ll have to try that from home. With one of the 25-30% of iPod compatible titles, of course.
That said, I think it’s excellent that everyone gets to play around with NetLibrary – it will only help people understand the product better so they can help & advise patrons.
I must admit I’ve never really tried to listen to podcasts. CBC Radio has had them for years, but I’ve never used them (even though I have an iPod). Most of the time, there may be one item I might want to listen to that I’ll miss, but I don’t want to download the whole program. Having tried it as part of Thing 22 though, maybe I’ll use it more often. I added “The House” (a CBC Radio politics program) to my Google Reader account – this is a program I like, but I never really get to listen to it.
The directories look useful. I poked around a bit, but couldn’t think of any really good searches to try. I’ll keep it in mind for the future, though.
Plenty of library application possibilities as well, but I think video would probably be better for bibliographic instruction. I see some of the library links provided have podcasts 6 months+ old.
Ah, You Tube. I remember an episode of The Office where Michael admitted that he didn’t do any work for a week when You Tube came out. I’m not that bad, although I have to admit the time totally just disappears when I’m on You Tube. There’s a ton of neat stuff – intros to old TV shows I used to watch (I’m a bit of a sucker for TV theme songs), fire truck stuff and music videos.
Library use – there are lots of possibilities. I like the advocacy / use your library videos listed (esp. the Harper College video) and can see possibilities for online instruction – e.g. how to use the catalogue, place a hold, etc. All of this is on my “to do” list – I’ve downloaded a program called CamStudio to film the screen activity – I just need some sort of microophone. Plenty of possibilities for someone with some creativity – unfortunately, I’m not that creative, but hope to play around with it soon anyway.
So, for my video, I chose this. I’m a child of the 80s and this was always my favourite music video, back in a time when they actually had production values and stuff. This one even stars Donald Sutherland. Enjoy!
OK, maybe I didn’t follow the instructions in the last lengthy post so well. There are lots of uses for wikis, mostly when you have a bunch of people to collaborate on something. However, I’ve seen a few cases where people set up a wiki when a blog would make more sense. If you just want a quick and easy way to publish something online, go with the blog. If there are a bunch of you or if you’re looking for input on something, try a wiki. For example, the booklovers wiki is cool, but not so much a collaborative thing. There’s benefit to me being able to add reviews, but I can also change earlier reviews, which isn’t really the point of the exercise. Perhaps LibraryThing would work just as well or better.
I added some stuff to the PB Wiki – vacation spots and restaurants. Easy-peasy. I set up a PB Wiki account once, but didn’t care for the categories and such for my purposes. I wanted something more like Wikipedia, which is why I went for Wikia.
Ah, the wiki. This is something I know a bit about, as I have a lot of experience with wikis. Here at work, I created the WPL Reference Wiki. There’s a story behind that. Once upon a time, we were getting a bunch of kids asking questions about good autobiographies to read for a school assignment. I’m still not 100% sure that biographies would have been OK, but they all said autobiographies. Anyway, we had a series of emails going back & forth between individual Reference staff and the branches with new titles added every round – just like the example in the Common Craft video. This seemed like a perfect problem for a wiki, so I created one. It’s also a good place to list titles for our ‘staff picks’ displays. I wish more staff would use it (hint, hint), but it has proven useful. It got a real workout last year after OLA – I created an OLA page and everyone was asked to summarise the sessions attended for all to read. The page for OLA 2010 is up & ready to go.
Otherwise, I also figured out that wikis could be useful for my fire truck hobby. Some fellow enthusiasts and I all collect information on what trucks are used by what fire departments, so I created a wiki at Jimbo Wales’ Wikia site. Wales is one of the creators of Wikipedia and Wikia is a for-profit wiki site. It’s free for me to set up the wiki, but there are ads. Nothing too bad at this point. I’ve had some outside contributions, both from people I know and people I don’t. In both cases, I was able to improve the information I keep by collaborating with others. This is a pretty specific field in a small hobby, so I don’t expect a lot, but it’s still sorta neat. Adding info to the wiki is relaxing and brainless work too.
Finally, Wikipedia. I set up an account and contributed to Wikipedia for about a year in 2007 and 2008. In some ways, it was kind of fun and rewarding, but in others extremely frustrating. I got in a few minor skirmishes with people who were determined to edit pages to reflect their own personal biases. I have my biases just like anyone, but I really tried to be as objective as I could. These people didn’t even pretend to be objective. I didn’t enjoy that. Also, when I created an article about the library, a 14-year old from Puerto Rico (politely and nicely) accused me of conflict of interest. That was dealt with fairly amicably, but it was still annoying. The most bizarre encounter was with some anonymous weirdo. S/he kept editing the article on Trenton, Ontario to include some PhD student in the list of notable citizens from there. I and some other editors kept deleting the name and told the person to knock it off. The weirdo was obsessively persistent and eventually started stalking me and my edits on other articles, claiming that I was running more than one account (‘sockpuppeting’) and posing as the other editors that assisted me. They eventually found the whole thing with the WPL article and tried to dredge that up again. None of this stuck and I received lots of helpful support from other legit editors, but I had enough. It just seemed that there were too many editors with mental health issues out there. Something fun was turning into a big headache and my wife couldn’t understand why I was getting all worked up over a voluntary effort that was supposed to be enjoyable. So, after seeing Andrew Keen at OLA, I decided to give it up in February 2008. Not 100%, but 99% anyway. I still maintain the library page and I’ve made a few random edits to other pages, but that’s it. And I don’t regret it at all. Now I see that Wikipedia is losing editors – they still have a lot, but I can see why. It takes a lot of time to deal with the trolls and such, and most people (I think) eventually tire of it. I did a little poking around and see that some of the editors that I used to see all of the time (including the Puerto Rican kid) have cut back on their edits or stopped altogether. Others are still going strong.
Thing 17 involves reading some stuff on Library 2.0 and commenting on the whole phenomena. I think I’ve been exposed to lots of commentary on Library 2.0 through OLA and Library Journal, but it’s always nice to step back and look at the big picture now and again. Michael Stephens’ column was interesting in that it didn’t just talk about technology, indeed it warns against ‘technolust.’ But most of the precepts he discusses are pretty straightforward – user-centred service, watching trends, transparency, meeting clients where they are, that sort of thing. I’d say it’s hard to disagree. I should note that I saw Stephens at OLA once and read his column in LJ. I’m a little less enamoured with Wendy Schultz’s column (people wanting virtual reality info coach from a librarian avatar?), but maybe I’m just not futuristic enough. Second Life is another thing I keep hearing about but can’t get excited about the hype. I do like this line:
But let’s be clear: Library 4.0 will not replace Libraries 1.0 through 3.0; it will absorb them. The library as aesthetic experience will have space for all the library’s incarnations: storage (archives, treasures); data retrieval (networks—reference rooms); and commentary and annotation (salon). Available as physical places in the library “storefront,” they will also be mobile, as AR overlays we can view (via glasses, contacts, projections) anywhere.
That kind of sums it up for me, except the viewing stuff with glasses and contacts. Mobile, sure, but WTH? Anyway, we have lots of clients who come in now, and I don’t get the sense that they’re clamouring for Web 2.0 services. That said, they’re already clients. We can’t forget everyone else out there, some of whom still have the stereotype of the library as a stodgy place where you have to follow a bunch of rules and navigate unfamiliar systems to get what you want.
One final comment. One of my favourite columnists & bloggers is Dan Gardner of the Ottawa Citizen. He had a great post on the swine flu last May that talked about the difference between cynicism and skepticism. Cynics dismiss everything almost automatically (kind of like gullible people, who accept everything almost automatically), while skeptics “…don’t accept things at face value. They demand evidence and examine it carefully. But neither do they automatically dismiss claims without first examining the evidence. They weigh and balance and consider: Only then do they judge.” This is what I try to do, not always successfully. It also applies to Library 2.0 – not all of it adds up. For instance, everyone cites this library in Michigan (I can’t remember which one) and their catalogue and its thousands of patron-driven book reviews and comments. That’s excellent, but sometimes it reminds me of people pointing out the guy who became a millionaire after failing to finish high school and saying “hey, if he did it, I can too! ” It happens, but it’s rare. As far as I know, this library’s experience is sort of unique – much emulated, but never equaled. I hope we get a cool catalogue overlay here someday, but sometimes think we’d be better off connecting to some other source of online comments, like Amazon. I don’t get the sense that our patrons are itching to contribute comments to our catalogue. Still, this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t give them the chance.
So far, in my skeptical opinion, Library 2.0 is a good thing…but we need to make sure we look at everything carefully and not with rose-coloured glasses. Not that we need to paralyse ourselves and end up the last to do everything, or that it’s wrong to try and not succeed. Be skeptical, but in the good way Dan Gardner talked about.
If you’re one of the two or so people who have read this, I thank your for your patience with my blathering.
Still not a fan of Technorati. As noted in the 25 Things blog, their new beta site has a lot of ads. That isn’t a big deal for the most part, but there’s this stupid mouseover Coors Light contest ad that expands to fill a quarter of the page. It drove me nuts. There are several of them on the page, so it’s really hard to avoid mousing over them.
Anyway, I searched for a hobby-related term and found nothing related to said hobby. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find a bunch of stuff on Google Blog Search – it seems that some American used fire truck companies have blogs, so I added a couple of accounts to the Google Reader.
But Technorati? Meh. If I were obsessed with reading foam-at-the-mouth political stuff or celebrity news, sure (because that’s really really hard to find online, right?), but life’s too short. Even the search feature isn’t that great – you have to remember to click the “post” button if you want to look for posts instead of blog titles. I see why they have that, but it’s easy to miss. And like I said, total ad overkill.
BTW – I couldn’t find the advanced search, but looked for a phrase in one of my older blog posts. Nada.
So delicio.us is one of this week’s topics. I’m afraid this isn’t really something I could get all excited about – most of my links are to obscure websites related to my fire truck hobby. I’m not convinced that I would find more stuff by opening them up to the world. I do like the fact that they’d be available from anywhere and I don’t have to worry about what happens when my computer dies (I try to make backups), but, neh.
This exercise did remind me that I have an old account that I haven’t accessed for three years. I created it and imported all of my old bookmarks, most of which I’ve since deleted. So I updated the delicious account by getting rid of a bunch of old stuff, much of it deadlinked anyway.
One way this could be useful (h/t to Donna for the idea) is that we could have this on the ref desk. We have two computers that should have the same links (but don’t) in the bookmark folder. Trouble is, you’d have to leave it open all the time or log in just to find a website. Might work, might not.
So I’ve created an account on LibraryThing. I’ve always been sort of curious about it, and this may be another place to store a list that I already keep anyway. I actually have a spreadsheet listing all of the books I’ve read in the last few years – I think I was looking at a title here wondering if I had already read it when I decided to create this thing. I don’t know if I’ll get into the whole review thing – probably not. I’m bad for skimming, especially books that don’t really grab me, so I miss some important points. The reviews posted look pretty insightful, so I’d probably feel like an idiot – the book I’m reading now is apparently an allegory using architecture as a metaphor for family relations. Makes sense, I guess.
Anyway, it looks like there’s a way to set up a corporate / library profile here. Maybe this is another way we can connect with our patrons?
