Thursday, November 4, 2010

130 days until Pi Day

This is it; I've done it; I've logged all of my 23 Things. I did the learning by serendipity and by following what I liked over the last nearly four years (and before, of course), but I did the tracking and blogging in a very compressed way over the last week or so. I discovered that, while some of the new Web 2.0 tools have supplanted others, or evolved substantially, or become irrelevant (to me, anyway), the world that opens up all across the interwebs when you really look to see what's out there is magical (as we knew it would be) and robust and right in tune with who we are as librarians and as a profession.

Talking to ourselves

Or thing 9.
It turns out that the most useful library news aggregator for me comes as the weekly American Libraries email newsletter. Fabulous links to all things library universe, intellectual freedom, library marketing, etc. David Lee King is pretty irresistible, as well, as he is bright, articulate and wonderfully customer-aware.

Podcasts

I have mentioned that I have not yet (yes, I'll get to it, soon, really, I promise) touched my iPod Touch. Could it be the 1,470+ books from 2010 that are asking for my undivided attention? Can it be that "podcasting" is a term only about 6 years old, at most? Is it ok if sometimes I listen to the radio and not subscribe to the podcast? And ok if sometimes I get my learning from YouTube? Did I mention that I like to be free to move around the web and listen to what I like? Like RSS feeds, there's a cumulative and therefore somewhat scary quality to podcast subscriptions. I've had years and years to get used to not keeping up with The New Yorker; I'm not planning to have scores of podcasts piling up around me. Their covers aren't as lovely.

Ce que vous aimez (from 2007)

circus amaze
What you like.
The art of reading, doing, thinking, writing, saying, knowing...
ce que vous aimez.

The two books I've encountered in as many days of real vacation both feature women who go off to Maine islands and adopt dogs. I did not go looking for Maine escape literature, or even books about dogs, but there it is.
My mother likes spicy foods, so we went in search of good Thai food, a cuisine she'd not experienced often, but we knew that the heat could be very satisfying. The restaurant staff were lovely and gracious, and saw her coming and muted all the chilis into what seemed to my mother a kind of blandness.
My mother also likes big loud movies where heroes are double-crossed but get revenge. So do my sister and I. So when we took her to see Live Free or Die Hard the weekend it opened and got some looks of askance on the part of the box office staff who saw two rather zaftig women trailing a slender white-haired and frail looking older lady into the theatre it just rolled right off us. They probably thought we came to see Bruce Willis, but I really had to make a bit of an effort to avoid thinking about his politics.

Tag; you're it

I love tagging. For this post (thing 13 if you must know), I went back and thought about tagging all my posts. I had already, long (as in years) ago, decided not to use Delicious for my bookmarks. As with other potentially large universes, time has made my bookmark universe smaller, and accessible in other, less direct but more intuitive and useful ways. The incredible usefulness of the new Google quick search adds to my ability to (almost) forgo bookmarks altogether. I used to mark anything I thought I'd lose track of; now I have given myself over to a kind of detachment--if I need to find it again, I will. I could go on about this, but it's hard to make sense about something that is as personal as one's own filing system...

Search engines (your own)

I put this collection into my Rollyo/Firefox search engine. Not sure I'll remember to use it, though it's interesting to me to think about how few, relatively speaking, sources I routinely search when I'm looking for information. What's missing from this list are things like the OED from our electronic subscription. I didn't add another dictionary, however. 
news.bbc.co.uk
washingtonpost.com
nytimes.com
latimes.com
wikipedia.com
cdc.gov
nih.gov
mayoclinic.com
wsj.com
mywebmd.com

Google docs (thing 18); more clouds

More is not necessarily better, so I'm sticking, for this post, with Google Docs. We need to figure out how to help library customers set up their documents in Google Docs instead of Word. The Innovation Cohort tried its best to encourage MCPL to make thumb drives available to our customers--we could have sold them cheaply and even branded them with our logo. But somehow the logistics of this presented an insurmountable challenge. So why not move our users to a cloud based online productivity tool? Google Docs is versatile and works easily for anyone who's used a word-processing program; it also allows for editing or markups by someone else. My middle schooler submits about half of his papers this way, especially the ones that are part of group projects. It's time to help our library user achieve the same flexibility and productivity.

The machine is using us

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g
This video from 2007 is still my favorite of all summaries of where our interactivity is going.
Where is web 2.0 going in relation to books, though? How about a new version of Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit for iPad? Or, how about a book, Jackass?

Totally hip

I am now a Ron Charles fan. What is it about this dorky guy who delivers articulate, sometimes silly, spot on, quite informative book reviews in longer-than-60-second videos for The Washington Post? He'll probably supplant dear John Crace in my affections, if only because I get to see more of him. (John Crace is still more wickedly funny--see his digested read of Keith Richards). But this roundup of Booker finalists (this before the Finkler Question was named the winner) is hilarious, and sends up, gently, the tools for book recommendations that 23 Things suggests exploring.

Microblogging

In the three+ years since librarians first started thinking about 23 Things and heading out into the wilds of Web 2.0 the biggest new things in a world of new things seem to be Facebook, of course, and Twitter. Twitter, I learned in looking for information about Tumblr, is one of many recently (relatively recently, that is) developed microblogging tools. These are web tools that allow people to broadcast small bits of information rapidly, and to aggregate, as in regular blogging, information and ideas into some kind of thematic order. So, back to Tumblr. New favorites: Officials say the darndest things. Front Pages (from the Newseum). I found these in a posting at Mashable.com. These kinds of things are exactly what keeps news and trivia junkies glued to the screen all day. Librarians like me, who like serendipity and hunting and gathering, are exactly the right audience for these kinds of aggregated information sites: small bites and most of it quite tasty.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

RSS feeds and other ways of keeping up

Trying not to think of "The Feed" from Tobin Anderson's wonderful eponymous YA novel. I've added a couple of the blogs I want to keep current with to my Google homepage: Capitol Choices and MCPL's illustrious Shhhout Out blog. That's enough. It's such a huge timesink to follow even the cream of the cream of blogs, news and opinion sites, even cartoonists I like...

Fear of technology or why are your lips moving?

I have an iPod Touch I haven't touched. What a wimp, you say; I say it, too. But, as a sign that my librarian heart has not entirely turned to stone, I noticed that it gave a small leap when I found that the iPod Touch is one of the supported listening devices for NetLibrary audiobooks and for Overdrive, as well. So, great. I won't be limited to listening to Beeswing all day long. Not that I would mind.

Wiki worlds

My first experience with posting to a Wiki was related to this handout I created for the YALSA preconference in Washington D.C. in 2007 ("The Sins of YA Literature"). I could never get it into the YALSA wiki and have since felt somewhat incompetent with wikis. My second experience was with the MCPL Intranet, which inexplicably uses the term "wiki" to mean a holding place for a bunch of forms, files or other items related to...well anything on the site. Fine. Most recently the Board of Capitol Choices used Google Docs to share strategic planning ideas and information. But I love the idea of working together on a narrative or shared body of information. I'm just not sure I've found the group who will make a wiki work. In the meantime, I've added the wikihow widget to my Google homepage.

Word clouds

Here's a way to convey information quickly and appealingly: make a word cloud. I've done this with the results from a couple of SurveyMonkey surveys I did for non-profit groups. It's cool how a word cloud focuses the attention on meta-messages. A way of looking at an idea from both sides now, if you will.
This word cloud was made in Wordle, using the text of Strategic Direction 5:

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

The Fantastic Secret of Owen Jester

The Fantastic Secret of Owen Jester

Thing 6

I will remember BigHugeLabs.com—it would be nice to make a set of trading cards for a gift. Also, I found a lovely green photo of bubbles at http://krazydad.com/colrpickr/ that made me think that’s what Owen Jester would have seen underwater in Graham Pond from the rounded window of his submersible. I haven’t used Flickr or any of the other photo sites as much as I would have years ago—part of it is the time involved in getting the pix from my phone or camera onto my laptop and then onto the site. So my philosophical, probably lame, excuse is that we seem to be surrounded by photos and images, almost to the forgetting of what our own memories, fickle as they are, store for us.
While looking for inspiration, I noticed that Thing 6 for the Cambridge University Libraries 23 Things project is actually an intro to Google Calendar. I loved Google Calendar for about a year. I had different colors for sports, music lessons, my life, my family’s activities and commitments. Then…again: was I just amusing myself or really saving time? Of course, around that time my older child began to keep his own calendar, drive himself (and occasionally his brother) to lessons and sports, and my sense of complex, frantic hours faded. But in the spirit of online tool discovery, I continue to enjoy using Doodle to plan group gatherings.

Monday, November 1, 2010

The True Meaning of Smekday

Zach Galifianakis in conversation with John Wray (HQ, short version)

utube; you tube

My favorite reasons to visit YouTube? (Aside, of course from library videos like New Spice Study Like a Scholar, Scholar and Libraries will survive, I like Ted Talks and book trailers.
Ted Talks: www.ted.com/talks
Book trailers
1. Zach Galafianakis
2. The True Meaning of SmekDay