Week 9 Thing 21 Podcasts

Thing 21. Podcasts.
I have added a podcast called Book Voyages to my Bloglines account. "Book Voyages is a podcast about children's literature from the point of view of a school library/media specialist. It features reviews of books as well as inteviews with students and authors." http://www.podcast.net/show/39068

I also added NPR Books for its book reviews & interviews with authors. There was a good interview with the director of a new movie called The Keeper, about the life of Omar Khayam. I think the NPR podcasts will be of great interest to me personally & may be of use for book groups, readers advisory etc.
http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_detail.php?siteId=4819383

I found some interesting Travel podcasts on Podcast Alley.
http://podcastalley.com/podcast_genres.php?pod_genre_id=16

I liked the Yahoo Podcasts site, and found useful information on creating a podcast. I liked their Podcast Search & that is how I initially found the NPR Books podcasts. I also looked on the NPR site to find them that way.

I liked the idea of podcasts of children's stories that Denver Public Library had, but hated the psychedelic visuals that accompanied them. I found them very distracting & disturbing. A picture of the book cover would have been much nicer. (They also had these visuals on the NPR podcasts, is this a common thing?)

I read a lot about creating podcasts and as long as you have a microphone it did not seem to be a difficult process. I could see the library using podcasts for Book talking & certainly for book reviews. I think it would be interesting if Jen could record podcasts of her interviews with authors for Jen's Jewels. We could have podcasts with important messages, e.g. school closings or library closings in the winter. There may be ways we could use podcasts for seniors, as some of them find reading difficult. We could use them for staff training and even reports from ALA/PLA conferences. It seems to me that wherever you need to disseminate information, a podcast could be used. There seem to be multiple uses for them.

Week 9 Thing 20. What I think about YouTube.

What I think about YouTube. Firstly,YouTube is becoming a much more acceptable mainstream service. What was once a forum for weird home movies and strange mashups, has now been used in a CNN/YouTube Democratic debate. See http://www.slate.com/id/2171005/ for commentary on this. Though old school politicians may speak against this type of debate, those with a better ear for public opinion, are realizing that the internet, YouTube included, opens up all kinds of avenues for them.
Secondly, it is a great place to find old footage of those bands you were such a fan of way back when. If you are doing specific searches, YouTube is very good. As with other sites if you are just browsing you can come up with all sorts of stuff you don't want & some of very dubious subject matter, however, you may also find that nugget that is really cool.

I first tried to input the video into my blog using an account with YouTube & having them add the video to my blog. Despite a message saying that the video would be placed in my Blog shortly, it never turned up, so I went ahead & used the embedding method.

I could see the library taking video of special occasions or programs & putting them on YouTube, or making small service announcements, e.g. what we do at HCPL. Or putting short training clips on there so that all staff could see the same information about a new database or piece of software.

Google Video site was nicely laid out & had a good range of material, I found Yahoo video more limited. I was surprised that Yahoo Video was voted #1.

With all of these video sites both sound and picture quality varies tremendously as does subject matter, so it's another case of looking for what you really want. They are all fun to play around with.

Dennis Chambers Drum Solo with Carl Filipiak

Week 9 YouTube

The You Tube video I chose is of Dennis Chambers (Baltimore native, voted in the top 40 all time best drummers in the world, plays drums for Santana & appeared with them when they played at Superbowl 37), Carl Filipiak - also from Baltimore, who plays many gigs around town & who has published instructional guitar videos/DVDs, and Paul Soroka who plays sax and lyricon and keyboards. Dennis drums all over the world & holds many workshops. He very kindly signed some drumsticks for me along with my friend & his, Tim Steele, who currently drums in The Approach & Crawdaddies - two local bands. I used to have a 5 piece set of Pearl Select drums with Zildjian cymbals & took classes for a while, so I have an interest in drumming. Pearl has a Masters Series Dennis Chambers snare drum & there are Dennis Chambers signature drumsticks available. Carl Filipiak is a lovely, modest guy who plays brilliant guitar. His band plays jazz fusion with a Jimi Hendrix influence & I love his version of Little Wing. Check out his website for listings for local gigs. www.carlfilipiak.com. Paul Soroka can play keyboards and lyricon at the same time - there's multitasking for you. His sax is over 30 years old & he told me that if his house was on fire it is the one thing he would want to rescue.
Dennis's website is www.dennischambers.com.

To Come - what I think about YouTube

Week 8. Tutankhamun & Thing 19: Web 2.0 Awards

Last weekend I went to Philadelphia to visit the King Tutankhamun Exhibition at the Franklin Institute. Whether you have an interest in Egyptology or not, this was a superb show, very well presented and with plenty of artifacts. It was just amazing to see chairs he had sat on, to see wooden model boats from so many centuries ago, still in good condition, & to see all the gold costume jewelery and semiprecious items. The exhibition lasts until September 30th & then travels to the UK. If you get the chance to see it, please go, you will not be disappointed.

Thing 19. I had a look at biblio.com. This was a useful site but I could not find one out of print book that I was able to find in Alibris. I have had good service from them & would be most likely to check them first before other sites. I also looked at ning.com & thought this was an interesting site. Seems they are advertising a lot of positions there, so I assume this is an expanding company. It calls itself a Social Networking site, but when I went to look under that category in the awards list, I did not find it there, it was listed under Mashups. I also looked at medstory.com - I would refer a customer to medlineplus.gov, but never to a .com site, as you don't know how reliable their information is. Although it seemed Ok, when I searched for a condition it referred me to Wikipedia for an explanation of what it was. I prefer medical information to come from medical sources. As with any other websites, the awards sites may be OK for certain purposes, but as librarians I think we have to be discriminating in what we use.

Posted to Blog from ZOHO. Week 8

A CHARITY CONCERT TICKET For the benefit of Katrina Hurricane Victims Featuring B.B. King, Eric Clapton, Erykah Badu Saturday, June 16 7:30 pm Cost $150 Parker Stadium 1322 Main Street, Arcadia, Texas - 23888 ADMIT ONE

Thing 18. I discovered you cannot Publish a template. You have to copy it into a new document page and then it is possible to publish it to your blog. Nothing amazing, but easy enough to use. Some of formatting lost in translation.

Week 8 Zoho

Thing 18.
I liked Zoho & found it easy to use. I can see the benefits of having an online wordprocessing system, so that if you were working on a project with people with diverse software, you could use online documentation & all share and edit the same material with no software.
This is a fake concert ticket I created on Zoho. I used and edited a standard template. I found Zoho relatively easy to use & liked their variety of templates for different purpose. Unfortunately it did not copy the colors or formatting when I copied to blog.
CHARITY CONCERT TICKET
A CHARITY CONCERT TICKET
For the benefit of Katrina Hurricane VictimsFeaturing
B.B. King, Eric Clapton, Erykah Badu
Saturday, June 167:30 pm
Cost$150
Parker Stadium
1322 Main Street,Arcadia, Texas - 23888
ADMIT ONE

Week 7 Fish Update, Wikis & Sandbox

Fish update. Aquarium seems to have settled down again. No recent fish deaths. May start restocking in a couple of weeks.

Thing 16. I enjoyed looking at many different Wikis. I liked the idea of a Wiki as a subject guide & as a better way to present catalog information to the public. Amazon & other such sites show the customer several reviews & offer links to other books by the same author, and offer suggestions for other titles the customer may like to read. If we could use Wiki's in our catalogs, we could offer the customer so much more than we do now. Even just having a summary of the content would be helpful to most people.
Could we use a Wiki to list our databases and links, for example on the various Zones, that way they could easily be deleted by customers if no longer viable, and customers could add other links that they thought would be of interest.
I see their value for sharing projects and documents, where everyone could edit. This may be helpful to any of our committees and teams.
I also liked the idea of the Library being the center of the community and of having a HCPL community guide to Harford County and its services, not just to the library services. This would be a central place to come to where you could find everything from books, to information on trash removal, to senior centers, to health and so on.
We should also see libraries as a world wide community and instead of reinventing the wheel, if we were all linked and could share our good/innovative/creative ideas we could look at what would work for us and be able to initiate improvements on what has worked in other systems.
I really liked the Book Lovers Wiki. I enjoyed reading the reviews and got some ideas both for my own reading and as possible material for the book group I run. Maybe this is something we could do on Reader's Place.
Thing 17. Sandbox. Keep getting an error message, still trying to add my blog to favorites. OK now I did it, you can see my blog address under Harford County.
I also created a page http://marylandlibrariessandbox.pbwiki.com/What-I-am-Reading
What I am Reading, a review of Whale Season by N.M. Kelby (2nd time I have read this and am enjoying it just as much as first time - pretty funny but wise - a good summer read).
I also linked this to the FrontPage so you will see it there also.
This was kinda fun.

Week 6 # 15 Library 2.0 & Fish

I have been having a trying week. A couple of weeks back my husband & I added some small tetras (gold & neon) to our freshwater tank. Since then we have had about half of our tank of fish die. They have no discernable illness, no parasites, mucus, etc etc. visible. They do not behave strangely. One minute they are eating & swimming, the next they are floating. The deaths have been across a wide spectrum of fish. We have lost all 6 of our threadfins, but not all at once, over two weeks. We have lost 1 of 3 red wag platties, 2 blue moons, a silver mollie, a balloon mollie, a female & male guppy (2 males & 1 female remain), and of the tetras, 1 gold & 2 neons have survived. We have also discovered 3 baby somethings in the tank that remain unaffected. Cherry barbs, a Chinese algae eater & panda corys among a few others remain unaffected. This is a real puzzler. We have changed the water and both our tests & those at the pet store say the water is perfect. The temps are also OK. We are just hoping that whatever it is will stop of its own accord because we cannot find any cause for this. I have searched Google, de.licio.us and all over the web to see if I could find any info, but you have to have symptoms in order to determine a cause. If anybody out there has any ideas, I'd appreciate comments.
Now on to Library 2.0. I really enjoyed reading the "Away from the Icebergs" article. I thought his points on "just in case" collections, expecting users to educate themselves, and expecting users to come to us were valid. Libraries have to move with the times or we will lose to other sources of information & community. In "Into A New World of Librarianship" I thought the author's comments on not implementing technology for its own sake, but only when it was making an improvement was well thought out. Each library system should have a plan, and if a new technology has no value it should not be implemented just for the sake of it. In "A Ripple Effect" a small rural school library shows how it expanded its services. Some of the services offered were innovative and I could see them being implemented in our system (HCPL). Why not loan MP3 players with a downloadable books program? (Need money first!) I thought a lot of what they were doing we already do but there is always something someone is doing differently. I read all the OCLC Space Newsletter articles. They were all of interest. I see how much databases will become linked in the future. There will be no limit to access to knowledge and you will be able to download a book in French from a French company, as easily as downloading from American ones. You will be able to access documents or articles from Russia as easily as from Spain or from the U.S. There is so much potential here and we are still only at the beginning. Library 2.0 is about how we view the future of libraries and our place in the world, not just in our own town or community. It is about access to information, but also about community. There is an article in Library Journal April 15, 2007 about Laura Cohen's blog, "Library 2.0: An Academic's Perspective", where she gives insight on dealing with the chaos of change using Library 2.0. Read her Manifesto at this address.
http://liblogs.albany.edu/library20/2006/11/a_librarians_20_manifesto.html
There is also another article in the same edition of Library Journal called "Journey to Library 2.0" by Robin Hastings, that refers to the 23 Things and Helene Blowers.

Week 6 #13 #14 Del.icio.us & Technorati

#13 & #14 I was both overwhelmed and underwhelmed by Del.icio.us & Technorati. There was a lot of stuff out there & a lot of ways to get to more stuff. In that sense I found it a bit overwhelming. As to being underwhelmed though, I found a lot of the content to be trivial, virtually meaningless or dreadfully written (especially in Technorati). I do not really need to read someone's blog about some Latino porn star which is one of the items that came up when I was searching. Top Searches consists of people looking for information on Paris Hilton. This is going to increase my knowledge of the world in such important ways! Technorati can be fun to use, and I like the idea of tagging, but there is just so much junk to wade through. I don't know how much I would use this site.
I did do a focused search for guppies (aquarium fish) in Del.icio.us and got some useful sites and information, however, I could have also got most of this just by doing a Google search. I do like the idea of tagging and find it a fun way of getting information. I like that it is so open and that you can include a wide selection of words to indicate your subject. It's sort of like browsing, where you may find a bit more than what you were actually looking for. I can see the uses to a library although I don't know how you keep out the bad stuff.
Del.icio.us bookmarks are supposed to be used to help build "an expansive knowledge network."
This is good if the knowledge is useful and accurate but what's the point of a knowledge network of junk. (Wikipedia is having a problem with this). I could see more uses for Del.icio.us in a work setting than I could for Technorati which felt more fun than value.
The PLCMCL2 site was interesting, and here you start to see information that is more intelligently presented. I can see the use in having bookmarks that can be accessed from anywhere and there is potential for librarians to use this as a tool for research or to keep up to date on information about the profession.
I read Alan's blog (My 23 Journeys) and had to agree with most of what he found in reviewing these sites. They do have some uses but, as librarians, I think we will have to be careful not to get bogged down in the trivial.