week 7: a tagging we shall go!

Almost everyone I know uses delicious (I can never remember where the dots go) I have not had a chance to really check it out before now. I added a billion things to Bloglines and have a couple other web places I visit, but I think as a library something like this would be really useful. Imagine having an event on say, alligators, and using delicious to find links on gators or Florida wildlife so kids could look up information before and after. There is only so much you can pass on to kids in an hour or so, right? Something like this would allow them to browse many other resources. Or, for genealogy you could post a tag focusing on census records, local town pages that might have history, and then the patron could use delicious to search along as their whim, almost like a wiki, going from tag idea to idea.

I use tags on my personal blog and if I need to reference a post on something in the past, all I have to do is click the "crafts" tag or "dolls" tag. Tags are a great way to give access to a group of related posts or links without a lot of work organizing them.

With technocrati, you could customize a library blog with tags so people looking up "Florida libraries" or "libraries with youth programs" would find yours easily. If you had specialized blogs, like a "collections" blog listing new books, you could then direct people to that as well.

Wendy Schultz' article onLibrary 2.0 and beyond was interesting. Personally I don't think I would go for a virtual library, but with things like Second Life and such I can see how it would appeal to others. I think, however, there is just something in holding a book, the weight of it in your hands, the turning of pages as you lose yourself within, that a virtual world couldn't replicate. Perhaps in a Library 4.0 we would be equipped with fake "books" that plug into our USB port and get filled with whatever text we want.

John Riemer's article on bibliographic information was pretty interesting as well. I know our own electronic resources get under utilized, and I think it's just because patrons don't know about them. Sure, as college students we know the pros of researching online journals, but say a mother is looking for a medical study on her child's cold medicine. She wouldn't think to go to an online journal, I'm sure. Yet connecting all the catalogs and resources together would allow her to find that with appropiate tags. Of course, tagging everything would take a lot of manpower.

I highly disagree with Stephen's Librarian 2.0 assessment that patrons should be informed and involved in all decisions for the library. Getting their opinions and feelings for what they like in the collection, what they'd like to see improve or change, and feedback which allows us to form our own decisions is very important! However, the same thing that makes the library great - its diverse scope, mixing of communities and ideas -- would be a hinderance if patrons made decisions on how resources were used or funds allocated.

If you say have a hundred dollars and offer to buy a group of new books, one person might want the newest hardcovers in fiction. Another might suggest some older paperbacks to get the most of the money. Yet another patron might want to invest more in your special collection. Someone else might argue that more Spanish books are needed. They all have admirable and important passions, but having so many people like this could lead to confusion and perhaps even resentment if a patron feels another is being favored. Librarians and other employees stay in touch with what is popular in general, through their patrons as well as the marketplace. Who knows? Using that hundred to fund something out of left field might bring in a whole new patron set you didn't know existed!

This is why the "library 2.0" is important, you can reach those who don't usually make it down to the physical library and bring in new materials and programs in order to serve them too while keeping your current patron base.

week six: PAZOOOW!

Oh dear, I seem to have fallen behind a little! Too much reading CNN and Yarn Harlot on Bloglines, I think! :)

Social networks have been around as long as the Net has. I remember Fidonet, where to even respond to someone you posted a message which then was sent to a hub computer and passed along. It could be days before the intended person even saw it, and then you had to wait for a reply. Nowadays, people can just jot down anything in a manner of seconds.

I have always kept in touch with my friends through a journal/blog site called Livejournal. In fact, they know the entire story of my triumphant journey into the library system. They cheered me on everytime I posted that I got an interview and went crazy when I got the job :) I have blathered on about how wonderful my library is and all the nice and sometimes quirky patrons we have. So, in a way my friends have been getting their own personal view of the library system.

I started with this story because I have not had much to do with my Myspace account. I started it because the co workers at my other job were all into it, but I have had my LJ for so long it seemed superflous to post the same thing twice in different journals.

MySpace is a lot more user friendly than LJ; even with a blogging program I still often hand type HTML, while Myspace uses a very nice posting interface. The one thing that turns me off MySpace is all the ads. It makes it a bit cumbersome to read.But the ease of reading and being able to reply easily makes MySpace a better tool for communities. You can easily see who is writing and reply to them quickly. It would be easy to list Youth Services activities or post music from a local band you know. You could even post audio files of a welcome message, or librarians reading parts of books. I think the audio and visual parts of Myspace make it a great tool for widespread communication.

By the way, Tom's sign is Libra.


Gaming: I am a huge gamer. My husband and I have all sorts of old and new systems, we play multiplayer games, puzzle games, all sorts of games. Gaming is very popular and pretty prevelant with today's kids. And not just the shoot im up or violent games. There's a lot of games that have minimal fighting and teach good storytelling and reading skills (a lot of the roleplaying games, such as Final Fantasy, have a lot of reading and often use strategic planning for skill systems, have defined good/evil storylines, have strong female roles and characters, often have a hero who is likeable and honorable and willing to do whats right for his friends, a few have had little mini games within a game that used math and planning skills, etc)

You have games like Monster Rancher, Pokemon and Nintendogs, where you have to raise and take care of a creature or pet. In some of these games, you have fighting, but it's not violent and usually the game's focus is on collecting or raising your pet.

A lot of games are multiplayer too. My husband and I sometimes play an online game call World of Warcraft, a fantasy multiplayer game played by roughly 4 million people in the US alone. It's actually a great way to network with people and meet people from all over the world. Sometimes if I am wondering about a game or movie I just log on to get everyone's opinions. :)

Moderation in all these games are important of course! But I think libraries starting to have gaming days is wonderful. Most games are multiplayer and can introduce even shy kids to new friends.

My score on the billards was a miserable 4. I'm not very good at billards, haha. The title of my blog post comes from the noise I imagined the stick making when it hit the ball. So I guess I got sidetracked making sound effects for the game and that's probably why the computer beat me to a pulp. ;)

small bloglines update

I am so glad I looked into Bloglines. I used to keep a bunch of favorite sites saved but it was always so much trouble to keep track of them. Now I can subscribe to a bunch of nice things, like knitting and library blogs, and still keep up on them. Even better, I can scan headlines like CNN or Time to see if I am interested in the article.

Image Generators

These things are always floating around my friends' blogs.
My Doll

The pony one did not work so I edited it for another one. I realized the code was for forums use and not in html for a blog, whoops!

LibraryThing: Oh wow, this is something I may just have been searching for. I was just discussing with my husband the need for something to help us keep track of our books at home (he was seriously trying to convince me to label each book in LOC call numbers - keep in mind at last estimate we had at least a couple thousand titles...) However, when we moved into our apartment together we didn't organize them very well, so I'm definitely going to use Librarything once I sit down to do the big rehaul. :)

I added some of the more recent books I've pulled off the shelves.
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/noisycat

Rollyo: I usually only use Google for finding things and it works for me really quickly, but I can see for research reasons how Rollyo can be a great help. I'll have to fiddle with it a bit to see how I can use it.

RSS

I have used RSS very briefly in the past. A few years ago, not many sites were using it and there certainly wasn't anything like bloglines, where you could subscribe to non RSS blogs, photos and more. So, I never really saw a use for it.

This past year, however, I have been trying to keep updated on current events as well as some blogs and it is a bit of a pain to check everything only to see nothing earth shattering has occured. So it's great to see how Bloglines works! I heard about it while watching the "20 Technologies in 50 minutes" presentation on Dynix's site. I'm so glad I finally signed up and got some stuff subscribed. Right now all I have is news sites like CNN and Time, but I have a big list of library and book related blogs at home so I'm going to enter those as soon as I can. If anyone has any suggestions I would love to hear them.

I might even make Bloglines my default homepage, it seems so useful to keep updated, I'm glad I gave it another try!

The call numbers of DOOM!!

The call numbers of DOOM!!
Originally uploaded by jsavino

I have always loved the Dewey system. Something about it just tickles me in a weird book geek sort of way. I can still tell you the number of my favorite book as a child that I checked out every time I went (398.2454 Hath)

Even so, it boggles my mind that there are sub categories for everything.

Here, we have the quiet 236.9, tucked away with only a few books to its name. Yet, as it happens, this is the call number for books regarding the apocalypse. I took this picture because while shelving I actually stopped and was amazed by this. It never occurred to me anyone would need to denote a number just for apocalyptic books.

Of course, these refer to religious end of the world scenarios, Four Horseman and the like. I'm sure other theories such as the earth falling into the sun, the ice caps drowning us all, or invasion by robotic kittens are under different numbers.