Library 2.0 - Thing 15

Lots of food for thought presented by some experts in the field. Just a side comment, why only one woman listed, and bibliography for Wikipedia also listed few female generated articles. Ladies, why are we always behind in technology?

With embarrassment I will admit that the short summary in Wikopedia was most readable and useful. Tom Storey said the obvious, "The Web moves from simply being sites and search engines to a shared netword space that drives work, research, education, entertainment and social activities..."

My favorite comments were by Rick Anderson who said that"..it no longer makes sense to collect information products as if they were hard to get. They aren't." Best is "We need to focus our efforts not on teaching research skills but on eliminating the barriers that exist between patrons and the information they need, so they can spend as little time as possible wrestling with lousy search interfaces and as much time as possible actually reading and learning." "But if our services can't be used without training, then it's the services that need to be fixed - not our patrons." This is so important, and biggest case in point - e books, and net library. Daily we have patrons with inquiries, who to do this, how to use this service, yet training for librarians is in short supply. Why offer a service if we cannot market it and/or explain the use of it????? One last comment from Mr. Anderson, "We have to be a bit more humble in the current environment and find new ways to bring our services to patrons rather than insisting that they come to us - whether physically or virtually.

I also liked John J. Riemer's words "To better bibliographic services" including broaden relevance ranking, and adopt popular web features of Google and Amazon.

All interesting articles in cluding Dr. Schultz and her take on the future, and Library 4.0.

Thing 20 YouTube

YouTube was calling me. So I'm out of sequence, but having fun. Posted below is my favorite library related video: Library Cart Drill Team from last summer's meeting in Chicago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtmZxghTkyY Wagner will never be the same.

Google and Yahoo may try to complete, but it looks like YouTube has the videos pretty locked up. Library applications - book trailers, upcoming program trailers. But either do it professionally, or low ball it with humor.

Technorati - Thing 14

Once again, many of the links were found to be out of date. Somehow one expects more from such a program. But then librarians are over-worked and understaffed everywhere, so move on!

Technorati is fascinating - loved the organization of such a system. Top blog today was Huffington Post. You go girl! Not that I share her viewpoint, still it is woman-power. Of course # 7 - Celebraties and Gossip - who could ignore. Need that update on Brad and Angelina? Or the fact that Bill Gates danced until 2am at the Sundance Film Festival. Just back from a trip to New York, I'm happy to say that I didn't stay at the city's dirtiest hotel - Hotel Carter.

Again - I liked their structure - and link accordingly. Obviously focus changes daily. Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas was focus of Technology, but sure that will be old news soon.

Del.icio.us - Thing 13

Interesting process exploring this topic. The video links were no longer valid. Maybe it would be helpful if they were updated for future 23 Things users??? But once I spent some time with Del.icio.us, I'm sold on the idea. How wonderful to be able to pull up bookmarks on any computer. No more re-inventing the wheel for me.

I can see if you were doing academic research, this tool would be invaluable. No more writing those web sites on little scraps of paper that get lost within the hour. Sign me up!

rollyo

The instructions were to make my own search tool, using a frequent library request. As I am doing this "thing number 11" on my own time, I decided to be a little selfish and create a food/recipe/wine search engine. What a wonderful idea, and rollyo proved most helpful in that category. So no more blogs for awhile, because I have so much cooking to do.
Rollyo was easy to use and I can see how it would be helpful in a number of categories. Short of a specific homework assignment, our Bethesda patrons ask pretty varied questions, so I'm not sure that rollyo would be a lot of help on a daily basis. But I'll give it a try.

LibraryThing

As a member of Capitol Choices Best Book Committee and MCPL Teen Service Steering Committee, I read a lot of books each year. I make lists as I go along, and at the end of the year annotate the list to use for informal and more formal booktalks. I see that using LibraryThing would put everything in one place, but I've also played around with GoodReads and similar competition. I think that I like the format of GoodReads, and just saving the book lists as a file on my computer may be just as easy. Jury is still out on this discussion.

So many useful library related blogs out there. Favorites include "Awful Library Books" which showcases books we can/should live without, Library Journal News, and variety of YALSA blogs and one of my favorites: www.readingrants.org. This is great for YA literature updates and some good reviews. www.chasingray.com is another favorite for teen book coverage. There's a great article in the Nov. 09 School Library Journal, with interesting cover (think they got slammed for it by their readership, but hey, our profession could use an update, although maybe not with alcohol) and Ten Blogs with information on what you can't live without. With all this information coming at you, maybe we could actually live without a lot of this information.