Well, I got way more out of this course than I thought I might. It pushed me to explore online resources that I had heard about but hadn't taken the time to get to know how to use. I found out that I despise Delicious and I love Twitter. Before I began, I expected the opposite to be true! I also learned how to post to this blog in a kind of elaborate way with embedded links and so on. I am so happy to know how to do that now.
23Things covered so many free things on the Web, but left out MySpace, Facebook and searching or uploading to institutional repositories, among other things, and it didn't cover anything that has fees attached, like Skype and iTunes. In all, I think that the course was well planned, and I sure enjoyed going through it. I loved--in fact, required--that I could do it at my own pace during an allotted time. If the time schedule was much shorter or stricter, it would not have worked well for me.
I enjoyed learning about some of my proximate colleagues through this course, but it doesn't hold a candle to sitting in a room with people week after week. Really I think it's better to have actual human contact when learning. Who will I keep in contact with after the course is over? That part will be missing.
If the Commission offered another discovery exercise, I would certainly consider participating if it met my needs at the time, and if I felt I had the time to do it. Also, that it was free was a big draw for me.
Many compliments to the NLC staff who organized the course and to the originators at Mecklenburg Library. Best wishes to the instructors and to my "classmates," and Happy New Year to you all.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Podcasts
Podcasting is the topic that drew me to participate in 23Things, ultimately. I was hoping to learn how to post podcasts through this course, so I am so glad that there are resources listed for doing that. As for listening to podcasts, I have done that off and on for a couple of years now. To fulfill the requirements for this Thing, I subscribed to NPR's Sunday Puzzle with Will Shortz, and I added the RSS feed for it to my Bloglines account. I often miss it on Sunday because it is on at a busy time in my house. So subscribing to it will help me catch it each week.
Podcasting is a great way to share audio and video sessions with a potentially wide audience, so it has innumerable applications in libraries and academia, etc. Also, I imagine that some version of it is probably going to be around for a long time. The only thing that I don't like about subscribing to podcasts is that they just keep coming, whether you have time to listen to them or not. It's one more thing to keep track of and to incorporate into every day life. But I know that I am free to delete one if I don't listen to it--though that is somehow easier said than done. In all, I am amazed at all the content that is available, and I adore the audio format.
Podcasting is a great way to share audio and video sessions with a potentially wide audience, so it has innumerable applications in libraries and academia, etc. Also, I imagine that some version of it is probably going to be around for a long time. The only thing that I don't like about subscribing to podcasts is that they just keep coming, whether you have time to listen to them or not. It's one more thing to keep track of and to incorporate into every day life. But I know that I am free to delete one if I don't listen to it--though that is somehow easier said than done. In all, I am amazed at all the content that is available, and I adore the audio format.
YouTube
Some months ago, I wasted--I mean *spent*--a lot of time exploring YouTube, looking at everything from video of Letchworth State Park in New York, near where I'm from, to Mark Morris dances and rehearsals, to the Stone Roses music (Fools' Gold, one of my old favorites) and lots of other music uploads, and so much more. I enjoy YouTube, but I have learned not to read the comments very much. They are often off-topic, abusive, inane and otherwise unhelpful. There are many obvious possible applications in libraries, and I'm sure that some library staffs are using YouTube in very creative ways.
I have not uploaded a video to YouTube, but this is a little video that my husband uploaded a while back.
By the way, I love the Dr. Horrible video that one of the posters on the 23Things site directed us to!
I have not uploaded a video to YouTube, but this is a little video that my husband uploaded a while back.
By the way, I love the Dr. Horrible video that one of the posters on the 23Things site directed us to!
Discovering Web 2.0 tools
I saw that last.fm won first place in the Music category of the SEOmoz's awards. I was a fervent user of last.fm for a while and discovered some great music that way. But the site kept losing my data somehow. I forget the details of what exactly went wrong by now, but I do remember that it was so annoying that I deleted my whole account. One other funny thing was that artists and others can manipulate the site to mess with what you see depending on how you enter a name. I entered "Winehouse, Amy," for instance, and on that page it said something like: "There ain't NOBODY called WINEHOUSE, AMY, so update your ?*&#$! files!!!" (I know that I shouldn't have been, probably, but I was a bit put off by that.) At least that taught me that you couldn't rely on how many other users listened to an artist because some entered the names inverted (like this cataloger did) and some put them in directly, and that changed how the site worked. I went so far as to put all the names in both ways--a bit much, I admit it ...
Another site that I have used some is Lulu.com. The very large Dictionary of Invertebrate Zoology was getting so many hits on the UNL Dig Comm Web site that the authors were asked if they would like the full book-length version of the dictionary to be made available via Lulu and the authors agreed. From the Dig Comm site: "The Dictionary is now available for purchase in an 8.5 x 11" hardcover edition, 381 pages, for a price of $90.00. Copies may be ordered at http://www.lulu.com/content/2080614." I don't know yet how well the book is selling, but it's been fun to help with publishing a scholarly work this way.
I hate to say it, but I was glad to see that LibraryThing did not win an outright award in the books category. Though I use their site very often, and to record thousands of books, I see huge flaws with what they're doing, as I have talked about in earlier posts. This exercise has led me to Vufind, and I will be curious to look into what that is all about. I like the look of it, but there's a lot to absorb about it. It could be really good, depending on how you can import data. I see that some major libraries are trying it out, and a few are even live with it. This looks promising so far.
Another site that I have used some is Lulu.com. The very large Dictionary of Invertebrate Zoology was getting so many hits on the UNL Dig Comm Web site that the authors were asked if they would like the full book-length version of the dictionary to be made available via Lulu and the authors agreed. From the Dig Comm site: "The Dictionary is now available for purchase in an 8.5 x 11" hardcover edition, 381 pages, for a price of $90.00. Copies may be ordered at http://www.lulu.com/content/2080614." I don't know yet how well the book is selling, but it's been fun to help with publishing a scholarly work this way.
I hate to say it, but I was glad to see that LibraryThing did not win an outright award in the books category. Though I use their site very often, and to record thousands of books, I see huge flaws with what they're doing, as I have talked about in earlier posts. This exercise has led me to Vufind, and I will be curious to look into what that is all about. I like the look of it, but there's a lot to absorb about it. It could be really good, depending on how you can import data. I see that some major libraries are trying it out, and a few are even live with it. This looks promising so far.
Thing #19 12-27-08
Thing #19: Apps, They're not just for desktops any more
I have wanted to try Google Docs for a while now and just hadn't gotten around to doing it. I see that it has the look of Word in many ways. I use Word when I am prepping documents for uploading to the UNL institutional repository (UNL Digital Commons Web site). I almost universally use Book Antiqua font there and I use the symbols a ton. The symbols list looks pretty good, but Book Antiqua is not a built-in font. I don't know if you could add a font some way. Otherwise, I am looking around at the menus and see that a lot of what I use in Word is available here, too (subscript, superscript, and some other formatting things). So, on the face of it, it could work for the preliminary editing that I do in Word. I do my final editing in InDesign, and I don't know of an app that would be like that.
I don't see of a way to place a new command on the tool bar. I went to the Google Docs blog and did a search on "toolbar" and still didn't see a way to customize the toolbar. Also, the paragraph formatting tools seem pretty meager in Google Docs, though I was able to do some fiddling with the paragraph spacing. So, I still prefer Word for my Dig Comm work, but I can see using G-Docs from time to time for other things. Or, I could start my work in G-Docs and then download the file as a Word doc and go from there. Good deal. It sure is handy--could use it at a public computer, for instance.
I posted this right from Google Docs, and then I added this one sentence with the Compose feature in Blogger. Easy and intuitive, wow.
I have wanted to try Google Docs for a while now and just hadn't gotten around to doing it. I see that it has the look of Word in many ways. I use Word when I am prepping documents for uploading to the UNL institutional repository (UNL Digital Commons Web site). I almost universally use Book Antiqua font there and I use the symbols a ton. The symbols list looks pretty good, but Book Antiqua is not a built-in font. I don't know if you could add a font some way. Otherwise, I am looking around at the menus and see that a lot of what I use in Word is available here, too (subscript, superscript, and some other formatting things). So, on the face of it, it could work for the preliminary editing that I do in Word. I do my final editing in InDesign, and I don't know of an app that would be like that.
I don't see of a way to place a new command on the tool bar. I went to the Google Docs blog and did a search on "toolbar" and still didn't see a way to customize the toolbar. Also, the paragraph formatting tools seem pretty meager in Google Docs, though I was able to do some fiddling with the paragraph spacing. So, I still prefer Word for my Dig Comm work, but I can see using G-Docs from time to time for other things. Or, I could start my work in G-Docs and then download the file as a Word doc and go from there. Good deal. It sure is handy--could use it at a public computer, for instance.
I posted this right from Google Docs, and then I added this one sentence with the Compose feature in Blogger. Easy and intuitive, wow.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Playing around with PBWiki
I added favorites to the books page and the music page, and added a link to my Nebraska Learns blog on the blog favorites page. I enjoyed this exercise and could see it being useful in many ways in the library and otherwise. Wikis are easy to use and to edit--they're forgiving of errors.
It is Christmas Eve, so now I am going to bake some cookies and start to make dinner. What a beautiful day in Lincoln, Nebraska today. It's cold (9 degrees F) but sunny with lots of holiday mood-enhancing snow on the ground.
It is Christmas Eve, so now I am going to bake some cookies and start to make dinner. What a beautiful day in Lincoln, Nebraska today. It's cold (9 degrees F) but sunny with lots of holiday mood-enhancing snow on the ground.
Wikis
I have written entries for an Oxford University Press encyclopedia and the process was strictly peer-reviewed. Jimmy Wales says not to cite ANY encyclopedia. Well, my entries were reviewed scrupulously, so I can stand squarely by the information I gathered for the essays. As for the dinosaur-version of encyclopedias, it's worth the time and effort to ensure that correct information is available to students, researchers and the public.
Henry Bryant Bigelow
Gail Borden
Theodore Dru Alison Cockerell
Wikis can be a good tool for internal communication, as many have said, or good for starting points on obscure or very current subjects. But as a research tool, not so much.
Speaking of specific wikis, I LOVED the St. Joseph County Public Library cooking subject page! It has the look of an old-fashioned pathfinder, which I learned to create in library school. There's information on the location and hours of the local farmers' market and even a recipe there! All of the library's cooking magazine subscriptions are listed (with links to the catalog records; helpful). There's a link to a local chocolate company's Web site and so much more; I am impressed. If I find out about specific subject pages of interest to me locally, I will certainly participate in the updating and maintenance of those sites. When used like this, wikis are bar-none for information sharing.
An aside: the CommonCraft videos are funny! They use bits of paper to show things about technology. I find that ironic, but charming.
Another aside: When I looked at the site yesterday, I was surprised to see Wales asking Wikipedia users for cash. What's that all about?
Henry Bryant Bigelow
Gail Borden
Theodore Dru Alison Cockerell
Wikis can be a good tool for internal communication, as many have said, or good for starting points on obscure or very current subjects. But as a research tool, not so much.
Speaking of specific wikis, I LOVED the St. Joseph County Public Library cooking subject page! It has the look of an old-fashioned pathfinder, which I learned to create in library school. There's information on the location and hours of the local farmers' market and even a recipe there! All of the library's cooking magazine subscriptions are listed (with links to the catalog records; helpful). There's a link to a local chocolate company's Web site and so much more; I am impressed. If I find out about specific subject pages of interest to me locally, I will certainly participate in the updating and maintenance of those sites. When used like this, wikis are bar-none for information sharing.
An aside: the CommonCraft videos are funny! They use bits of paper to show things about technology. I find that ironic, but charming.
Another aside: When I looked at the site yesterday, I was surprised to see Wales asking Wikipedia users for cash. What's that all about?
Library 2.0
[Sigh.] I have so many thoughts on Library 2.0. I read several of the essays listed in the 23Things posting for this exercise.
My thoughts run so many ways when it comes to this topic. One first thought is that "library as museum" is a key concept that is often too readily dismissed. Human artifacts, such as books and other tangible media, are part and parcel of the domain of libraries. While I firmly believe that the digital format will eventually become the default, libraries are THE institution in which all remaining hard copy objects MUST remain accessible IN ADDITION to our involvement in the digital domain. Just as museums retain physical objects, such as examples of extinct animals, minerals with their origins noted, pottery from bygone eras, and so on, one thing libraries are is book museums. This is critical, too, because, aside from that, more books are published now than ever before, and their format is not incidental.
This brings me to another sticking point for me. Now, I have gone from cataloging to scholarly communications, so I have not paid too much attention to the first version of RDA, but my concern is that cataloging's focus needs to shift from "content over carrier" to the exact opposite: "carrier over content." The CARRIER of an item is the absolutely critical aspect to a patron. It sure is critical to this library patron, to me. If I have to go to the library to get an item, I need to know that front and center. If I can get something online, right now, that is very important for me to know.
In a roundabout way, this leads me to another issue which is inadequately addressed in discussions of Library 2.0 and that is: who pays for all of this stuff? It's great to say that the online environment affords access to this, that and everything else, but my employer can only justify paying for resources that directly serve our particular academic community, and we will continue to have limited access (via interlibrary loan, for instance) to additional materials. My thoughts are that the whole -economic infrastructure- of Library 2.0 in the Web 2.0 (and beyond) environment, is what needs to be hashed out -above all-.
As some of the essayists pointed out, yes, we need to have library workers in place who are extremely technologically facile; that is a given at this point. As one essayist said, we also need to react -quickly- to changing technological capabilities. That's where we could stand some improvement.
My dream is to be able to go to any library catalog and have a super powerful search mechanism in place so that I can search for article titles in the same place that I search for book titles, and have the ability to search by subject, date, place, etc. This can be achieved by major manipulation of the rich metadata/catalog records that are already in place for so many items (books, images, sound recordings, articles, etc.), so that tons of work is done behind the interface of the catalog. The catalog interface should hide a hugely complex network of information that leads users to any sort of library resource they want, a la Uber-Google.
This is such an exciting time to be in libraries.
The changing landscape of contemporary cataloging
My thoughts run so many ways when it comes to this topic. One first thought is that "library as museum" is a key concept that is often too readily dismissed. Human artifacts, such as books and other tangible media, are part and parcel of the domain of libraries. While I firmly believe that the digital format will eventually become the default, libraries are THE institution in which all remaining hard copy objects MUST remain accessible IN ADDITION to our involvement in the digital domain. Just as museums retain physical objects, such as examples of extinct animals, minerals with their origins noted, pottery from bygone eras, and so on, one thing libraries are is book museums. This is critical, too, because, aside from that, more books are published now than ever before, and their format is not incidental.
This brings me to another sticking point for me. Now, I have gone from cataloging to scholarly communications, so I have not paid too much attention to the first version of RDA, but my concern is that cataloging's focus needs to shift from "content over carrier" to the exact opposite: "carrier over content." The CARRIER of an item is the absolutely critical aspect to a patron. It sure is critical to this library patron, to me. If I have to go to the library to get an item, I need to know that front and center. If I can get something online, right now, that is very important for me to know.
In a roundabout way, this leads me to another issue which is inadequately addressed in discussions of Library 2.0 and that is: who pays for all of this stuff? It's great to say that the online environment affords access to this, that and everything else, but my employer can only justify paying for resources that directly serve our particular academic community, and we will continue to have limited access (via interlibrary loan, for instance) to additional materials. My thoughts are that the whole -economic infrastructure- of Library 2.0 in the Web 2.0 (and beyond) environment, is what needs to be hashed out -above all-.
As some of the essayists pointed out, yes, we need to have library workers in place who are extremely technologically facile; that is a given at this point. As one essayist said, we also need to react -quickly- to changing technological capabilities. That's where we could stand some improvement.
My dream is to be able to go to any library catalog and have a super powerful search mechanism in place so that I can search for article titles in the same place that I search for book titles, and have the ability to search by subject, date, place, etc. This can be achieved by major manipulation of the rich metadata/catalog records that are already in place for so many items (books, images, sound recordings, articles, etc.), so that tons of work is done behind the interface of the catalog. The catalog interface should hide a hugely complex network of information that leads users to any sort of library resource they want, a la Uber-Google.
This is such an exciting time to be in libraries.
The changing landscape of contemporary cataloging
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
SlideShare
Here's a cute slide show I found on SlideShare. It's pretty brief, but probably gets the point across well enough. A few other people have downloaded it.
I have uploaded a slide show that I created a couple of years ago. It is still converting on the SlideShare Web site as I type this. I will add it here when it is finally available. I do not create presentation materials very often but I do need to occasionally. I have also added Nebraskaccess as a contact.
OK, it's done uploading. Here's a link to mine:
Here's a link to my account:
http://www.slideshare.net/sgardner2
Happy New Year, everyone!
String of paper gingerbread men and women
How cool to learn how to embed a slide show in a blog posting. This could come in very handy sometime.View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.
I have uploaded a slide show that I created a couple of years ago. It is still converting on the SlideShare Web site as I type this. I will add it here when it is finally available. I do not create presentation materials very often but I do need to occasionally. I have also added Nebraskaccess as a contact.
OK, it's done uploading. Here's a link to mine:
Here's a link to my account:
http://www.slideshare.net/sgardner2
Happy New Year, everyone!
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Delicious
I created a Delicious account (sgardner2) and edited my bookmarks and tagged all of them. I have found that I do not look at my RSS site in Google, and I suspect that I will not often use the Delicious account, either. I could be wrong, of course. I have ended up posting occasionally to Twitter when at first I thought I would not use it. I have been followed by three interesting people on Twitter, so that's why I have continued with it. One is a cookbook author and I like to read about her daily doings. Gives me ideas!
I can see Delicious being very useful in a library setting. It would allow users to possibly add their own tags to Web sites the library has discovered for them, so that they could customize the site to suit their needs.
For the NebraskaAccess site, I might tag it: reading, free, library, books, magazines, Web sites, education. I agree with everyone's tags, of course. People tag for a variety of reasons and if one person finds a reason for a tag it's likely that someone else might use the site in the same way and need a similar tag.
I can see Delicious being very useful in a library setting. It would allow users to possibly add their own tags to Web sites the library has discovered for them, so that they could customize the site to suit their needs.
For the NebraskaAccess site, I might tag it: reading, free, library, books, magazines, Web sites, education. I agree with everyone's tags, of course. People tag for a variety of reasons and if one person finds a reason for a tag it's likely that someone else might use the site in the same way and need a similar tag.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
I will leave this as I first posted it but was I ever wrong about this! I post to Twitter A LOT. I post usually only about food-related topics (a neutral, non-controversial subject, I figure) and have found some other very interesting food-obsessed people this way. I am a total Twitter convert, I'm afraid, as Susan will attest, as she is following my posts.
My original post on this:
Twitter is not my cup of tea. Pausing to mention what I am doing or where I am going, etc., would break the flow of my invariably fast-paced day. Interacting with Twitter would interfere with interacting with my kids when they are around, so I would never use it while they are awake. So that I am Twitter-literate, I have done everything required for the assignment. I am following Susan at NLC, and Blake Carver, a librarian who's listed in the article we were to read. I looked up some cooking-related terms and am following a pastry chef. My stepson is apparently on Twitter, and I'm following him, too, but I suspect that he posts rarely.
I cannot imagine wishing to convey this sort of thing on a regular basis:
My original post on this:
Twitter is not my cup of tea. Pausing to mention what I am doing or where I am going, etc., would break the flow of my invariably fast-paced day. Interacting with Twitter would interfere with interacting with my kids when they are around, so I would never use it while they are awake. So that I am Twitter-literate, I have done everything required for the assignment. I am following Susan at NLC, and Blake Carver, a librarian who's listed in the article we were to read. I looked up some cooking-related terms and am following a pastry chef. My stepson is apparently on Twitter, and I'm following him, too, but I suspect that he posts rarely.
I cannot imagine wishing to convey this sort of thing on a regular basis:
sgardner2 I roasted a 30-pound Hubbard squash last night. How tasty it is!
Saturday, October 18, 2008
LibraryThing, and the LT widget
I have already blogged about my projects in LibraryThing. I dicovered LT last year and put my own catalog online in a week or so. I had an EndNote database that I uploaded to LT and, overnight, voila! There was my catalog online. Then I added a few more books the usual way, and I have been keeping up with it ever since, adding new books to my catalog all the time. See http://www.librarything.com/catalog/sgardner to view my catalog.
Until recently, I was a cataloger in an academic library for a very long time. So I wondered how I could use LT in my work. I asked my department chair if, using LibraryThing, I could catalog a collection associated with the Nebraska State Museum and she agreed. So I worked on that for several months. Here is the result of that project: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/manterlab.
I complained about LT in my last posting, so I won't do more of that here.
I had trouble adding the LT search widget to my blog. I selected a look for the widget and saw what I had to copy and then paste into my blog's HTML coding. I located the blog's HTML coding, but I couldn't figure out where in the coding to put the pasted widget code. Can someone help me figure that part out? Thanks!
Until recently, I was a cataloger in an academic library for a very long time. So I wondered how I could use LT in my work. I asked my department chair if, using LibraryThing, I could catalog a collection associated with the Nebraska State Museum and she agreed. So I worked on that for several months. Here is the result of that project: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/manterlab.
I complained about LT in my last posting, so I won't do more of that here.
I had trouble adding the LT search widget to my blog. I selected a look for the widget and saw what I had to copy and then paste into my blog's HTML coding. I located the blog's HTML coding, but I couldn't figure out where in the coding to put the pasted widget code. Can someone help me figure that part out? Thanks!
Friday, October 17, 2008
Thing #11--About Technology
I use my computer every day. It's a life line, in some senses. But rather than write about the wonders of computer technology, I will use this forum to mention something that's been on my mind. If I had the time, I would write a scholarly paper critiquing LibraryThing. Now, I am an avid user of LibraryThing. In two accounts, I have downloaded almost 6,000 records in LT. But there are many problems with it. In short, it is merely user-focused and not book-focused. There is a lot of emphasis on the social aspect of book collecting, and the cataloging part of things gets short shrift. This is unfortunate because it would be technically easy for the LT people to give a little more attention to the cataloging side of things and the service would be vastly improved.
Here are just a couple of things that are not good with LT. As it is now, users are unable to input long titles. When I was entering original records for people's dissertations, this was very unfortunate. I had to put the full title down in the comments field, which was an unsatisfactory solution. For some dissertations, the title was meaningless unless all words of the 30-word title were input because the organism being discussed in the paper was not mentioned until the end. If they have server room for book covers, they certainly can allow filling in of the whole title. Also, the MARC record has become very difficult to locate in LT records (or have they finally made it unavailable altogether?). This affected my work because I was hoping to include subjects in the records, for collation of topics, and this is not possible unless you convert the subjects to tags, and that is not a straightforward proposition at all. Don't get me started on the inadequacy of the interface ...
Anyway, I could go on and on. LibraryThing is covered in the next Thing, so I will go on to that activity. I will just conclude by saying that they could improve the service in a hundred ways.
I have commented on Pam S.'s thoughtful "This is Pam" blog to round out the requirements for this assignment.
Side note: I made some lentil soup today, by the way. It was a nice, cool day for having it.
Here are just a couple of things that are not good with LT. As it is now, users are unable to input long titles. When I was entering original records for people's dissertations, this was very unfortunate. I had to put the full title down in the comments field, which was an unsatisfactory solution. For some dissertations, the title was meaningless unless all words of the 30-word title were input because the organism being discussed in the paper was not mentioned until the end. If they have server room for book covers, they certainly can allow filling in of the whole title. Also, the MARC record has become very difficult to locate in LT records (or have they finally made it unavailable altogether?). This affected my work because I was hoping to include subjects in the records, for collation of topics, and this is not possible unless you convert the subjects to tags, and that is not a straightforward proposition at all. Don't get me started on the inadequacy of the interface ...
Anyway, I could go on and on. LibraryThing is covered in the next Thing, so I will go on to that activity. I will just conclude by saying that they could improve the service in a hundred ways.
I have commented on Pam S.'s thoughtful "This is Pam" blog to round out the requirements for this assignment.
Side note: I made some lentil soup today, by the way. It was a nice, cool day for having it.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Flickr apps, etc.
There are so many Flickr apps and add-ons, it's a jumble of things. One list of these that I saw is only organized alphabetically, so it's not intellectually arranged in any way. So you have to scroll through and see what there is. Another of the lists is arranged by platform and by a couple of other criteria, so it was more easy to use.
I played around with the Spell with Flickr app and spelled "lentil soup" (which I am craving these days). http://metaatem.net/words/lentil_soup I also tried DUMPR jigsaw and Fastr, a couple of games. Cute. And I looked at Clockr.
As for what might be useful in a library, Flickr Search could be useful because it's an add-on for Firefox which would make it easier for patrons and staff to search Flickr right from the browser. The blurb for it says: "This is a simple search plugin for your Firefox browser, that allows you to quickly search the public available Flickr tags." Could be good.
I played around with the Spell with Flickr app and spelled "lentil soup" (which I am craving these days). http://metaatem.net/words/lentil_soup I also tried DUMPR jigsaw and Fastr, a couple of games. Cute. And I looked at Clockr.
As for what might be useful in a library, Flickr Search could be useful because it's an add-on for Firefox which would make it easier for patrons and staff to search Flickr right from the browser. The blurb for it says: "This is a simple search plugin for your Firefox browser, that allows you to quickly search the public available Flickr tags." Could be good.
Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/photos/anders_naesset/2942400948/
For this assignment, we're supposed to look around the Flickr site and find a picture we like and blog about it. My good friend, Jean, was just in Norway last week, so when I saw this picture taken in Norway, it caught my eye. I found it in the randomly-generated interesting pictures feature. It drew my attention because it seems to have been done by a skilled photographer who was able to capture the other-worldliness of the scene. Black and white can be so elegant that I am often drawn to b&w photos.
I am not a photographer at all, though I do appreciate good photography. I even forget to carry pictures of my little guys with me (gotta work on that!). I am reluctant to post pictures because of privacy concerns, though my stepson is big into Flickr and many other photo sites. He sends me links from time to time, so I have been a passive Flickr user for a long time now.
For this assignment, we're supposed to look around the Flickr site and find a picture we like and blog about it. My good friend, Jean, was just in Norway last week, so when I saw this picture taken in Norway, it caught my eye. I found it in the randomly-generated interesting pictures feature. It drew my attention because it seems to have been done by a skilled photographer who was able to capture the other-worldliness of the scene. Black and white can be so elegant that I am often drawn to b&w photos.
I am not a photographer at all, though I do appreciate good photography. I even forget to carry pictures of my little guys with me (gotta work on that!). I am reluctant to post pictures because of privacy concerns, though my stepson is big into Flickr and many other photo sites. He sends me links from time to time, so I have been a passive Flickr user for a long time now.
Monday, October 13, 2008
Added several RSS feeds to Google Reader
I used Technorati to look for blog sites, and I also searched Google for topics of interest to see what sites would come up and then looked for feed buttons from there. I looked for baking sites, cooking sites, science-related sites, design sites, and for Digital Commons sites. I ended up subscribing to: Rose Levy Beranbaum's baking site, Science News Online, Earthquakes 5+ in the Last Seven Days site, the New York Times "most-E-mailed" list, the Penn State Digital Commons site, as well as the NLC sites that we were required to subscribe to for this assignment. I had trouble finding an interior design site that I was interested in, and I also couldn't connect to the feed from the "Cookbook of the Day" site that I found and liked. There was an error on their site. Too bad, because I really wanted that one. Though it was a good experience (in a way) to see how it doesn't work sometimes.
RSS
I set up a few RSS feeds in my Google Reader. I have until now been reluctant to get into RSS because it is so constant. I like to take a break from checking sites from time to time. I figure that I can still take a break from it, even with RSS turned on. The other reason I haven't used it is that I like to find things by serendipity on a sprawling site like the New York Times. Also, another of my favorite "news" sites is weather.gov, and there is no RSS feed for the weather in Lincoln. A few other places around the country have weather feeds, but I'm not generally interested in knowing the weather in Detroit, for instance. I have subscribed to the NLC All-feed and the Flickr feed. I'll see how I like it.
Monday, October 6, 2008
IM-ing
I have used IM-ing in my library work. When I recently cataloged a large collection at UNL on LibraryThing, I used instant messaging to have someone help me do the Russian cataloging. I trained my computer camera on the title page of each Russian book and my Slavic-cataloger friend at Berkeley transliterated each title, author and publisher and, together, we found records on OCLC for each item. That helped me to determine which library's catalog to search in LibraryThing (LT), so I didn't have to click endlessly around in LT to find which library might hold these obscure titles.
Here are a couple of screen shots from the project ...
Other than that, I IM with several people, non-work-related. My son loves to click on the emoticons while I do it, so he can even join in though he's too young to write. It's good for adding a private comment to a conversation if someone is within earshot of a phone or Skype conversation you're having.
Here are a couple of screen shots from the project ...
Other than that, I IM with several people, non-work-related. My son loves to click on the emoticons while I do it, so he can even join in though he's too young to write. It's good for adding a private comment to a conversation if someone is within earshot of a phone or Skype conversation you're having.
New skills
I'm going to participate in Nebraska Learns 2.0 to learn a few new skills; all at the low price of zero dollars! Thanks for the free course, NLC and Charlotte/Mecklenburg.
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