Twitter

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:

sgardner2 I roasted a 30-pound Hubbard squash last night. How tasty it is! 10 minutes ago from web

Feels too self indulgent, I guess. But now I know that!

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!

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.

Mini READ poster & Dynamic Einstein Picture

http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/hqops/publishing/graphics/READ_Mini_Posters.cfm



http://www.hetemeel.com/einsteinform.php

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.