Web 2.0 tools...

I took a look at the award winners - love the one where you can play around with haridos, hair color, etc.

Then i checked out wufoo.com and immediately set about creating a customer survey to put up on the lib's website. Wasn't rocket science and I'm sure there are better surveys. However, for a first try it wasn't bad and the site was easy to use. Sometime I'll have to go try out surveymonkey though - more precision there, I think.

Web-based apps..

We don't have the full MSOffice software at home, only the piddly little program for wordprocessing and spreadsheets included with the PC we bought. So, whenever I receive docs that are in MSOffice format, I go to my Google account and open them in Google Docs. It's a real lifesaver!

Wiki's, or, I'm terribly behind..

Ok - my take on wiki's - what a way cool way to get things done. I have participated in our library's wiki, a professional association's conference planning wiki, a local event planning wiki; I have looked at wiki's and drooled about what could be done, if only, if only I had more time (and now I'm planning on jumping into the world of online courses in January... so, I get wiki's and there must be so much more we can do with them... family genealogy, parties, who wants what for Christmas-birthday-Hannukah?

update:
Ok - added my fav library-scene-in-a-movie to the wiki...

A hand-made spinning wheel...

and gorgeous at that!

See more photos here...

Ravelry, knitting, online societies and life

Oh lordy, another blog to follow. But, really, how could I possibly NOT follow a blog that combines French cooking with German... cafe creme and pretzels. Really.

One thing we Amis (German shorthand for Americans) miss out on is the Advent calendar... loads of them out there with different themes. My favorites - the DROPS calendar with cute holiday knitting ideas and the the culinarily themed one from Kochtopf (aka the Cooking pot, stock pot, etc).

And it gets better - here's a flash-back to the eighties (in case you were feeling nostalgic) - as someone commented somewhere else, the hairdos alone are worth looking at here!

Never seen an Advent calendar? Well, the idea is that it helps you count down to Christmas from December 1. Children are big fans - lots of fun stuff for them. For the grups (grown ups) it's themed calendars, with everything from craft ideas, to recipes, to knitting patterns, to, well, who knows.

We are missing out! Demand your local Advent calendar today.

Library 2.0

I think some of the discussions referenced have become moot: people are using library/web 2.0 in libraries and out.

Personally, I think the Web 2.0 tools are just that: tools to use in our work. I use what works, learn about what I don't know yet (like how to create a fabu Facebook page for my library a la Jerwood Library of the Performing Arts, Trinity College of Music (Greenwich, UK). They have RSS feeds from their OPAC to the Facebook page to show new books. Not to mention a catalog search button, and other good stuff.

So, for me Library 2.0 means learning lots of new stuff, fast, in order to keep up with the world which is where my customers are.

Dancing Border Collie...

Remember, if you want to get a Border Collie as a pet - they need something to do. They MUST have something to do - then they're happy happy dogs....

In which I do not conquer Technorati..

However, it has its uses, especially in the serendipity department, or wow, look at what I found.

So, I started out with a search on library management. Not so good. Tried that as a phrase. Hmm. Better. Looked through the blogs listed and found, sigh, ANOTHER one to add to my bloglines blog roll on library stuff.

Browsing through that blog's posts (see link above if you've already forgotten my newest find) led me to the infamous Annoyed Librarian. Ok - the AL, as those in the know call this blogger, generates an inordinate amount of comment, far more that this blogger is due. Some say they know who it is, some are incensed this person blogs anonymously and at LJ, too boot. Here's a fine example of an AL post with 176+ comments. The comments are worth reading, too; lots of self-impotent peeps gassing away there, too. Yes, I posted there. Booby prize to you if you figure out which post is mine.

Some folks think the AL is funny - well, not ha-ha funny, but funny as in tongue-in-cheek so. I'm not so sure. Sometimes I think the AL is out to cause discord in the ranks for no better reason than, "because I can." Francine Fialkoff quotes the AL as saying that the AL is no more "the writer" than Charlotte Bronte was Jane Eyre. Well, that don't warsh. Publishing one unified story, that comments on society and mores, is not the same as publishing a long string of posts in the blogosphere that masquerade as serious commentary and then asking us to believe it's all in good fun. Besides, all fiction entails autobiography.

As to whether the AL is fostering necessary discussion - well, I'd say the AL isn't adding anything new or original to the debate on "whither the library." Tina McElroy Ansa has a much better written and thought through, though old, argument about books and reading in the November 30 Atlanta Journal-Constitution; it's worth reading this essay, pondering it, and discussing the issue.

So, there you have it. My technorati odyssey. I'll be back for more.

on Technorati...

... which will be multiple posts until I figure this out. Talk about information overload, especially at the end of a long day, at the end of a long week.

So, I did find our humble library blog listed among the blogs on Technorati. We've been fav'd once but have no authority. Oh well. One step at a time.... :-)

Del.icio.us

It was a great day when I first discovered Delicious. No, I am serious about this. Finally, a place where all my bookmarks could live, and I could find them again! No more looking for a bookmark on the wrong PC. No more, "I know I found a site about that...." No more wading through 4 million bookmarks hoping to find that URL. Fully portable, fully findable bookmarks. With tags! Here are my bookmarks.

I tag things for friends, save articles, websites, knitting patterns, the local weather-report site, and on and on. I put the Delicious tools on my toolbar right away - highly recommend you do that, too. It's a quick login, and away you go. Click the "tag" icon, make a few notes in the comments box, adds your tags, and save.

Dislike disorganized tags? You can bundle them, rename them, delete, them; in short, you are in control of your indexing and subject headings.

And, for those of us using Firefox - when you bookmark a site using Firefox, you can add it to your Delicious account as well.

Best thing since sliced bread.

How to promote your library, ala YouTube.com

I think we could do something like this... I'd be the straight man of course. Staff may line up to be the comedy act...

Libary Thing and Goodreads..

Over at the library I set up a LibraryThing account quite a while ago and encouraged staff to add their titles - we added things we own personally as well as titles we happen to really like. Needless to say, we hit the limit on titles added for a free account in no time. So, we upgraded and have a paid account (non-profit rate). If you look at The eStory you will see random titles from our LibraryThing catalog listed down towards the bottom right.

I use Goodreads for tracking what I want to read, am reading and have read (hm, past present and future, all in one place!) I forget who introduced me to this one.... doesn't matter. It's a live-saver. I also get to see what my friends are reading and my veddy erudite little sister's fabu reading list! Love the tags too - I have my professional reading list (thin right now) and my cookbooks, and now I've added knitting. I think I may go the way of Lisa Scottoline and add the Primary To-Be-Read list, the Secondary To-Be-Read list, the Backup ... oh, you get the idea.

For when I get really good at knitting...

My slide show...

Technorati

Well, I decided, quite on my own (yes, I am stubborn), not to search out new feeds (lord knows, I find enough of those with out specially looking for more) but to take a look at Technorati. Had heard about it - but didn't really know exactly what it does. I think I'll stick with Bloglines - have too much invested there to move, or add another reader spot.

One thing I did do was "claim" the library's blog on Technorati. We'll never hit the top ranks of Technorati blogs; but, that's ok. It's just neat to have claimed our little corner of the blog-o-sphere. If you visit the eStory you'll see that you can now add the eStory to your Technorati favs list. Whee.

Bloglines.. love it hate it

Yes, I have a love/hate affair with Bloglines. It's great, when I remember to look at it, um, regularly. That "regularly" is the hate part. It is convenient for looking at a number of feeds all in one place, with short blurbs or first lines to see if I want to read more.

Problem is, I have way too much on Bloglines now. I don't really want to weed anything out; however, I also don't want to add more feeds there, even when they are really good ones!

Sigh. Information overload.

Twitter and the vote..

Ooooh - this just makes my gadget happy heart flutter - live voter reports!

Twitter has a "#votereport" hashtag you can use to tweet about your voting experience and also have it show up on the twittervotereport list... The hashtag works with a filter twitter set up to find all those tweets and bring them into the votereport log. Take a look at twitter/vote report to see a little about the work involved in creating the votereport. Here's another review of votereport.

NPR is also using the votereport idea... using twitter.

And, then there's YouTube....

There is no more hiding.

Re: Technology, in general

Technology's a great thing. Imagine if no one had invented the wheel.... And, sometimes I find techno-things a real time suck, as in hopping on the 'puter at 6pm with a promise to the husband to be in to watch the next four installments of CSI:Las Vegas (cheers for Netflix) and looking at the clock by said 'puter and discovering it's now 7:54pm. He (the husband) is being very patient; have heard no comments from him, yet. (Course, he can troll the web from midnight to 2am, no problem.)

Anyway - yes, technology is a wonderful thing. I don't mind not doing dishes by hand, and I like safe food that keeps well in my freezers and fridge, the dishwasher's nice, and I couldn't do my job without a PC, fiber, internet, and such. However, there are times I'd rather the old, less techie way of doing things. So, I like fountain pens and good paper for writing, I like the "feel" of a book (as one Kindle owner I know put it), I like making my own yarn (!), and I have a feeling that, once we get there, I'll like hand-milking the goaties even though there are good small milking machines available.

Sometimes I think the Amish have it right: take what's useful of modern inventions but don't let the gadget take over your life (which is how an Amish family can have a phone outback in a shed - it's useful technology, but would be intrusive in the house...) Hm, how can I apply this to my cell phone... which, being human and easily conned into believeing I need something, I can't live without. (How did our mothers ever survive our childhoods with us not having cell phones to call and say, "I'm on my bike on the other side of town?")

My Trading card...

So, here it is my official trading card...

Some of my other favorite things to do with photos from flickr.com:
business cards from Moo
photostream on other blog
find new great photos to mark as favs (you'll have to log in to see)
and, my personal favorite mashup Tag Galaxy - enter a "tag" (now that you know what that is) and have fun.

And if you get bored with these mashups, head on over to this site for a list of 275 (and counting) things to do with flickr.

Flickr and a'that

Flickr has been a real joy to work with; the library has over 300 photos archived there. Some are visible to the public, others are not and are simply archived there. (We've gotten a bit tighter about what we make public since reading an article on infotoday.com (thanks to CCLS New Directions for that one!)

So, I now am working with two flickr accounts - the work and the home accounts. Home account i set up mostly to get photos of my knitting projects up on ravelry.com (thanks to my pal over on ravelry!). Of course, I can also post really cute pics of our animals and things that live in our garden. Feel free to visit my flickr photostream.

I'll do a blog post from flickr next.

Ravelry.com and the knitting addiction

Finally have added some more projects to my www.ravelry.com account. My friend over there, purlypeach, is sooooo right. It is addictive.

I started knitting at the tender age of 5-6; I remember my first scarf - a blue, one, in cotton of all things. My dear Grandmama gave me this huge ball of yarn to knit up. The incentive was that there were little trinkets hidden in the ball for me to find as I knitted along. I just remember not really liking the scarf and wishing I could get to the prizes faster than I could knit.

My next memorable project was a Dr. Who (aka Tom Baker) scarf. I made it for my sister, who is also a Whovian. The darn thing must have ended up at 5 or 6 feet long by the time I finished it.

After that, I didn't do much knitting at all. Until, one fine summer, I learned to handspin yarn at a summer camp for adults up in the mountains of West Virginia. The focus of the camp is music - dancing every night! - but mountain crafts are also taught. So, I learned to spin yarn and came home with a spinning wheel and a fleece to process. Naturally, making yarn led back to knitting again. Nothing like working up a gorgeous fleece and then making something out of it.

Now I'm finishing up a sweater out of a lovely English yarn made of Wensleydale Longwool. Yummy stuff. Photos are over at flickr.com.

More on 23 Things thing 4

Just looked at the Participants list on the ccls23things blog - great to see all the fun folks are having! Love all the creative blog titles and personae showing up...

23 Things #4

Ok - so the blog is officially registered over at the ccls23things site (well, just as soon as someone confirms that I sent the email).

So far so good.

On a learning note - today learned more about LinkedIn and how it can actually be useful (and not just another place to park information about self). Good to know they guard privacy very closely - no spamming of email inboxes. Interested to see how the service could aid in fund raising/development. Actually ventured forth and answered a question someone had posted on using buy-a-brick fund raisers. Woo. Movin' up. Next thing I know I'll be some sort of expert. Ha!

It's official...

If the Boston Globe says so, it must be true! Library use up in down economy. But, we already knew that....

El Biblio-burro..

A fine example of using appropriate technology for getting the job done. Who said faster and newer is always the best solution?

Library humor - tech edition

Yes, librarians have a great sense of humor. How else do we deal with all those questions from little kids, teens, tweens, adults, moms, dads, etc etc without going nuts?

This strip has a bit of Dilbert(c) in it too....

http://www.unshelved.com/archive.aspx?strip=20081020

I hate it when...

.. I click a button on a page, inadvertently make a change, and then cannot, for the life of me, undo what I just did.

So, yeah, that's me in the "followers" section following my own blog. Duh. Stay tuned for undoing of click.

Update - look around long enough, and actually read instructions, and presto, problem solved.

Friday Funny.

Yes, I like humor. This one is really good....

Funny of the day...

Is this guy and his now-defunct lawsuit on Hitchin's and Dawkin's list? How to prove divine existence... or not?

Too good to pass up...

It's us - the Commie Pinko Library Workers!! (Thanks to the Shifted Librarian for this one)

Day 2 of Learning 2.0

Okay. So the Learning video was a bit, um, too simple for me? However, I do like the contract idea - yeah, signing something is always a good idea for accountability. So's having peeps looking over your shoulder (figuratively).

The promised icanhascheezburger pic is next.


more animals

First things first...

must make first entry in order to then send over an image from icanhascheezburger. i just know i'm going to have WAY too much fun with this...