Things 9, 11 and 12

Thing 9. OK, I don't
really get twitter .
The only person I follow never posts. The person I'd like to follow
protects her updates. So I am alone, and I can't evaluate it really. I
don't want to invite people from my address book. At some point, I
should talk about the connections I've made through href="http://www.linkedin.com">LinkedIn, from the InfoPeople Web 2.0 class I took at HQ.

Twitter is kind of like chat, but you can only post 140 characters per post. Some people call it mini-blogging.

I
asked my 21-year old daughter (my ace on the hole in terms of Life 2.0)
about it. She didn't know twitter, asked if it was like href="http://tumblr.com">tumblr? Which led me down a road
I didn't need to follow. After she'd looked at twitter, she said (and I
have her permission to quote): "It's utterly pointless and a waste of
space."

She also told me that Second Life is stupid and boring. This did make me feel a little less old and stupid.

I've
decided to give Twitter one more try. I looked up the guy whose
presentation I saw at ALA and "followed" him. Then I looked through the
people he follows, and added some more people whose blogs I admire.
However, I am not waiting with bated breath.

Thing 11. I've been using LibraryThing
off and on for a couple of years. I love the idea, but I'm lazy about
entering books. Plus, as a lifelong library user, I don't really like
the way it implies that I own every book I've read. I guess I do in the
sense they become part of my conscious, but then I look atLibraryThing
and realize I don't even remember so many. I did find href="http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6476403.html">a really
good article on social bookmarking and libraries, via href="http://librarianinblack.typepad.com/librarianinblack/2007/09/social-bookmark">Librarian
in Black.

Thing 12. I tooled around in rollyo a bit. It is interesting. I didn't create my own searchroll, because my interests are not that eclectic or unique that I need a special search tool. I did like the start-up reference
search roll. I put it in my del.icio.us. I may put it inrefc as well.

I WANT this campaign!

Wyoming Libraries

There was a post on one of my lists about Wyoming libraries using mudflap girls to promote an auto-repair electronic database. You've got to see it, and the rest of the campaign. It's creative, funny, and fun--out of the box thinking! How do we get there?

Another version

Another version
Originally uploaded by lislemck

To see if I can cut and paste image link!

Thing #10 New or old? Avatar--playing with Image Generators

A poll here--which looks more like me?

or this?


The old avatar has a decent grey streak--not an option in Doppelme. Neither the doll program or Doppelme had a cane or a chihuahua.

Then there's this. There would be an a Press Pass I created with Flickr here, but I can't get it to show up here. I've spent as much time as I am willing to on it, so I'm letting you look at it as I blogged it directly from flickr, which did work. Onward and upward!

Delicious Library

Delicious Library

More to check out!

Thing 8, +13+22 +99 reasons why I haven't done my homework

I started this post at 5 minutes before closing last night. Now it's Saturday and I am finishing it on my own time.

Did it say anywhere that we needed to do the Things in order? Because I realized in looking over the list of Things that I had managed to jump around a bit. Sorry if that causes any inconvenience.

I thought last week was the crazy busy week. I was wrong. I did not get 45 minutes to truly play with any fun new toys at work this week. However, I did some stuff that was at least related.

My co-worker Molly and I set up a flickr account for our branch, and I showed Molly how to upload and tag pix. Our username is LakesideLibrary. Molly discovered some really great shots of our mural celebration on what must be a local photographer's flickr account, Joy Elizabeth. So we "friended" (aka added as a contact) her. We also created an avatar for our account, using the photo of LK on the SDCL.org site. So I think this counts as fulfilling Thing 22. Molly is just full of ideas for using flickr. She wants to do librarian trading cards for all the staff. This does seem like fun, and good PR.

I'm kind of amazed--I've been using flickr for like five years, and I had not begun to explore/exploit its interestingness. I have to remember to order photo paper. I want to print a set of Joy Elizabeth's mural pix for my mural documentation folder, with attribution of course!

I have to think more about how we are tagging them, since they aren't coming up when you search Lakeside Library. We put in the tags LakesideBranch and SDCL. Need to rethink.

I've now read all of the posts on all of the blogs my fellow 23 Thingsers have set up. I think that was 73 posts. Most were pretty short, but it was pretty interesting. I got to see lots of mashups, a little bit on image generators (which I look forward to trying since I think my current avatar looks anorexic). I also looked at Oddcast, but I couldn't find the way to do a trial. Oh well, maybe someone will post a link.

I accidentally ended up reading a bunch of Information Wants To Be Free from a reference to the survey there. I tripped over IWTBF ages ago, and always find Meredith's thinking useful. A recent post posed questions about why people blog. I think I will think about that over at my main blog. I recently had comments there from two of my old online friends, which made me realize how much I value that contact.

I also spent a lot of time this week looking at the Nashville Public Library site and their implementation of Encore. I was one of the people asked to evaluate it for potential for SDCL. Encore uses de.licio.us style tag clouds, but they are based on Library of Congress Subject Headings. It almost goes without saying this makes for some weird results.

And yet another Thing I worked on this week. I've opened a de.licio.us account for the reference committee. We are going to try to put together a set of reference bookmarks that will be useful for the entire system. Several of the people involved are also 23 Thingers, so I have to say this course/competition is certainly having some consequences. I have also been posting and getting more comments on my other blogs. Kick-starting those was one of my personal goals. So I am rather happy, even if I did spend substantially more than 45 minutes writing this post (it is now Sunday morning). So I will slog onward!

Thing 7 and thing 8

Since I already have tons of experience with Bloglines, I decided to set up a Google Reader account. It's just another aggregator. My Bloglines account is completely scary--thousands of unread posts from acoupla hundred blogs...

So I set up the Google Reader account with feeds from my 23 Things colleagues. I don't have time to finish this am--have to get ready for a Hispanic Heritage event. I'm just putting a note here to serve a reminder a) I stopped at Susan D in my blogroll and b) I want to talk about getting more from our blogs by using them as our reporting method!

LibWorm: Librarianship RSS Search and Current Awareness

LibWorm: Librarianship RSS Search and Current Awareness

Search the Biblioblogosphere and Beyond...

"the librarian RSS engine
over 1500 RSS feeds go in
exactly what you need comes out!"

Maybe some SDCL U blogs will be covered here!

del.icio.us libraries … updated August 23, 2007 � m�lange

del.icio.us libraries … updated August 23, 2007 � m�lange

WOW! I stayed up much later than planned after I found this site. Good thing we're off tomorrow. It's going to take me awhile to process this. But watch out SDCL--de.licio.us is coming your way!

Chelmsford Public Library Home

Chelmsford Public Library Home

Another interesting example--check out de.licio.us bookmarks and subject guides!

Five Weeks to a Social Library

Five Weeks to a Social Library

When I have the time, this looks interesting...

Thing 6

I got a little seduced looking at Charlotte's page--lots of links that led me elsewhere.

I've looked at Ann Arbor's site before--I think it's tremendous. The user reviews of materials are just wonderful. The website asa blog seems to really work.

Denver Public's podcasts were cool--I'm jealous. I guess we need to start an author lecture series. Then we can have cool podcasts from them. This seems like a great idea, but we don't really have an auditorium space anywhere, do we?

What's our largest seating capacity? If anyone knows, please post a comment. Of course, we could go the partnership route. I think I can get like 300 in our community center. Great, another great idea to work on! (Sarcastic, yes, but still upbeat.)

BTW, I had no difficulty locating the podcasts on DPL's main page. Maybe they've improved it since InfoPeople made that comment?

I actually spent a little time looking for libraries that have implemented flickr. I found this group, which was cool, and led me here. I think I liked San Mateo's page best of all the ones I visited this week. I'll be looking some more at their use of flickr, as I start to try and get LK's flickr going!