Future me/Past me in the 2.0 digital world (Thing 23)

23 Things taught me that I actually know a lot more than I thought I did about Web 2.0. It turns out that I had intuited my way through this brave new world with such people in it, and I shocked myself more by own proficiency than by the challenges.

I tried to take the hardest path on every Thing, taking on the challenges instead of taking the easy path through technology I was comfortable with. I emphasize “tried,” however, because I know I wasn’t perfect and that I didn’t always take the harder path when it was before me.

What I most look forward to learning more about is podcasting myself. For my family, I would love to podcast to my nephews who live back home in Kentucky. For reasons of vanity, I just think podcast anecdotes would be fun to include on my personal blog.

I really enjoyed the 23 Things and honestly have no suggestions for improvement. I felt there were learning opportunities for all levels of experience and instructions were always clear and entertaining. I liked that there were blog prompts to keep Thing-ers on track and that there were Challenges for ambitious Thing-ers to really push their skills.

I’m glad NEFLIN plans to leave the 23 Things posted so that I can revisit Things and follow more links. The more information I am equipped with, the more I can share my knowledge with others.

(Thing 22) Janus: Looking back, looking forward

When I look back at Thing 1, I see myself reaching for new tools as I instantly added Google Analytics to my site and a widget for links in my blog sidebar. I was eager to learn more L2.0, and I couldn’t wait to read others’ blogs. I still check in on other blogs from time-to-time, but I have to admit I’ve cut back on that. I hope my 23 Things pals keep up on their blogs and let me see that window into their library world. I also wanted to use my 23 Things to network, and since meeting Jim Morris at Lake City Community College and linking up with some people through blog comments, I think I’ve succeeded at that.

I am about to take a NEFLIN course on Drupal, and I hope the class can spur my resolution to stay on top of my 23 Things blog. 23 Things has inspired me to always look for more links and to chain to new places. I want to resolve to write about my future discoveries and conquests and continue to explore links on 23 Things that I had to skip.

Thanks, 23 Things, for bringing me a huge network of links to follow. I look forward to learning more.

(Thing 21) Research my research

As soon as I read Thing 21, I started ROFLing. As a student, I would have plugged in all my data at the start of the semester, tuned out every e-mail reminder, and crunch it all at the last minute. As a professional, I can think of tons of reasons to use calendar tools to help keep me on track with events like upcoming conferences.

The “About RPC” states: “The traditional details of bibliography cards, outlines, citation formats, etc. often result in a view of the research process as daunting and tedious. Our goal is to help you bring the student to see the research process as empowering and rewarding.” I remember looking at bibliography cards as ridiculous as an undergraduate, then learning how significant a role they can play in crafting a good research paper in graduate school. A tool that helps students learn how to conduct research in a format they’re probably already familiar with—digital—brings the project from “tedious” to manageable.

Even facing resistance from professors about sharing in the research process, librarians can still participate when those one-shot information literacy students enter the library classroom. Assuming that the professor is skilled at the instructional principles of conducting a research project, the library instructor need only send a brief e-mail to the professor to see what his or her research topic will be for the semester. If the librarian reaches resistance even to this, a quick course catalog review of the course description should give an understanding of core themes. Adapting the RPC principles of research to guide him or her, the librarian steps into the role of research mentor in the information literacy course. As I’ve seen similar skills implemented at Flagler College, the research mentor role plays out when students ask for “that librarian that taught my class that one time.” Clearly, some information connection is at work between student and librarian.

(Thing 20) Read it! Online, offline—reading skills

First, a few fragments from my experience exploring the “Learn” section of Thing 20:

• Added TwitterLit.com to my Twitter. I love to Twitter, and I love to read—this seemed like an obvious union of two of my hobbies.

• Reading Trails sounds like the way I use the internet, following links to create the paths I want to pursue, but I didn’t join at this time as I have a big enough book backlog.

• BookBrowse also looks like exactly my thing, giving me Amazon style recommendations based on what’s popular and providing reader reviews.

When I receive reference requests from students at Flagler College, most are disappointed when we have access to an ebook only and not an actual hardcover print copy. “You don’t have that as a regular book?” is a question I get all the time. However, there are students who are thrilled about ebooks. They can go home and use their own computers to access the ebooks at their digital pace. They can print pages from their home computer and choose what chapters to follow based on “Search in text” features.

Last week, I had a student approach me with a journal and ask how she could print it. She only wanted a digital version, not the awkward bulky bound print. I was a little shocked, but I showed her how to use the photocopier to get what she wanted. There were only two pages from the article that interested her, which makes me think of “micro-research,” like following hyperlinks to get only the text you need.

I read the article “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?” in the New York Times. I really connected with the concept of digital reading and its unique literacy, and I’d like to respond to a few quotes from the article.

“One early study showed that giving home Internet access to low-income students appeared to improve standardized reading test scores and school grades. ‘These were kids who would typically not be reading in their free time,’ said Linda A. Jackson, a psychology professor at Michigan State who led the research. ‘Once they’re on the Internet, they’re reading.’”

Children suffer if they are in a digital divide, a group which often includes low-income and minority students. As the article mentioned, students who do not develop internet skills may not become valuable employees. Their skill-sets may not match requirements of higher paying jobs in the Information Age.

“’Kids are using sound and images so they have a world of ideas to put together that aren’t necessarily language oriented,’ said Donna E. Alvermann, a professor of language and literacy education at the University of Georgia. ‘Books aren’t out of the picture, but they’re only one way of experiencing information in the world today.’”

Watching my husband teach digital literacy, art of film and video, and web-based skills, I directly see the way reading and interpreting audio and visual literacy plays into the skill set he teaches. The Flagler College Communication Department teaches information literacy as a core concept of their required major coursework. For the students’ future careers, multiple media formats are necessary to communicate effectively with diverse audiences, a trend growing across many majors.

Some critics argue that the digital age is destroying literacy, but my experience is that digital literacy is altering the meaning of traditional literacy concepts. As more libraries evolve to Web 2.0 concepts, digital literacy is necessary as much for the practitioners as it is for the users. How could I have completed Thing 20 without knowing to chain through a cloud of hyperlinks?

Ning Thing (Thing 19)

I joined Ning group Library 2.0 almost as soon as I started 23 Things. I wanted to be as in-the-loop and connected as possible, staying ahead of the Thing curve as I learned more and more about web extensibility and its application to libraries.

Today, to flex my Web 2.0 skills, I logged into Ning to do a couple of things. First, I clicked onto a post link titled “CMS is required for better library services.” Although I felt the argument for CMS over LMS wasn’t presented in the post, it did give me a moment to think about CMS. I had planned to use some library free-time to play around with Drupal this summer and determine if it would be useful to Flagler College’s small special collections holdings. I’ve always said I wanted to get my information into MARC and drop it in our OPAC, but I wonder what Drupal will do?

Thinking of Drupal somehow made me think of another interest, FRBR. When I read about FRBR in print resources, it seems quite promising. I thought I’d do a Ning search and see what the real world was saying on the virtual world. My search results weren’t huge, but I did find lots of interesting links posted by commenters that looked like they’ll be fun to follow when I have the chance.

Interestingly, one Ning commenter called for pronouncing the Library 2.0 group dead. He posited that everyone had migrated to Facebook. Hmm. While the Ning board seemed relatively inactive when I logged on (did I see tumbleweeds just then?), I wonder if he’s right about Facebook? Library 2.0 in Ning felt so physically dispersed as to demand different perspectives. Facebook seems like cliques of people who already know each other, which I believe produces redundancy. Where will L2 take the L2-ers next? Reminds me of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast.

Facebook v. Myspace (Thing 18)

I already have both Facebook and Myspace accounts, but they are personal sites I use for communicating with friends, and I don’t feel comfortable sharing my links here.

Myspace is already a thing of the past for most social network users. The common belief is that Myspace pages are used to sell products and promote bands, and Myspace friend requests are almost always someone trying to get you to promote their band for free or catch your interest in adult services. As both a Facebook and Myspace user, I see far more adult entertainment spam on Myspace than I have yet on Facebook.

While some younger users feel that Facebook is going to be the next Myspace let-down now that anyone can join, it still gets heavy use. Since I see Flagler College students’ use of campus computers in the library, I can gauge how much time is spent on Facebook versus Microsoft Word.

I like Facebook better than Myspace because of the tools it brings together. I can watch my friends’ activities and updates as they scroll across my home page in real time, I can check and see who is online at that moment and chat with them in real time, and I can join groups that express my interests.

Groups that I join are often created by my friends regarding an upcoming event, where I get requests for social club meetings that are coming up. I also seek out and join political groups that reflect my concerns, especially during this past presidential election. It was probably pointless to say “Christine supports this presidential candidate,” but at least I felt like I was doing something.

Ultimately, Facebook has been the social meeting ground that Myspace tried clumsily to attempt. Myspace required blogs to broadcast information, and posting notes to friends was so cumbersome that it took days to have a simple online conversation. Facebook is probably on the verge of becoming obsolete as its newer better replacement rolls out, but, for now, it’s the place to be.

Listening in (Thing 17)

I listened to the Library of Congress podcast, “Voices from the Days of Slavery: Stories Songs and Memories.” Fountain Hughes was interviewed as part of the WPA collection in the 1930’s, recounting his days as a slave and his time after slavery was abolished. He described being a slave as worse than being treated like a dog, and he described his days after slavery as being lost like cattle turned out in a field.

The Library of Congress podcast was easy to find and easy to use. On the loc.gov home page, there was a link on the left that said “Podcasts.” I clicked on it to see what I could see, and Mr. Hughes’s summary interested me: “Fountain Hughes reflects on his childhood experiences before and after the end of slavery in Charlottesville, VA. Among other events, Mr. Hughes recollects slave auctions and the hardships endured by freed slaves after the end of the Civil War.”

I have been wanting to try my hand at podcasting, and had hoped to get one up for this Thing, but it didn’t happen (microphone/computer compatibility issues). Podcasting is a project I definitely look forward to experimenting with in the future.

A missing page and YouTube book video (Thing 16)

I already love YouTube because my friends post fun links to videos of themselves and share links to videos they’ve found interesting. I have found several helpful videos for my personal life, especially hula hoop tricks and how-to’s. While endlessly entertaining, YouTube serves up enough serious video to complete this Thing handily.

For this Thing, I decided to revisit a grad school independent study I loved—book repair. I typed “repair torn book pages” into the YouTube search, and I didn’t have to look any further than my first three results to see relevant information out there on the web. While I don’t think any video will replace the hands-on instruction, YouTube does provide a good introduction.

Enjoy how to tip in missing pages.

Rollyo over to St. Augustine (Thing 15)

Starting out in Rollyo, which I had actually never heard of, I found the “Quick Quotes” search roll appealing. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the results I wanted, which I guess was me begging the question to presuppose what I should see.

I tried “Elba” in the quest to find “Able was I ere I saw Elba.” No such luck. I found actual informational sites on Elba, which, I gotta say pleasantly surprised me. OK, “able Elba,” still no luck. Time to move on.

For my on Rollyo search roll, I went with a St. Augustine, Florida history theme. I named my search, “St Augustine Sites.”

I like my St. Augustine search because I think it’s practical to the educational mission of our academic library at Flagler. My search also ties in with my roll as college archivist and keeps me easily informed about my local peers.

Customize it (Thing 14)

To create a custom start-up page, I was instantly drawn to iGoogle. I like Google services quite a bit, and I’m familiar with their, I don’t know, “je ne sais quoi” (har har)? Their layout is pleasing to me, their customizable features are extensible enough for my needs, all-in-all a good fit. In addition, I got to pick which zip code and items of interest I wanted pinned to my home page. I got custom weather, arts and entertainment, and, yes, the indulgence of humor.

I added a calendar, which I think would be great for tracking library events. Library programmed events like movie night, game night, children’s story book hour—all are right on my start-up page, ready to be tracked. Shared calendars are not just great for me though, they also work for alerting patrons to upcoming events.

I also added the suggested NEFLIN’s 23 Things countdown calendar, and shnikey if I’m not running out of time! Time to move forward to Thing 15.

My personal tastes (Thing 13)

I created my Library Thing badge to share just a few of the books I've read in, oh, relatively recent memory. Or just books I love. I hope you love a few too.



Flagler College library home page has a "New Acquisitions" blog type list, but there are so many buttons on the home page that I wonder what its use stats are. I don't know whether Library Thing would improve our current system or not, actually.

I have asked to have my 23 Things blog linked to on the library home page, but the director thought it wasn't a good idea. If I had my own library blog, I would definitely use Library Thing because of its bright colors and attractive appearance. I haven't used the tag clouds for my books, but they could be useful for our library's virtual visitors.

Winki-wiki-wiki-Wah! (Thing 12)

At last! I have made my list of a few of my vintage cameras!

Welcome to it: Christine's camera wiki.

If I weren't sitting two floors away from the archive, I would use the wiki to share some of the more prominent collections held in the archive I manage. I could list unique book holdings, files on Flagler College, and photos of Henry Flagler himself.

As a library application, I would love to see the wiki used as a departmental pathfinder. I often get students at the reference desk writing for programs I know little about, like criminology. When I click on the criminology pathfinder, I don't feel comfortable suggesting that route of research to the student because of its lack of content. I would like successful search strategies to be shared in a wiki format, whether provided by library staff or students.

I understand why instructors are wary of online resources because of their questionable validity. However, I often explain to students that information on the web provided by respectable resources like universities can be valid information. A wiki from a reliable source should not be banned as a student resource, but some instruction in the library or classroom must be provided to explain evaluation of reliability of online information.

Just because a technology is new doesn't mean that it faills to provide valuable information. As students become more and more digitally minded, their research strategies need to be taken into account and directed in helpful ways. Banning online information teaches the students nothing. My experience is that students resist instructors who impose digital bans. Work with the students to improve information literacy--don't quash their natural search abilities.

(Thing 9) So tardy

I took the easy way out on this Thing. I stuck with applications I know, and I feel like I cheated. Thing 9 seems really cool, so I look forward to revisiting it and learning about these other nifty applications.

I did put my neck out there earlier, but it was the application that seemed to not be working--Lazybase. I tried to make a spreadsheet of my vintage camera collection, but Lazybase had different ideas. I'll have to go back one day and put together a power point with photos describing each camera one of these days.

www.flickr.com Go to wysocki.christine's photostream

Great. And then my Flickr flash badge didn't work. I settled for the Flickr HTML badge. Grr. What gives Thing 9? You need some work.

Social media lets me down (Thing 11)

I got all set up for Digg. I’ve seen Digg icons at the bottoms of individual blog posts, and I wondered what it meant. Hmm, social bookmarking that ranks interest. I don’t care. Sorry, just don’t care. (I did Digg a couple of articles on sugar-based soda that were replacing corn syrup sweetened soft drinks. I love cane soda.)

I think it might be Digg that’s the problem for me, though. I couldn’t Digg sites on my favorite online home, the New York Times. NY Times had options to e-mail items of interest, which I’ve used often, but there was no option to Digg.

OK, try another. Just the name “Newsvine” looks promising. OK, Newsvine is my thing. I’m clicking and linking and reading and learning—and loving it. I guess I just needed to find my genre.

Net result, however: timesuck. This is the sort of tool that draws you into a web of links you’ll like to read because someone like you liked to read them too. Click. Click. Click. Wait, how long have I been on Newsvine?

This is the first Thing I’ve found that I can’t see used in libraries except by people like me who have time on their hands during Saturday reference desk hours. I give this Thing my first thumbs down. Sorry social media (but I’ll be back for Newsvine’s links to The Times of London).

I'm Delicious! (Thing 10)

I had never used Delicious before, and I was curious about what it was and how to use it. Mystery resolved!

I created a Delicious account and added three blogs that I find fun to unwind to after a day of serious computing. I added the Delicious badge to my Wysocki in 23 Bytes blog, which displayed my Delicious username and not the blogs I’m following. I would rather it list my blogs than my username, which may be reparable, but I’m not getting into it now.

What I like about Delicious is the possibility for library homepages to use this tool. One of the most frequent questions I get is “How do I cite this in [APA/MLA/Chicago Manual]?” Pretty much every library website has some link to citation guides, but it would be interesting to see the Delicious links to other citation resources. Duke of course comes to mind with their excellent style guide resources.

Delicious also might be fun to link new acquisitions to Amazon or Barnes & Noble (or whatever). Amazon always brings up the “Shoppers who liked this book also liked this,” a fun and helpful feature.

I'd also love to see students' free text searching methods and incorporate their tags into the catalog. I just had a student ask for books ON War and Peace, and I found the OPAC a little balky. It kept wanting to show me war and peace in Europe, the Middle East, negotiating peace in time of war... I had to really push the OPAC to see what I wanted for her. We resolved the dilemma, but it seemed like it could have been easier.

I definitely look forward to exploring Pagekeeper since it is designed for an educational environment. It may turn out to be more useful for my academic library than Delicious.

My "I really wrote too much" post on (Thing 8)

ON IM:
I’m an IM-er. I mostly use IM to communicate among my professional peers at the college, and many of the exchanges go like this:

“hey. busy?”
“no. what’s up?”
“wanna go to lunch?”
“sure.”
“i’ll meet you at your office in 10 minutes.”

That could be a literal transcript of any Thursday afternoon.

I also IM through Gmail and Facebook with my friends. It’s fun to log-on to either one of those sites and get a little window that tells you who’s online. My recent social IM’s included asking a friend who works in historic preservation about getting rats out of my home’s walls and explaining to someone else why I am unhappy with my cuticles.

Despite my apparent frivolity, I actually IM professionally, too. Flagler College has its own IM system. The circulation specialist I work with most often and I log on to IM to keep abreast of what’s happening at each other’s desks. She lets me know when a patron needs reference help but went to the circulation desk accidentally, and she gives me a brief overview of the patron’s research topic. In that respect, our professional use of IM is timely and pertinent, even more so than the comparatively slower e-mail system.

ON SMS:
I absolutely do not text message for one reason: I can’t afford monthly cell phone text plans. I am a simple, Luddite cell phone only kinda gal.

ON LIBRARY E-MAIL:
Mass e-mails about password changes or policy reinforcements are helpful to pretty much everyone since it is information vital to the functioning of the library. Big HOWEVER right here: too many mass e-mails are in-box cluttering updates on topics that only concern a few people. I get frustrated by my colleagues’ misuse of mass e-mail when I have gadzooks-a messages going back-and-forth between just two people. I don’t understand why they can’t take it off-list. Overall, the majority of mass e-mails I receive via the library are on-target, relevant, and timely--definitely improving channels of communication.

ON WEBINARS:
I recently attended a database vendor’s webinar for an interface upgrade. The vendor was instructing approximately three additional sites simultaneously, and I had no idea whether the other locations were libraries or not. The instructor treated the webinar as if we had never used a database before in our lives, not as if we only needed to see the new features. I felt like the instructor’s inability to get instantaneous informal feedback from us really hindered her custom tailoring of the course. As my fellow attendees and I walked out of the conference room, we all agreed that there was only one tiny piece of data we learned from the hour we just wasted listening to how to form basic Boolean searches. While webinars have a lot of great features, this one fell flat, in part because it wasn’t customized to our particular library’s needs.

WHAT I’D LIKE TO SEE:
OK, webinars are important but not staggeringly engaging. I think they will continue to be a source of information distribution among library professionals, especially as vendors are trying to cut costs on employee payroll and travel funds. If one webinar can service four locations, and the instructor is still at the home site, then that’s a good thing, right? Sort of. But I think it will continue to grow as people are faced with the reality of the expense of hosting on-site events.

Ideally, I would love to see IM reference at Flagler College, but I don’t see us getting into the man-power needed to support it, given our small enrollment. What is possible, immediately available, easy, and necessary is e-mail reference. There should be one general e-mail reference account that any reference librarian can log into to receive student requests. Students could write in with their questions, and we could provide answers—wherever the student is located. Our digital resources are available online to any student with a valid login, why shouldn’t our services be available alongside them?

Flick-Flick-Flick-Flickr (Thing 5)

I use Flickr quite a bit already to keep up with my friends. Slowly my network of friends has dispersed around the country, and one way we stay up to date is through sharing our photographs. We use tags to separate our photos by subject, location, and time. We use sets so that we can look at pictures of new babies as one group instead of mousing through a stream of unrelated photos. Some of us are dedicated enough to join groups like the 365 days portrait project. I hope my tags, sets, and groups are all logically arranged because I firmly believe in the sanctity of the bibliographic universe.

For my new Flickr membership for 23 Things, I took a few pictures of me and my student-worker enjoying Flagler College’s archive—and, um, drinking coffee.

I had no problem uploading my five pictures, but I couldn’t for the life of me get my buddy icon to load. Three times I tried the same steps to upload an image from my computer desktop to the buddy icon. No red flag popped up on the photo upload area to tell me what I was doing wrong, but I finally realized my photo exceeded the 2 mb limit Flickr uses for buddy icons. Ugh.

To solve my buddy icon problem—because I couldn’t let my face look like that gray, bland emoticon—I used the same photo from my Flickr account instead of approaching it through my desktop. I went to the “All sizes” page on the Flickr individual photo view, and I saved the square image I wanted. I went back to the buddy icon change it in my profile and, voila, there I was! My square photo was finally less than 2 mb.

I next arranged my photos into two sets: “Flagler College” and “Flagler College Archives.” Yeah, they’re the same five photos for both sets, but I haven’t had a chance to take more photos, making the two sets distinct from one another. I also joined the group “Libraries and Librarians” and put our five pictures in there to share with the world of library fans. I added a friend contact to a fellow 23Things@NEFLIN-er, “cats23things.” I look forward to seeing what photos she uploads.

Behold, me, in action:

I may use Flickr to display some of Flagler College’s archival holdings. Since the archive isn’t really open to the public, I hesitate to reveal very much, but we have some cool pieces that could enjoy the digital light of day.

It's all good (Thing 6)

I am loving the Flickr letters app!

"Pura vida" doesn' translate into Spanish as "Pure life," which it appears to say, but as slang that means "Everything's OK." I try to remind myself "Pura vida" all the time. I get a little "sturm und drang" sometimes.

Onto topic: Mashups in my library. Since we are an academic library here at Flagler College, I’m having a hard time seeing the usefulness of some of these tools. I feel like the gravitas of online academic research would be mocked by cutesy web apps.

The only place I see something like the Flickr letters app being useful in my library would be if our education department had its own library homepage. Since it doesn’t, I don’t foresee particularly extensive use of these online services in our library.

However, if my library had young adult reader services, I would love to use mashups to capture the imaginative spirit of youth services.

Skipping through images ahead to ... (Thing 7)

I’m cheating. I skipped ahead to Thing 7 over 5 and 6---just because I felt like it!

This mosaic from Big Huge Labs may seem like a series of architectural photos—which they are—but they’re all different domes from the original Chicago Public Library. Connecting the images to my current Thing is sort of a stretch since one represents history and one represents the future, but, underneath the stained glass and networked computers, we’re libraries.

Libraries were founded on the radical principle that all people were capable of governing themselves and that the only thing they lacked was an educational vehicle to provide the necessary intelligence. Today's libraries still function on the principle that all citizens deserve equal access to information, even though now our information is delivered in largely digital format. Computers or books, libraries still serve as the radical meeting point where all patrons have access to the information they seek.

And how do I want to use this image tool in my library? I want to mosaic my library’s website header and make a shifting pattern of our library’s photo. That would be cool.

For me, this project was just fun. And skipping ahead on Things wasn’t my only sin; I made a vanity graphic. Enjoy … it describes me.

RSS concluded with LOLspeak (Thing 4)

I can’t stop rewriting this post because for some reason I keep sounding unprofessional. Writing about my blog consumption turns on my texting slang aggregator. Maybe I con-text-ualize myself differently because I mostly read my friends’ blogs, and I tend to speak in an ultra-casual OMG way with them. (We never say LOL unless we’re being really sarcastic, by the way. LOL is so passé.)

I read blogs socially. I know I should be reading something like the Daily Kos, but I’m usually reading my friends’ blogs, especially “A Librarian’s Guide to Etiquette.” Online networking like Facebook is great, and I use it almost daily, but keeping up with blogs that publish sporadically can be challenging. RSS-ing my friends gives me the freedom to see what they’re up to when they’re up to it.

Although I’ve had blog followers on my own private blog, and although I know how to insert an RSS feed option into my blogs, I had never actually done it until Thing 4. And, as far as putting all my friends in one place, I had never used Google Reader before. Now I’m discovering, “Hey, look, I can see you all together at once!” Google Reader is like my own little coffee house.

I also learned a lesson the hard way. I thought I’d be cute and put a subscription to one of the gossip websites I read occasionally on my Google Reader. Within milliseconds my aggregator was overfilled with a million posts. I discovered that Google Reader saw my gossip site as a series of individual posts, not one cloud under the name of the site. Oops. Although I stopped my subscription to the gossip feed within minutes, I can’t figure out how to get the headlines out of my inbox! Now I know to seriously evaluate the website in question and decide how it will affect my inbox.

I know this is the “wrong” answer, but, for the short term, I’m using RSS in Google Reader for my friends and for the handful of “23 Things” blogs I’m following. In the long term, I need to evaluate which library sites are of value to me and subscribe to those rather than hunting them down sporadically.

I’m also envisioning a with-it, jargon-filled library blog aimed at clients that includes an RSS feed. I’m teh win cause I no LOLspeak like bebeh kittehs!!1!1!!!

Search for the hula hoop blogs! (Thing 3)

I started my blog search with Technorati. I chose the topic “hula hoop” because I make and sell hula hoops. I was disappointed at first because I got a lot of Wii fitness results, but as I looked closer, I found a couple of interesting blog links, and I found a section on hula hoop videos. As a hula hoop professional, I was familiar with a lot of the websites Technorati retrieved, but these were high quality sites that I know give reliable information. Kudos to Technorati. I see how relevant those results would be to someone new to hooping. If I hadn’t known of those sites before, I would have clicked them first and discovered a whole network of hula hoopers.

I tried for Opinmind and Sphere next, but neither had search functions. They were aimed at tools for bloggers to improve reaching their target audiences and maximizing hits and sales. Disappointing.

Google blog search was kind of disjointed, but I learned that Michelle Obama likes to hula hoop-- a fun fact. Again I got a lot of results for sites I already knew.
I gave Advanced Google blog search a half-hearted try and excluded the term “Wii.” I got some pretty odd results from casual bloggers who were just mentioning in passing that they liked adult sized hula hooping. As I read their testimonials, I found I liked those results because they added a cute human dynamic instead of hula hoop advertising gimmickry.

Perpetually beta (Thing 2)

I’ve been reading some L2 and W2 articles a lot lately to think about ways to incorporate new technology into our library here at Flagler College. One comment I read over and over is that the internet is “perpetually beta,” meaning all content on the web is infinitely transmutable. The ability to adapt library web resources brings the possibility of instant transition to new client needs or library dissemination of information.

Stephen Abram commented on connecting Amazon book images to the OPAC and creating virtual, browsable bookshelves. My greatest concern of L2 computer technology based transformations is the lack of serendipity when browsing stacks. Creating browsable bookshelves eliminates that lack of spontaneity in digital research by adding connectivity to the OPAC, links that click clients through related but unexpected material. (As an aside, librarians have always been able to do this by knowing how to browse metadata taxonomy, but clients don’t necessarily have the knowledge or skills to follow leads to unanticipated resources.)

Speaking of taxonomy, I am afraid of folksonomy as much as I want to implement it. Blyberg hints that libraries must understand users’ search patterns and allowing for their input to OPAC records based on natural language querying.

Blyberg also states that L2 is not an option—it’s already happening. Storey says that calling new initiatives “Library 2.0” implies that “Library 1.0” never responded to the evolution of user or librarian needs. Presuming a “Library 2.0” model makes libraries static since the great library at Alexandria. Blyberg insists that libraries are already responding to L2 needs, consciously or not.

Storey says that the web has become “the center of a new digital lifestyle.” Libraries are as perpetually beta as the internet. RSS feeds for user selected library updates. IM reference chat. Digital subscription to periodicals instead of print. Coffee in libraries. The library changes as physically as it does virtually. We are L2 whether we have intended to embrace it or not.

Sometimes I feel like somebody's watching me (Thing 1)

Or at least watching my IP.

Already a blogger, I took NEFLIN’s challenge of adding features to my blog. The first has been to add Google Analytics, which I highly recommend. Google Analytics offers a free service to track number of visits to your site, which posts visitors looked at, and how long they stayed on your page. I put the link to Google Analytics on the right over there under “Sometimes I Help” so that you can get started with this tool too.

I also have another suggestion to anyone who might be new to blogging: don’t write your post in your blog’s edit window! I write all my posts in my word processing software of choice so that I can edit and spell check easily. I find those tiny little post windows of Blogger and Wordpress cramped and annoying. I want to see my text run free on the screen in Microsoft Word! Additionally, I name my blog file and do a “Save As” right away and click the save icon several times as I write. This way, I know I’ve got back-up should I magically find the perfect button combo that deletes all.

Can’t wait to network and learn more about my fellow Web 2.0’ers!