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!!!