Tagged Out: #15 On Library 2.0 & Web 2.0 ... and another rant!

Library 2.0 - It's many things to many people. What does it mean to you?

I have to say this: What's changed? True- this is not the library of my childhood. That's a good thing; my public library was a bookmobile. But- in a way- what we do these days is to get the "goods" of the library to the people we serve like the bookmobile did. We've found different ways to do it. In many cases, just as we've had to adapt to changing economic conditions, to "do more with less" (a phrase that is due a rant in itself), so changing technological conditions are another part of the evolution in services. It's not like we upgraded suddenly into a Library 2.0 revolution. In my view, the concepts described in all the Library 2.0 are just evolutionary blips on the greater library/librarianship continuum.

And now- my somewhat-connected rant: This training has not provided a smooth journey of discovery. What the creator of this training -and all those who appropriated it- failed to realise is that -verily- the Internet is an inconstant creature. You can't build a set-it and forget-it course around it. Sites -even those that look rock-solid- disappear. Sometimes, you can find the information elsewhere on the Web but -often- the whole shebang is gone-baby-gone. Those rock-solid sites with well-written information don't change as the technology changes. So newbies to the former next-big-thing site find that they can't understand what the Internet Sage is talking about in his or her beginner's guide because the next-big-thing site has morphed in the meantime and changed the site around, renamed buttons, eliminated buttons, and -now- it's changed so much that the guide is no longer useful.

The appalling thing- from a training standpoint- is that this is the nature of the beast and that any training based on this beast has a built in redundancy factor. It makes exploring and attempting to work with the Internet both aggravating and exciting. The job of an Internet tour guide has become one where the seasoned fearless leader encounters detours, dead ends, and dragons that weren't there when they last took the journey-- even if that journey only took place a month or a week before. Before you sit back and say- "Whew! I'm glad that's not my job." , I remind you that, dear heart, it is. As library workers at any level, we guide travellers through the Internet maze on a daily basis. Everyone- parents, students, teachers, government leaders, business people, et al - needs to have more than a working knowledge of the Internet. Surfing the Internet has gone from a pleasurable pastime to a tool we use everyday. While the library profession and the view of the public formerly portrayed librarians as being professional know-it-alls, experts in the field, and founts of all knowledge, with the Internet, the best we can realistically hope for is to be knowledgeable guides. We can help customers avoid pitfalls and steer them in the right direction. Instead of being the sages on the mountain-tops that seekers of wisdom consult, we become fellow travellers on the journey with them. I think that change is an improvement in our relationship to our customers.

Tag-a-logging: Exercise #14 Getting not-so-technical with Technorati

And the Exercise says: Take a look at Technorati and try doing a keyword search for “Learning 2.0” in Blog posts, in tags and in the Blog Directory. Are the results different?

Okay, folks. A pet peeve that is growing larger as I go through this course. The language in this training doesn't match the language in the source we're directed to. It's no one's fault. Change is the order of the day. It's unsettling as it is inevitable. It does, however, make it difficult for a newbie to follow along and complete this training. I wonder if we'll lose a lot of people along the way just because they couldn't figure out what the training was asking them to do in the exercises.

I clicked on the Advanced Search on Technorati when working on these exercises. I did a Tag search for Learning 2.0. A tag search got me 1,026 hits. A URL search got me 860 hits. If you put it in quotes- "Learning 2.0", you get 241 hits. TO put in quotes or not to put in quotes? Dispensing with the punctuation always gets more hits:
Keyword Seach: with " : 8743 Without " : 8745
Phrase Search: with " : 0!!! Without " : 464
I'll bet most people don't use the quotes when searching for something on this site. I tried it with Interlibrary Loan. 266 with, 499 without.

Explore popular blog, searches and tags. Is anything interesting or surprising in your results?

It's interesting to see what others are find noteable and valuable on the Web. I found some sites that I added to my del.icio.us listings. I really wasn't surprised to see that Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams was in the top spot for YouTubes faves.

I've been tagging since the beginning of my blogging without knowing why. It must be that old cataloging class making its mark on me. I claimed this blog and another in Technocrati. I'm holding off on doing the watchlist for now. It would truly amaze me if anyone thought that any of my blog posts were noteworthy.

Tag! You're It! Lucky Lesson #13 on del.icio.us

I've loved and lost many a list of websites because I moved computers or because some IT person re-imaged my PC without giving me a chance to snag my Favorites. In some cases, this was a good thing. My new lists were now made up of the sites I could readily remember and those I used frequently. Starting out fresh also got rid of defunct sites. At work my focus narrowed from collecting sites that helped me answer frequently asked questions & Reader's Advisory sites to collecting specific ILL-related sites that helped me and my staff do our work.

I kinda like del.icio.us. I was first introduced to del.icio.us at an ILL conference. The speaker included it in a super-sonic speedy overview of Web 2.0 tools that she couldn't live without. As my eyes recovered from glazing over, I really didn't couldn't see how I was going to use this knowledge and I relegated the information to my internal "Things I'll Get Around to Looking at When I Have the Time" file. The big drawback I have with del.icio.us is that it's a bit clunky to use- when compared to the coupla clicks efficiency of putting a site in Favorites or in Links. I'm not that crazy about the tagging. Possibly, that's because I don't have a handle on that part yet. I'd rather categorize the sites in general categories of use. The overlapping nature of some of the tags puts some sites in the "wrong" bundle. It's a lot like cataloging sites -as opposed to categorizing them the way you can in Favorites by organizing them by a file name.

Back to the Exercise:
Explore the site options and try clicking on a bookmark that has also been bookmarked by a lot of other users. Can you see the comments they added about this bookmark or the tags that they used to categorize this reference?
I looked at a blog called: LibraryTechtonics: Tagging on Flickr & del.icio.us. It was saved by 77 other people. The comments are brief- most of them talk about the blog though I've noticed a comment that was more about the tagger than about the blog post. Many of used used the same tags for this article.
What del.icio.us doesn't do is this: it doesn't cull out the dead sites. I skimmed and sampled what I was most interested in on the PLCMC del.icio.us site. During a brief viewing, I found 2 dead sites.

Create a blog post about your experience and thoughts about this tool. This is it.
Can you see the potential of this tool for research assistance? Definitely. If -say- the JPL Fiction Department had a del.icio.us site with helpful Reader's Advisory. Or Popular could have a del.icio.us site with music, film, TV, etc. sites. It could be set up so that staff throughout the system could contribute sites that helped them answer customers' questions. You could tap the expertise of all the staff to help answer customers' questions. Or just as an easy way to create bookmarks that can be accessed from anywhere? It is that too. I discussed that more earlier in this post.

I have a del.icio.us badge on this blogspot.

Learning 2.0 Withdrawal Symptoms Hit

This is the second morning in a row that I haven't been able to get this week's lessons. I wonder what's going on. I took a look at the PLCM Learning 2.0 site to see what we would have been looking at and found some dead links. If anyone has done the same thing, click here to find the article: The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users.

"#12 Add a JaxCat Search Gadget"

I added the JaxCat Search Gadget to my blog and to my iGoogle page. There--> it is. It wouldn't display correctly on my Dots template, so I switched templates. That necessitated my going back and changing a previous post. My blog page is getting pretty crowded.

The question for this Discovery Exercise was: "How else can a search box to our catalog be useful outside of our library's webpage?" I can see one way: as a promotional tool. Right now, Jacksonville iGoogle users are getting the gadget for another county's public library. When I set up my iGoogle page, I discovered that a Jacksonville tab came with it. I clicked on that and one of the boxes I saw was for St. Johns County Public Library-- NOT JPL. JPL's gadget was nowhere in sight. I wonder what has to be done to get Google to automatically display JPL's gadget instead of SJCPL's?

#11 A Thing about LibraryThing

LibraryThing is an interesting tool if you want to catalog your collection AND want to be part of a social network discussing books. I'm a member of a mystery book discussion listserv and I have trouble keeping up with those ongoing discussions.

I wondered if there was also a DVDThing or a MusicThing out there and Googled DVDThing. There was an ongoing discussion on the LibraryThing site about that very thing. Some of the posters were enthusiastic about it and wanted something that had all the qualities of LibraryThing. Others felt that LibraryThing should stick to books.

My link to LibraryThing is in the right hand column of this blog.

#10: Image Generators - Bead Art, Wordle, Map Maker

Well, this lesson was quite an eye-opener!





I'm really surprised that the lawyers - the Disney lawyers, in particular- haven't gone after this Comic Strip image generator.






Using the Dummies art at SignGenerator.org- I created this book-that-never-was.

Lydia San Marco- beaded version (http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/beads.php). Kinda looks like she's looking through a thick screen door, doesn't it?

This is the Wordle (http://wordle.net/) I created for this blog. This is my favorite of the bunch and is highly addictive as you can see by my creations on the Wordle site.

Places I visited as a child or teen

The blue states are the ones I visited or lived in.

#9 Exploring RSS Search Tools

The questions posed in this exercise were:

• Which method of finding feeds did you find easiest to use? Feedster wasn't one of them. When I couldn't access it, I Googled it and found this: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/blog_search_feedster_quietly_dies.php That article mentioned some other feed finders to try. So, I moved on down the list. Syndic8 was a disappointment. Topix was good in that it defaulted to items of local interest - though: How did "IT" know?
• Which Search tool was the easiest for you? I found Bloglines' search tool to be the easiest for me to use. It was basically one stop shopping. I could add new sites to my public Blogline account right there.
• Which was more confusing? Apart from the confusion with the dead Feedster- Sydic8 was the most confusing and least helpful.
• What kind of useful feeds did you find in your travels? The hurricane and weather feeds will be helpful. There's not much out there for useful ILL blogs. A lot of non-librarians use the service and either praise or express disappointment in it. Gratifyingly, praise is in the vast majority of the posts.
• Or what kind of unusual ones did you find? Well, there is "Captain ILL". (Example: http://captainill.blogspot.com/2008/04/interlibrary-loan-of-day_24.html) who for some reason chooses to post in other languages very once in a while.
• What other tools or ways did you find to locate newsfeeds? Ummmm. I have been using Google Alerts for a while now to find search the web to find items on "Interlibrary Loan" and on "Jacksonville Public Library". It doesn't always give me THIS "Jacksonville Public Library" and "Interlibrary Loan" gets me A LOT of posts on ILL customers use of the service. Google Alerts sends me an e-mail with links to items it finds on websites and in blogs.

Here's my take on RSS-dom. My FeedReader alerts me whenever new stuff comes in. Google Alerts does the same thing, though it does it once a day or once every couple of days. Bloglines will be another site I will need to remember to go to in order to access the posts. They all have a huge advantage over doing searches on a topic or remembering to check a site for an update. Now- the problem! Some of the websites I need to check up on do not- for whatever reason- "work" with RSS. Very ironic in one case since one of them is exploring new, innovative ways to use Interlibrary Loan!

#8- RSS and newsreaders

http://www.bloglines.com/public/Cambie is my public Blogline account link.
I've been working with RSS readers since January 2007 when I found out that the ILLiad Customer Service Interface was going to add an RSS component in the next upgrade. At the time, the OCLC Help Desk pointed me to newsreaders that required me to download software to my desktop and then have to upgrade to newer versions. Bloglines is a lot easier and accessible from any computer. That's a big plus. Now, to the questions at hand:

What do you like about RSS and newsreaders?
The convenience. As the video in the training pointed out- it comes to you so you don't have to access the websites to get the information you want.
How do you think you might be able to use this technology in your work or personal life?
I see me using this more in my work life. My work is so tied to computers that my off-time is usually off-line. I can see entries from Library Journal that I'm interested in. Wall Street Journal runs a column on recommended books. Many of them are no longer in print so there will be ILL requests from all across the country for the few libraries that still have these books on their shelves. It's good to get forewarning. There are some ILL-related blogs that I don't access on a frequent basis. This will help me keep up with those blogs.
How can libraries use RSS or take advantage of this new technology?
At JPL, we already are. If you use ILL, you can get notifications that your book has come in via RSS. JPL also has other RSS feeds available:http://jpl.coj.net/res/rssfeeds/index.html They help keep customers informed about new services and library programming.