The Uninivited- Crashing the Sandbox Party- Test #17

So..... I dutifully attempted to do the exercise for Playing Around with PBWiki only to find out that I needed an invitation to the JPL Learning 2.0 Sandbox. It would not let me in. I did not have an invitation and did not know the secret word. So, I sent out some SOSes. And NO ONE ANSWERED ME! sniff! No one told me that it was exclusive invitation! HA! We'll just see about that!

So- I guessed it. And I got in there and played around in the sandbox. Don't worry. I raked the sand so it's not that obvious that I was there.

Wiki Tiki Tavi- # 16 So what's in a wiki?

Assignment: What did you find interesting? What types of applications within libraries might work well with a wiki?
I work with and have been published in a Resource Sharing Wiki: shareill. It's a great tool for ILL staff to use and saves a lot of searching through the Internet for information we need. It was also very easy to add information and correct information. The shareill wiki does make it clear, though: "if you aren't open to what you write being changed around, don't post here."

I like the way wikis have been used by other libraries in this exercise. It would be easier if JPL's recommended websites could be in a wiki that's accessible by JPL librarians as in the SJCPL Subject Guides. It would speed up correcting defunct websites. I also like the way other libraries used the wiki as a way to get customer input and build community oriented sites. I was puzzled by the Bull Run Public Library site. It's more of a Twitter-type site with the short bits of information they give. I was concerned about the ads showing up in some of the wikis.

So- I can see how libraries could use wikis in two different ways- for building community and support through customer participation and for making it easier for staff to update information for recommended websites while exercising some professional and local control over the content. But as the shareill founders said- you can't count on what you place in the wiki being unchanged. Librarians pride themselves as trying to provide accurate verifiable information and that's not always a given in a wiki set-up.

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?