Method 12

I'm almost finished. (I've got to get started on my annual report for this year or I would have drawn this out a little longer.) I sent off the survey a few minutes ago and said nice things I really meant about this program. I liked this version much better than the 23 steps.
I am one of those folks that belonged to more than a dozen email listserves to try to find information on lots of topics. For me the RSS readers were the best thing. I am comfortable with Google Reader now and have found over 40 feeds to read. Some of them are just folks I think are interesting and others are on target for projects I am handling.
Maybe my next favorite thing was what I read about wikis. I am going to have to be involved with creating one for my library in the near future and the various links you included were good background information. The samples you included showed some good and some less good examples.
My least favorites were the social networks. Maybe it is just a generation gap or maybe they are a waste of time (Twitter especially)
What surprised me the most was this blog. I never though I would enjoy just writing something and leaving it out there for the world to read. I think I am more comfortable this time around because I really don't think anyone will ever read this but it is a little like a diary. But easier to correct spelling errors. Will I keep doing this as a life long goal. I don't know> I kept a diary for awhile as a girl ; maybe I'll start again.
If you do this again will I take part. Probably. I have learned a number of things from your various programs in the past. The question would be what to offer. Maybe something about redoing a library on the cheap. I'd enjoy that and in this economy we may need it.
Thanks. It has been informative and enjoyable.

Method 11

I found a lot of great podcasts out there. I found the most on YouTube. I was looking for 2 types of podcats. One, anything on "information commons" my pet project and also anything we could use for bibliographic instruction which is a library project. I swear I though YouTube was mainly for looking up crazy singing cat videos.
Some of the bibliographic instruction ones are specific to certain schools but quite a few of them are generic enough to be used by anyone. Here I go being cheap again. We are planning to use Camtasia to create inhouse videos to teach all sorts of things. I got stuck with creating the script for teaching the Ebscohost databases since that it is one of the things the Reference Dept. teaches in my library. Just before spending hours looking at the steps involved I remembered the help files from Ebscohost. Guess what! Ebscohost used Camtasia to create their own version of tutorials to teach both basic and advanced searching in the Ebscohost databases. I sent the urls to the committee working on our podcats/tutorials and went to get a Cafe Mocha from Starbucks instead.
That's just one example. Looking at some others, we found some topics that we will have to do ourselves but that we had not even thought of doing . This is going to save us lots of time reinventing the wheel. To be honest these are from much bigger schools who often have time to do a series of podcasts. I love the Arizona State University "Library Minutes" series. It is amazing how much information you can pack into a single minute. That one went straight into my Google Reader.
Now back to the singing cats.

Method 10

Wikis do seem to be the way to go for some projects. My library is thinking about starting one for the reference staff so that we can keep up to date on things happening while 9 of us work various everchanging hours on the desk. Right now if some special assignment comes up, we leave notes on the desk or send around an email warning the others what to expect.
Some of the wikis i viewed seem to be very organized and up to date (the ALA ones). Others started off well but seem to have slowed down or even died. I am a little afraid that if this proposed one here at my library takes a lot of time and planning that it could be spending resources and time which we should devote to projects for students. We are going to start doing in house training with camtasia videos and Libguides soon and they will take up a lot of time . On the other hand we may just jump in with little concern for organization and good looks and get started right away on a wiki. For one thing the wiki is "free" and the other projects are going to have to be purchased. And isn't one of the great things about a wiki supose to be the ability to go in and then keep editing it and improving it as we go along.

Method 9

I watch them at the tables in front of the reference desk keying away at those tiny keys with flying fingers and then reading the answers on those even tinier screens. It is another world.
But I do know how to chat. The university installed a campus wide chat line 18 months ago. The library was thinking about putting in Meebo back then (its free remember) but the campus went another way and we followed it. All offices on campus that have a web page have a chat line link right on their home pages as well as one one the university's main page. Our program can track messages, transfer them from one department to another, store prerecorded messages to push out to a patron if they ask a standard question we answer all the time, and of course transfer it to our email if no one is online when the message comes in. We still get more phone calls than chats but the questions are often the same as the ones we get in person. My perference in order is in person, phone, email, and chat. I will never win any texting contest but I can answer most reference questions online.
I like the web based chat service we have although I know that IM from one of the Big 3 services is another options for the future. Our campus just does not want to use it at this time and those decisions are made at a higher level than the library's.
Anyway I forgot that librarys like mine are built of steel and concrete. (a lot of steel and concrete and very few windows.) I have a nice new IPhone with an IM application which will not work the minute I step across the front door. Guess I will have to hope the 3G upgrade coming to my area in Jan. will improve reception.

Method 8

OK let's admit this right up front. I have finally found some Web 2.0 features that I think are a total waste of time. FaceBook and My Space have millions of members and that makes them something I need to be aware of. But Twitter. I have to draw the line at Twitter. Even the word brings to mind great flocks of crows and starlings "twittering" as they settle in for the night. What a waste of time.
Back to FaceBook and My Space for awhile. I have a FaceBook account and I even check it about once ever 3 months or so. I have a young nephew who actually wrote to me a few times. I enjoy his phone calls more. But my library and my university also have FaceBook accounts and I check the library's about once a month. We must be doing something wrong because my account has more activity than the library's. I think we got swept up in the Web 2.0 frenzy and decided we wanted a FaceBook page. That's not a very good reason for doing it but it was "free" and you know how I like free or cheap. We can improve as we go along I guess. One of our problems is that we do not have an official presence on FaceBook like we do for our webpage. I understand the purpose of a personal page in Facebook but for a public library or an academic one I think there needs to be more structure and a certain predetermined committment to try and make it succeed. I just don't want to be the person who gets that job.
One more thought. Does anyone else remember 20 years ago when almost every one just had to have a CB in their car. Where are all those CBs now. And will there be a thriving FaceBook in 20 more years.

Method 7

I must admit that the first thing that attracted me to Delicious was the fact that I can never keep my various favorites/bookmarks in sync on my 3 computers; laptop, work and home. Here is a product that would let me look up that new favorite from anywhere. I did not ever get interested in tagging my selections. But after litening to the 2 videos that were mentioned I looked at the Inbox a little closer. As you may remember I am looking for materials on information commons for my job so I typed in informmmation commons. That first hit was not very useful but the search box offered other possible selections based on tags from other people and I clicked on one of them. Eureka. The mother lode. 1. An ALA bibliography on information commons, a Educause video from a year ago on information commons. and much more. Maybe these other folks are better searchers or they have more time than me to look around but why shouldn't I profit from their expertise.
I am now trying to tag a least some of my items to get a little order into a growing list favorites. I have no problems creating my own version of subject headings for my favorites without worrying about what LC would do. But I'm not a cataloger by trade. I'm betting there are real cataloguers out there who are cringing at tags.

Method 6

You Tube can be soo! addictive. I have a dozen things to do today and yet found myself watching different videos on YT trying to find a good one (no the best one) to add to my blog. We are in the beginning process of adding an information commons/learning commons into my library. We visited one in person but it is time consuming and expensive and only so many folks get to go. YT allows me to see places I will never see in person while sitting at home. I must have visted 10 this morning. Here's the one I want to keep


This particular video shows a richer and bigger library than we can ever hope to have but I would like to incorporate some of its elements into this one.
Now off to have some fun Do you know how many cat videos there are on YT? I am going to "waste" more time I'm sure.
Here is one last thought As I write this I am listening to Dr. Wesch lecture. The odds are I will never get to sit in a lecture room at the Library of Congress. I will never buy a video copy of this video assuming it is for sale. And yet because of YT, I learn at the feet of a master teacher in the privacy of my home.

Method 5

Sleeping Cat
Originally uploaded by Javier Ocasio "KoL"

I cannot say I am very comfortable about this method. I don't even own a camera let alone a digital one. Still I have visited Flickr recently looking for pictures of various libraries which posted views on their new informmation commons. It is a great way to "visit" libraries, steal ideas from the best and save time and money. Have you guessed by now that I am usually the librarian trying to find the cheapest way to do something. Still, I think I will buy one of those small CanonPowershot 1100 cameras in a few days. I miss having pictures of my newest, youngest cats.
As to whether we should post pictures we take to our library blog, if I take them, they will probably be so blurry that no one will worry. We have posted a few but only recently posted any with people in them. Our blog is new and we are just learning to use it.

Method 4

This "method" is a no brainer. I have been using Google reader for quite awhile now and my only problem, similiar to one I had long ago when email listserves were all the rage, is how to keep from subscribing to all the blogs or news sites I like.
I might have liked a particular blog but I rarely reminded to check one on a regular basis. If it came to me like email I read it but not otherwise. Here are 3 of my favorites ones.
http://lonewolflibrarian.wordpress.com/
One of my favorite sites. I'm a little worried about him right now since he got downsized and is out there looking for a job. It is amazing how you can get sucked into other folks lives through these blogs. My listserves were a little more impersonal although now that I think about it those folks on ACAT listserve did get a little hot under the collar at times about those cataloging issues.

http://www.libraries.wright.edu/noshelfrequired/
One of my newer sites. I just bought an Amazon Kindle this summer and got hooked on reading ebooks even though my library has had a collection of 50,000 Netlibrary books for a couple of years. So I got interested in Sue Polanka's blog. She cover the entire realm of ebooks from readers to the implication of ebooks for libraries. Should we jump now, hold off a while longer, or just dip a toe in the waters. Should we buy a new smaller Kindle (they just dropped the price you know) or a Sony or hold off for a color one. Should we be reading our ebooks on a kindle or on our laptops or our Iphones. I've done all three and I admit except for the weight I prefer reading on my laptop. I can barely see the pages on my Iphone.

http://www.acrl.ala.org/acrlinsider/
This is just a conversion from one of my emailed listerves. I've done that a lot recently. Dropped an email link I may have had for years so that I get it on my reader. It is often more entertaining on the web and it cleans up my email box a little. This last one came out on the 8th and talked about the H1N1 flu and libraries, information literacy training, and had a great article pre-print from C&RL about those non affilated users that I mention in a previous post about Google Docs. I don't have to remember to visit it every so often . It comes to me.

One thing I learned however was not to sign up to the news or popular culture feeds. They just dump way too much into the reader. I still just duck into Yahoo news a couple of times a day.

Method 3

Cloud Computing
As I sit writing this on Google Docs, I remember buying my first copy of a word processing program for my home computer. It was WordPerfect if that tells you anything and that was all I bought that day; not a set of programs running a spreadsheet or presentation or emails or anything else. They did not even exist back then. And it wasn't cheap either.
The last big package I bought was MS Office 2003 and it cost me $599 on Amazon with an education discount. MS Office 2007 would cost me more than my present notebook computer did. Turns out my university who buys a site license for the campus will give me a copy to use on my home computer so I have not had to buy it yet and I probably never will now. My campus isn't a rich one and their site license for MS Office cost an arm and a leg. The library uses it in our offices, our homes, and our computer lab but not on our public terminals. We don't have any option for off campus users to type a letter or a resume and we have a lot of off campus users. That's one reason why I learned to use Google Docs. It is cheap (try free) and usable. My customers may never write a book on it but who cares.
I even use it myself on my notebook computer instead of loading MS Office on it. Then I just transfer it to my office machine and reformat it into MS Word. I've lost things that I wrote in Word on my home computer so I know it happens but I am not going to spend any long amount of time worrying about it. I back up my typing on a memory stick and if it should go missing from the web before I transfer it I still have it. I also like the ability to work from anywhere. For security sake, the university will not let most of us get into our campus machines from home although there are plenty of tools to do that. The cloud lets me truly work from home. And although we do not work together often on projects I know that the cloud would let me do that do.
And no I don't worry about Big Brother watching over me. I have other things to worry about. Like buying the next expensive reference book with a budget that just got cut by 30 %.

Methods 1 and 2

Web 2 is simply a progression. It is a change no different than most.
My great grandparents moved from the deep South to Texas because of the War between the States. My grandparents as children gave up riding horses to learn to drive a car. My mother never used a personal computer or sent an email yet I bought my first personal computer before my library had anything but a connection to the campus main frame.
Web 2 is simply a progression. It is a change no different than most. It is inevitable.
I started in a library tying together paper card catalog cards we bought from LC. Now I sit here viewing my catalog on its own web page and wondering if we should let our campus “improve it” by using Librarything for Libraries.
Web 2 is simply a progression. It is a change no different than most. It is inevitable. But we will adapt to it at our own pace. My boss set us up for Web.2 23 things this summer. It was a requirement not an option and I resisted. It wasn’t my age although I am older than most in my library. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the new technology. I think I did not like posting private thoughts for the world to see. I was also busy. I had other things to do. More important things,.I believed. Now I am ready again. In my own time. Web 2 allows you to do that.
Library 2 progresses naturally from Web 2. It is a change no different than most. It is inevitable. But we will adapt to it at our own pace. Some libraries faster than others. Mine will move slower than some. Our students and faculty are not driving us to make the changes but they will not resist it. I remember when we moved to a online catalog way before the web was involved. A few faculty and even fewer students commented that they preferred the card catalog. (I was just glad to stop tying cards together.) But they learned at their own pace. Now many of us have already adapted to some elements of Web 2 in our private lives. When they appear in a library setting it will not be a huge change for the user. But, we must make sure we prioritize the time and energy we use to implement a change.
We implemented a chat line because the campus as a whole went to a chat line to connect with distance learners. There are more popular ones some which we will study in this “class” but ours works. It did not cost the library anything except training time. We could add a more popular one as well but I doubt we will. We have a FaceBook page but it isn’t visited often and most of its”friends” work here. How much time and effort should we put into it. How much time and effort for any of this. Stick around and see.

Library 12 Things

Well here we go. A blog for all to read. I'm not sure how I feel about that but it turns out you can delete them as I just did. This isn't anything that will endure like Shakespeare or even Stephen King but it is a requirement so off we go.