Finale

This marks my last posting for the 23 Things Assignment. I decided to paste the questions from the assignment to answer.


What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?

I really enjoyed the Audiobooks Site. I will definitely use that in the future. Also, the out-of-print Biblio site was a wonderful tool to find obscure books.


How has this program assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals?

I definitely learned some things I hadn't before. I feel that I will be knowledgable about more Web 2.0 technologies to assist patrons and staff members with implementing them.


Were there any take-aways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?

Not really.


What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept?

Firstly, I think the program would be better off suited to the needs of a librarian. Yes, I love learning about new software and applications! Who doesn't? But given that this is a required class for a library degree, I would have benefited from a larger emphasis on softwares that are entirely relevant as a librarian. Also, I would remove YouTube and Flickr. If possible, I would concentrate on obscure technologies that not everyone knows to make this assignment more worthwhile.

Discovering Web 2.0 tools

I chose to look at biblio.com for this exercise. I am a huge out-of-print book person. Most of it isn't my fault, though. Many books that I enjoy reading are long forgotten and are out of print. Usually I use ILL to request them (or if I have some extra cash will turn to amazon.com or abebooks.com to buy them). Biblio.com seems to be a better version of Amazon and ABEBOOKS. I searched for numerous OOP titles and found all of them at reasonable prices (lower than amazon.com, even!). The site interface is very user-friendly and is easy to search for the book you're looking for. You can also browse by subject or by lists complied by biblio.com. I can definitely see why this tool won a Web 2.0 award. I attribute this to its easy-to-use interface and extensive library of books. I will definitely refer to this website in the future for my obscure needs.

Library 2.0

I really enjoyed the posts from OCLC's NextSpace Newsletter. The points made provide a completely realistic perspective as to where we stand for the changing future of libraries. To me, Library 2.0 is only one aspect of the situation. There seems to be a constant recurring theme in many articles to expand services to the home user. I completely agree. We don't live in the 1950s anymore. But that's just one piece of the pie. Librarians need to know all kinds of web 2.0 skills and need to be BETTER at executing them than anyone else. However, to dismiss the traditions of librarianship as a thing from the past or completely irrelevant is blasphemous. Yes, librarians need to know LCSH, Connexion, MARC records, AACR2, etc. They do. Because these older forms are still around and, more importantly, aren't going anywhere any time soon. I think the best prepared librarians will have a complete knowledge of the tools that are still in use in the majority of libraries coupled with fresh concepts about new technologies and will be able to somehow implement and overlap both.

Zotero

I have been using Zotero for over a week now thanks to someone in my 618 Music Bibliography class. For our final project, we must write a bibliographic essay. In library talk, it is a glorified pathfinder without in-text citations and including direct quotes from the sources. It also includes a narrative that guides the reader through the sources in such a way that they arrive at your conclusion.

Because of the bibliographic nature of this essay, I was pulling my hair out to enter and keep track of all of my sources. Fortuantely, one of my class members recommended Zotero and I am so glad he did. Zotero is pretty much writing the essay for me. It saves all the citation information and can export it in any format you choose. It can also insert direct quotations. In fact, I uninstalled EndNote (which I find to be cumbersome) because I enjoy Zotero so much!

You can access my Zotero library here!

Rollyo

I found Rollyo to be very similar to the Google Tool I used to create my own search. However, the difference between the two seems to be that Rollyo adds a box to your search page and Google Tools adds a search box to your website. I created this search so that I could search all of my favorite news sites at once instead of going to each of their webpages. That will save lots of time! In a library setting, it appears that this tool would be most useful to patrons who want to simplify their lives. Overall, I found this tool to be quite interesting and am glad I learned about it.

LibraryThing

LibraryThing is a wonderful online resource to discover new books you may like. At Borders, I constantly get questions like "I read ___ series and am looking for something similar. What do you recommend?" Because we do not have access to the internet, it is extremely hard to help that customer find something along the lines of what he or she is looking for. In a library setting, LibraryThing would prove to be tremendously useful (especially for reference services) to help patrons find books that will interest them.

Overall, I definitely enjoyed this site and will use it often in the future. However, at the risk of repeating myself from previous blog entries, [I won't rant too much about this] but I have an even larger issue with "tagging" your catalog entries with tags you choose. Each field in a MARC record means something specific and is even more specific by adding numbers for the 1st and 2nd indicators. In the 7XX fields, one makes added entries from the LOC Authority Files (if a work has a varying title, you would put the uniform title there so that it is easily accessible). I suppose that LibraryThing wants to make itself very user-friendly but I foresee bad things ahead without controlled vocabulary...

You can check out my library here

Google Tools

For this exercise, I decided to explore Google Tools. One of them that sounded intriguing was "Google Custom Search." I was able to build a search engine to only search the websites I wanted to. In this case, I chose UB's Website.

Loading

I had a lot of fun picking out the layout and having enough power over it to tell it exactly what to search.

For the other tool, I decided to explore Google Books. This site seems to be a wonderful place to find free complete public domain books and excerpts of many (if not all) other books in print. With the advent of .pdfs and scanning technologies, many individuals have taken it upon themselves to digitize books that have been long forgotten. I search quite a few books but was able to find a rare out-of-print book from 1999. Unfortunately, it was not available in full-text. Half of the text is better than none!

http://books.google.com/books?id=pWFegGwtfPkC&pg=PA289&dq=piano+lefthand&hl=en&ei=BV3bTKvzBomosQPFq_yECA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&sqi=2&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false

GoogleBooks is also extremely useful in a library setting. If a patron wants a public domain book that is checked out, the reference librarian could refer them to this site.

Google Docs

I always love using Google Docs. It simplifies life. A lot. Not only is this set of applications associated with my Gmail (which I primarily use), but it is easy to access from any computer. For instance, many of the computers in Lockwood and the Cybrarys only contain .pdf software (I'm thinking specifically about the computers by the print stations). Unless my document is already saved in a .pdf format, I would not be able to use these computers to print. If my document is saved in GoogleDocs, however, I can export it to a .pdf or print right from the application.

For this exercise, I decided to explore other document formats instead of the regular "blank document" that i use often. I firstly explored the spreadsheet template. This was much easier to use than Microsoft Excel but lacked many of the advanced features that Excel has. I also explored the "presentation" and "drawing" formats and found each of them to be very user-friendly. GoogleDocs are perfect for the casual user who wants to share and have 24-7 access to their documents. In libraries, GoogleDocs are often used by staff for scheduling.

Wikis

I have used Wikipedia for as far back as I can remember. Whenever I was in high school and doing so, reliability and the open access aspects never seemed to bother me. If I allow myself to, I can spend all day on Wikipedia discovering different things that I have no prior knowledge of. There are many reasons why it is so intriguing. I think that Wikipedia has a super easy-to-use interface and find their "subject headings" to be very useful and helpful.

I was in charge of maintaining a Wiki at my previous library job. I found the experience to be interesting because all staff members could edit the wiki at any time. There were no meetings or wasted time in creating our pages because all of us could edit them whenever we wanted. While the library wikis we looked at were creative and cutting edge, I personally think a wiki is better suited to organizing staff meetings, pathfinders, etc. as opposed to making one for the general public. Wikis, however, do provide an incredible opportunity to reach out to all users due to its interactive nature.

Technorati

Technorati was extremely helpful to me in the finding RSS feeds exercise. As I began to explore it more, I realized that it is very useful as a starting place to look for blogs. It was interesting and somewhat peculiar to read about how people can index their blogs to be found by Technorati. I have absolutely no interest in doing this. I currently have multiple other blogs (which are public) that are not indexed by any search engines. To me, it takes away a significant privacy factor. Yes, anyone would be able to access my blog if they possessed the URL. One would never be able to find the URL, though, via any search engine or keyword searching. Whenever the user sets up a blog, there is a usually a box to uncheck saying "Allow search engines to index my blog." Again, it all depends on the user and their particular needs.

The top 100 blogs search on Technorati was a nice feature. I would like to subscribe to many of those through my Google Reader account.

Del.icio.us

I have a severe bone to pick with tagging. Librarians do two things - organize and provide access to information. Part of organizing information is providing access through controlled vocabulary. Let's think about LOC subjects headings for a minute. Yes, one could make a case for finding bias within them. Sometimes they provide the user with a lot of options in terms of describing their subject. However, if one finds the proper subject heading and does a search in a library catalog, he or she will see ALL of the items that match that particular subject. It is only accomplished through controlled vocabulary. With no authority control, tagging helps perpetuate the information overload because everyone uses different words to describe items. If the user was given a thesaurus (think of the Ebsco's in the ERIC database) and was told "instead of "kitten" USE "cats," tagging would prove to be effective. That way, everyone who was looking for that particular item or subject would see EVERYTHING instead of searching for kittens, kitten, cat, cats, felines, etc.

Overall, Delicious was an interesting site but I failed to see how this is significantly different from Diigo. Both are wonderful ways to bookmark websites and provide many advantages to just bookmarking them on your computer.

Finding Feeds

Exploring the four search engines for feeds proved to be interesting. Feeds are not something I usually seek out. Rather, I seem to stumble on them by accident whenever I enjoy a specific website or blog and want to continue reading it with minimal effort. It was great to learn about the different search engines as they would prove to be very useful to discover new types of blogs. RSS Micro's server was "busy" and would not return any results for my searches. Technoroti and Topix were most useful to me because they returned many relevant results. I found tons of feeds about Buffalo. These will keep me updated on the local goings on.

RSS Feeds

RSS Feeds are a wonderful way to save yourself lots of work. I use them all the time to keep myself updated with my friends' blogs and news websites I frequent. I had never used Google Reader before. Instead, when subscribing to RSS feeds, I would bookmark them on my browser and do the search that way. I was very happy with Google Reader because it's much more convenient to have all of the feeds go to one place instead of manually looking at each bookmark.

This technology could be very useful if implemented into a library setting. Some libraries, such as the UB Music Library, already have options on their blogs to subscribe via RSS feeds. The reason this technology is wonderful is because it saves a lot of work. A user is more likely to read new library news in their Google Reader than to solely keep it on your blog.

Audiobooks

Audiobooks are a wonderful way for patrons to "read" if they are visually impaired or want something different. I always find it easier to listen to an audiobook of a difficult work (take something by Nietzsche, for example) than to actually read it myself. As an employee at Borders, I find older people and children to like audiobooks the most. They're even more convenient if you are going on a long drive somewhere or have a flight to catch.

I was not previously familiar with LibriVox. This site is a wonderful FREE place to find audiobooks. Given the universal format of the sound files (.mp3 mostly), patrons would find it simple to download the chapters they want and upload them to an iPod (or even burn them to a CD). In a school library setting, this would be an incredibly useful source as schools have lost library funding and many high schoolers need help with understanding and reading classics. I searched for 4 or 5 public domain books and LibriVox had all of them.

So far, this is the only tool that has been worth learning about because of its apparent practical implications in a library setting. I hope the forthcoming ones are more along these lines and not a waste of time and completely irrelevant like Flickr or creating a blog (because who didn't do that in high school?).

Podcasts

I usually find podcasts to be useful. Many of the ones I have listened to have come via iTunes. So, for this exercise, I decided to explore the online directories instead of what I was used to. To begin with, the options listed were somewhat limited. Podcast.net is no longer live and Yahoo Podcast Directory was shut down in 2007. Thus, I was only able to explore one of the sites which was podcastalley.com. The site was quite cumbersome to use. The search feature did not work well and returned no results for multiple searches. I decided to browse by genre to see if this would help. Unfortunately, it would not allow me to browse for individual podcasts.

In a library setting, I question how useful podcasts would be. If the patron subscribes via RSS feed, I could see potential of people actually listening (mainly because it would alert of the of updates automatically). However, I think this is another tool information professionals need to know about rather than use it in a library setting. I think it bears repeating that I advocate for Facebook in libraries (and possibly Twitter). You have to meet the users where they are. They WILL NOT come to you. In specific instances, I think podcasts would be plausible option. However, reality implies otherwise.