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.

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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.