Looking back

I have enjoyed this much more than I thought I would. Somehow I thought it would be boring but that certainly wasn't the case. My favorite parts were flickr, image generators, you tube and the play week. I certainly found a lot of fun stuff out there that I didn't know existed. Hopefully I also found some things which will help me on the job.

The biggest problem was finding time to go through all of the lessons. I did some of it at work and our director certainly encouraged us and was willing for all of us to do all of it at work. But in practicality some weeks there is no time at work. Many lessons I did totally at home others I did partly at home. But I had two weeks at home where I had no time and that put me behind. When I was behind I felt pressured and I know that is my fault. However if you do it again it would be nice to have smaller lessons or maybe give two weeks on each lesson. A lot of people seem to have dropped out along the way and I think if there wasn't as much to do each week maybe they would have been able to stick with it. It was just so hard to catch up if you did miss a week or more.

I would try it again if it was done again, especially if it wasn't exactly the same. But I imagine that things change so fast that even it it was the same I'd still learn more.

By the way in my last post I said I wouldn't use wikipedia with a customer at the reference desk. Well I did use it yesterday. It was simply the best place to get the information she wanted. It was worded so that she could understand it and gave exactly what she wanted. I did show her information from a more authoritative site first and explained about wikipedia, but for what she wanted wikipedia was the best source.

Wikis

I have to admit that I have always liked the wikipedia, at least for my own home use. I know it gets a bad rap among librarians and I would never use it with a customer at the reference desk. But I do find it very useful at home.

I really wasn't acquainted with other types of wikis. So this was fun to look into. I really liked the Wyoming author's wiki http://wiki.wyomingauthors.org/ It would be great to have one like that for Montana authors. Although it most likely would take a lot of work and effort to get it to a useful point.

I went to a meeting last week with others from the Montana Shared Catalog, at which, it was mentioned several times when we talked about how to get information out to others, that a wiki might be the answer. It is a good way to get instructions and information in one place and out to many people. But you have to be able to train people to remember to look there and for many it is just one more step that they don't have time for. Or one more thing to remember.

Del.icio.us

I thought that Del.icio.us might be useful for me since I often use computers other than my own. When I am working with the public at a different computer it is sometimes frustrating to not have my familiar favorites to go to to quickly find a site that I use a lot. Since it is bookmarked on my computer (either at work or at home) I have likely forgotten how to get at the site any way except by clicking on my favorites. However I never quite caught on to using Del.icio.us. I did set up an account and I did try putting my favorites into it. But I didn't get it working in any useful way. I think my best bet is to just be more familiar with the sites which I often use and to remember the keywords I need to get to them.

I did however find some sites via Del.icio.us that I have bookmarked on my computer and plan to use. On the otherhand I found a good site on Del.icio.us that I wanted to bookmark but didn't right then and then couldn't figure out how to get back to it. Altogether this was not my best unit even though I did end up spending a lot of time in it.

Youtube

At our staff meeting yesterday someone tried to show a video from the Arlington Heights Memorial Library website. http://www.ahml.info/ Since she was unable to get it to play, I thought I would go to the Arlington Heights Library website and look at the video. Well, I forgot which one she was going to show but I did look at some on the site. They are a good example of what you can do with Youtube on a library site. They appear to have at least a video each week which tells what they are doing that week and often highlights a library program or feature. I watched one about library databases. I also watched one with their parade float. But my favorite was about their technical services department. It was not serious so it wasn't truly informative, but it was odd, and therefore fun.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6iRDOe4Bw4

Podcasts

I certainly haven't explored everything about podcasts yet. I haven't subscribed to one yet but I did just spend the last hour and a half listening to some just for fun. I will in the future look into what is available with library content. I know I have seen information about archived workshops, etc. on places like OCLC. I haven't looked into how to get at them. I think this lesson will help me go on and look into them and listen to some. I hope that this may help me keep up better on some library issues.

Library thing

I picked some fairly obscure books to add to my library thing catalog. On a few of them I was amazed that they weren't as obscure as I had thought, about 50 others had them. Others that I thought would be a little more popular only had about 50. It was fun to see that others liked some these books, but dismaying to see that others of my favorites weren't as well liked as I would have thought.

I selected Skid Road an informal history of Seattle by Murray Morgan as one of my books. It was fun to see what other people who also selected it had as some of their other books. They had a lot of books which I had read as a result of reading Skid Road. I hadn't thought of those other books for quite awhile.

I was pretty sure I would be the only person with Ski Lodge Mystery by Montgomery M. Atwater. But there is one other person who has it. It was nice to see that someone else has heard of it. I read and reread that book when I was young. It was my absolute favorite book for quite awhile.

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/fcllibrarian

Rollyo

I thought a genealogy rollyo would be neat. So often when I do a search on google for a name from the past for genealogy purposes, I get annoyed by all of the nongenealogical listings it brings up. A genealogy rollyo will weed out all of those nonpertinent results. I need to work on my rollyo some more to add more and better sites. I started with someone elses rollyo and added to it but someday I need to take time to edit out some of their sites which I don't need and explore even more that I can add.

While working on this I saw a "recipe" rollyo. I like that idea also. I often use the internet for recipe searches.