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.

Same picture, different effect

It is just amazing how different the same picture can be and this only just scratches the surface.

Sunset

I used http://www79.lunapic.com/editor/?action=photo-spread to make this. One amazing thing about playing with this site is that with the photo emboss effect I could suddenly see the house in the foreground and the swingset in its back yard. Of course you couldn't see the beautiful sunset anymore. I didn't realize their details were even there.

Behind

I just did not have time last week to play. So this week I need to do two weeks of lessons. I started last night and spent a whole hour having fun generating pictures and didn't come up with something worthy of putting on this blog. Although I did send one to my daughter. It was a bad week to be behind since it was such a fun lesson. So I look forward to more play with pictures. Hopefully I won't have so much fun that I won't be able to tear myself away to work on this weeks.

I am pleased that I seem to have started my daughter on something. I have gotten two great "postcards" from her since I sent her a trading card. The postcards are a lot like trading cards. From now on I will have to let her know where I am making things when I send them so she can play also.

Trading cards and jigsaws

I created a trading card of my daughter and e-mailed it to her. I am eager to see what her response is. I suspect she will think I am silly for making it. I don't think she understands my playing around with the technology which we are currently working with.

Actually I fail to see the point of the trading cards. As far as I am concerned the pictures are better than the cards.

I also created a jigsaw puzzle. If if wasn't for the fact that it costs $30.00 to actually have them make a real one from the photo I input, I might think that this is a neat application. It also sounded like the puzzle would be on high quality paper instead of backed with cardboard, so it may not be of much use as a real puzzle. I do like real puzzles so this was intriguing.

Amazing hawk picture

This was a fun lesson. I especially like the map part where you can find pictures from around the world. However some of the animal pictures were amazing also. I really liked this one of a Red-shouldered Hawk catching a fish. What a great action picture. I found it at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ozoni11/2202622902/in/photostream/

RSS feeds

I have tried setting up one blogline account at work and and one at home. I am not sure sure how helpful it will be at work. I need to find some better places with feeds that really apply to my work before I find it useful. At home it may save me a little time since I have a lot of favorites which I regular look at. Some don't update very often so I have only been checking them from time to time. Now with blogline I should know right away if something new has been posted on them and thus will get the information when it is current.

Experimented with pictures

I am proud of myself. Yesterday I uploaded digital photographs from my camera and from a memory stick. Then I successfully cropped some and removed the red eye from them. I then sent them to Walgreens to be printed. My kids were not around to help me so it took me a long time but I finally got it done all by myself!

7 1/2 habits

The easiest habit for me is to teach or mentor others. At least that is easy if I understand what I am doing to begin with. I don't mind getting up in front of a group or I can do one on one mentoring. On the other hand it can be the hardest habit also if I am not comfortable with the material, which could be especially true with technology related topics. Then it is hard to figure out what is going on, especially if things go a little differently than I expected. I can get flustered if I am not sure how to proceed and someone is watching what I am doing (which would be the case if I am teaching). Figuring things out is surely easier if I am all by myself.