LibraryThing

I guess it shouldn't be too surprising that I found this to be a lot of fun. Books, book-fiends, book-fanatics, and book-wacky stuff. What's not to like? I was surprised at how seriously I felt I should consider the 5 books to catalog. Not like it really matters, but I wanted to pick a really good list of 5. I had a great time pondering tags for the books.

My library: http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=awickens

I think this is the first topic that I'd be likely to return to on my own time. I don't really think I'd use it to catalog my books, though I can see how that would be useful and fun. But the site really provides a great portal to the community of readers and book lovers. I spent a while browsing through the various groups, and am considering joining the Librarians Who LibraryThing group, which I noticed is one of the more active groups.

I also found it to be a good reference tool. While exploring, I happened upon a good list of humorous books - something that's always a bit tricky to find (so subjective).

But I'm left with the same criticism - how do you find the time to do all this stuff???? I guess it's really a matter of how much time you want to spend on a computer. After a day at work, and after getting through my personal email at home, I just don't think I'll want to sit down with a nice cup of cocoa and browse LibraryThing. My rant for the day.

ps. the image is of an old family book that we've read for generations (2 or 3)

de.licio.us

My first lesson learned was that it's reeeeeaaaallly easy to get sucked into surfing from just about any of the tags on the 27Things site. My ramblings took me to a Guinness Brownies recipe and some climate change links. Curiously, the recipe didn't have "guinness" as a tag.

So that leads to my second lesson, which is that catalogers make really great taggers. The rest of us probably stink at it, which is not to say that de.licio.us isn't a highly useful site. But when I think about our catalog being opened up to patron tags, I have to wonder. It would be great to have a tagged version of the catalog, but I have a hard time seeing them integrated into one system. Not only does there need to be some sort of subject control, there also has to be some sort of control to prevent profanity from infiltrating the system.

I wonder how de.licio.us prevents profanity, or maybe it doesn't. I tried searching on a few words, and on 'porn' and came up with a baffling array of sites - some seemingly porn and some that were sort of academic-ish blogs about porn.

So if we had an open tagging of our catalog, how would we deal with this? Anyway, it seems like a great tool if you are spending a lot of time online.

Social Networking

I think the part that stood out for me most was that email is considered "old" and not very interesting to the social networking crowd. It doesn't surprise me that these things change all the time, but it does surprise me how quickly this happens. Also that MySpace is considered too popular for some youth.

This makes me think that libraries need not only to be a part of the social networking crowd, but that libraries need to have dedicated staff to keep on top of whatever wave is cresting. Fall behind and we've lost whatever interest we had.

I think there are plenty of opportunities to be creative and fresh as a library presence on these sites, but I think it takes a lot of time, and needs someone who does this sort of thing at home themselves, not just here and there on work time.

The Second Life networking site sounds pretty interesting, but also a time sink. I think it's the least useful (but probably most fun) setting for an institutional library presence.

I enjoyed the blog comments on some of the articles I read - the back of forth of pros and cons of libraries engaging in social networking. Sounds like a lot of people have already given it a lot of thought.

RSS Searching

I found this excercise to be the most confounding so far. I much prefer to look for the RSS icon on a website, or just paste in the url, rather than search for a feed. I found most of the search tools to be difficult in terms of understanding the results - couldn't tell what it was I was actually looking at. I guess I'm used to google, where the website is clearly listed, or a title is clearly shown.

Feedster results are ok, but I can't tell what sort of website the results come from, because no url is listed (is it a .com site, .org?, .edu?). Topix is similar - can't tell what I'm looking at. Syndic8 is the worst in terms of results - what do all those icons mean - exclamation points?? And if a result is 'pending approval', what does that mean?

I thought the bloglines search was the best because they clearly show the url in the results. I used that to find a library feed. There were very few 'brick n morter' library feeds, but I finally found Hennepin County News.

I found "Library Link of the Day" using one of the other search tools.

My remaining question is - if you can copy and paste any url into bloglines to subscribe, why bother looking for a feed?? What's the difference between a "feed" icon and a url for the page you are on?

Unusual feeds? How about "Nude Hiking and Soaking in the Pacific Northwest" - I was particularly impressed with the nude snowshoeing blog. I'll spare you the photo...

RSS

Way back when, we created lists of websites, or created personal bookmark lists of sites we liked. This seems to be the next generation of "lists".

I really like the concept of collecting all this in one central place, where just new news is pushed our way. But I sort of miss going to the websites - you miss the pictures, I think. I also think you miss the serendipity factor of happening upon something unexpected. I did notice that you can view the names of all other subscribers, and when I tried clicking on one, I found their list of feeds (which was huge - now I know why some people spend endless hours on this.

I'm not too sure how this will help in my personal life, because I just have a few sites I monitor on a regular basis. For KCLS life - it would definitely be useful, in that we could subscribe to a particular feed for very specific issues. It seems like it would be particularly useful to have an RSS feed for library news going out to patrons.

Flickr Mashup

I tried a few of the mashups. The first was an image puzzle maker - you upload the image and then the program fractures the picture into random sections, scatters them, and allows you to drag the pieces back together to form a puzzle. I can't imagine enjoying this more than once, but there you have it.

The other one I tried was a random background image program. I had it pull random images from Flickr's Iceland group, and place it onto my computer monitor's background. Nice!!!

Here's an example (and I apologize to the creator of the image if he/she happens upon this - I'll be happy to take it down if you prefer it not to be used)

kentfront

kentfront
Originally uploaded by a.wickens.

I just discovered that my images will not be reviewed, and thus not found by others, until I post 5 or more images. So I'm adding one more image here.

Flickr2

I wanted to be able to post directly from Flickr onto my blog, but when I tried that it showed that my Google/Blog account hadn't yet been verified. I never received a verification email (maybe it went to junk mail) so I asked for them to resend it. Once I was verified, and allowed Flickr permissions, it all went fine.

I had thought originally that you somehow had to place the photos within the text of the posting, but now I see that the photos are independent postings themselves. I'll try attaching one of the photos here within the text of the posting too. Ahah, so you can do it either way. I think I like this way better, placing the image into the same posting with the text.

Bridge to nowhere

Bridge to nowhere
Originally uploaded by a.wickens.

Iceland geology

Iceland geology
Originally uploaded by a.wickens.

Iceland waterfall(s)

Iceland waterfall(s)
Originally uploaded by a.wickens.

Jokulsarlon Lagoon

Jokulsarlon Lagoon
Originally uploaded by a.wickens.

Flickr

OK, that seemed to go fine. I ended up putting up some Iceland photos. We spent a few weeks there last summer and it was a great trip. Some of the most spectacular hiking and scenery I've seen in a long while.

Well, technically, I'd have to say that Flickr is really easy to use. I was surprised to see that they have their own email system that you can sign up for. It's almost a one-stop shopping type of website.

The only problem I'm having now is trying to remember to sign in to my blog with my full email address, instead of just my ID name. And I can tell that if you do a lot of this sort of thing, and use different logins and passwords, you'd get very confused very quickly about which password goes to what login.

I guess that's it; I'll try to figure out how to add the photos on to this posting.