20th Thing: The Final Thing

Well, I've done it; I've done it all! It was in turns fun, intriguing, frustrating, rewarding, time-consuming, but above all, educational.

There is stuff out there that I never dreamed existed. There are some things, like LibraryThing, the image generators, YouTube and Flickr that I'll no doubt use again and again. There are other things that I doubt will become a regular part of my life. Nonetheless, I am happy to have learned about each of them.

If you were a little timid about playing around on the internet and trying new things I hope that this project has emboldened you. So keep exploring! Continue to check out new applications. If a patron comes into your branch and mentions an application you're not familiar with -- check it out! And share what you learn with your co-workers and our patrons.

The web changes so quickly. No doubt we could repeat this project in another year and have 20 completely new things to explore. So let's try to take a little time each week to explore some new website or application.

19th Thing -- Podcasts

Well, I think I'm more of a visual person. I do like music and enjoy listening to it but I'd rather attend a live concert than listen to a CD or an mp3. This may explain why I love to read but don't care for talking books and why I only listen to the radio while I'm doing something else. It may also explain why podcasting just isn't my cup of tea. But I did explore some podcasts and I even subscribed to 2 cruise-related podcasts. I had them sent to my Google Reader account rather than my Bloglines account.

There are lots of library-related blogs and I'm sure that many of them are quite useful. At this stage of things what I really wanted was a library humor blog. I haven't found one but I may check back from time to time.

I can't imagine ever wanting to publish a podcast of my own. I don't have anything to talk about that I think more than a handful of people would be interested in hearing. But that limitation has not stopped thousands of other podcasters and bloggers.

18th Thing -- Web 2.0 Tools

There are such a lot of nifty web 2.0 tools that it will consume as much time as you choose to devote to them. As a result, it took me many long minutes to settle on just one to write about. I limited my exploration to the award winners and, after dabbling with the travel sites, decided to write about Zillow. Zillow is a tool that provides a great deal of information on real estate. You can enter the address of a property and very quickly retrieve - among much other information - the estimated value of the property, the number of square feet, how much property tax was paid and - in most cases - photos of the property. I know that all of this information is public record but it is still amazing how much information can be gathered in a very short time. In addition to seeing how my house compared to others in my neighborhood I also looked at the listings for the other houses that I've lived in. Zillow is a useful - and fun - tool.

17th Thing -- Online Productivity Tools -- Google Docs

I was introduced to Google Docs at a Library of Virginia workshop a couple of years ago. Although it's a great collaborative tool I hadn't used it regularly since that workshop. Now Bill and I are preparing a workshop for our Managers and Librarians. Any time you need to learn something well enough to teach it to others you invariably learn about the idiosyncrasies of the thing. Google Docs does have some but the usefulness of the product outweighs them.

Although I've created this post in Google Docs and uploaded it to my blog I'm not really sure what the advantage is in doing it this way. It seems easier to go directly to the blog and create my post there.

The ability to work in real time with others in different locations and to maintain and easily view all revisions to a document is the real benefit of Google Docs. When several people are working together on the same document it can be very useful to know who made which revisions and be able to compare versions and, if necessary, go back to an older version of a document.

I'm looking forward to having our Managers and Librarians adopt Google Docs as a useful tool for the collaborative work that we all do.

16th Thing -- Wikis

There has been some really interesting use of wikis. I particularly like the SJCPL subject guides wiki. The PRL R&T department has recently been talking about pathfinders but we're finding the traditional printed format much too limiting. A PRL pathfinder wiki is very likely in our future! Near future or distant future remains to be seen.

The Best Library Practices and the Library Instruction wikis are also places that I'm sure I'll be visiting frequently. I'm always looking for ways to make our training better and these sites seem very useful, I'd like to think that I might one day have something helpful to add to the wikis.

Friday Pontoppidan, my Second Life Avatar

That's me in the sunflower t-shirt. I did finally figure out how to put on the shirt that I got at the library but I don't remember how I did it. If you double click on the picture you'll see my bald spot. I have no idea who the person stuck in the table is. Creepy.

15th Thing: Second Life

I have an account in Second Life. I've had it for well over a year now. My Second Life name is Friday Pontoppidan. I have visited the site several times but rather than finding it interesting and engaging I've found it a little weird at times and occasionally creepy.

On one of my 1st visits to Second Life I learned to fly. That was really fun. I liked soaring high over the landscapes and across the ocean. Then I landed on a island. There were lots of buildings but no people, so I explored. I went into a building that seemed to be under construction and I fell into a hole. A very deep hole. I couldn't climb out; I couldn't jump out. I yelled, "Help" -- or at least I typed it. Maybe I should have typed it in ALL CAPS because no one heard me. To save my virtual life I could not figure out how to get out of that hole. So I just quit the program.

I came back several weeks later. This time I visited the ALA site and a virtual library. I was given a t-shirt - virtual, of course -- for stopping by but I couldn't figure out how to put it on. I was also very confused by the bonfire on the roof of the library. Live fires in or on library buildings just seem like a bad idea to me. But I guess I'm just not thinking virtually. Anything is possible in Second Life.

I know that part of the supposed draw of Second Life is the chance to interact with people from all over the world in this virtual world. Social interaction. The problem with that is that I'm not that great with social interaction in the First World. So when I see other people in Second Life rather than go up and chat with them I tend to walk away. Once I ended up on another island -- there are a lot of islands in Second Life. I heard drums and I saw a large group of people in the distance with torches. That time I didn't walk away, I ran. Until I remembered that I could fly; then I took wing.

The last time that I visited Second Life I was attempting to show my husband the interesting world and the people there. We were in a park. There was a biplane flying overhead. There was also big gray bunny person and several cat people. Then a figure dressed in black dropped in from the sky. I said, "I think that fellow has a gun." My husband, ever the optimist said, "I think it's an umbrella" just as the fellow started to shoot his "umbrella." By this time I've become fairly adept at getting out of Dodge quickly.

I haven't been back since then. I know that there must be less strange places in Second Life but I haven't had much luck there. I also have doubts about the lasting usefulness of Second Life to libraries. The program requires a lot of computing power and a high speed connection to the internet. Some of our patrons have neither in their homes and even some of our branches would have difficulties running the program. I think that Second Life, at least in its present form, won't have a major impact on how we provide liibrary service.

I should have known that Second Life was going to be a struggle for me when I created my avatar Friday Pontoppidan and she somehow ended up with a bald spot. Apparently female pattern baldness is a problem even in the virtual world.

14th Thing: Library 2.0

As far as I can determine Library 2.0 is an attempt by those in librarianship to get a handle on all of the new technologies that are loosely referred to as Web 2.0 and try to determine how those technologies can be used in libraries. I think it's also an attempt to get ahead of the curve. I sometimes feel -- and I imagine that I'm not alone in this -- that technology is changing so rapidly that I can't keep up. Before I become comfortable with one new thing something newer, and supposedly better, has superseded it and I back playing catch-up again.

I do think that there is no doubt that some of these new ways of doing things will become firmly rooted. But many others will fade away. Part of the trick of keeping up is figuring out which Web 2.0 things will really be useful to Library 2.0 and finding ways to use them.

13th Thing: More Ways to Search Blogs

Searching for "Learning 2.0 in Blog posts, tags, and in the Blog directory returned very different results. I got 2620 hits when searching blog posts, 485 hits in tags and 430 in Blog directory. This is understandable: the blog directory search registers a hit each time the phrase "Learning 2.0" appears in a blog. The tag search requires that the owner of the blog had tagged their blog with the phrase and hits returned in the Blog directory search must be on the topic "Learning 2.0" rather than just having the phrase mentioned somewhere in the blog.

I'll definitely use these search options if I'm trying to find information specifically from a blog. I can see how it will be very useful if, as often happens with me, I'm trying to find something that I read in a blog that I didn't tag or otherwise save but that I want to read again.

12th Thing: del.icio.us

This is another tool that could be very useful to us as we provide reference assistance to our patrons.

11th Thing -- Rollyo

In a matter of minutes I rolled a search engine on cruising! That was really easy. The hardest part will be remembering the password that I used when I set up my Rollyo account. This could definitely be a useful tool, especially for the reference staff who gather websites that they like and want to be able to search across those sites all at one time. Give my Rollyo a try. There are only a handful of sites rolled there but it gives you an idea of how the tool works.

10th Thing -- Generators

Now here is a Web 2.0 application that I could spend waaaay too much time playing around with! I'm a Scrabble fan so I had to add the name generator. You can get your own Scrabble tile name by clicking on the link under my Scrabble tiles. I've been trying to figure out how to get it to show horizontally. No luck with that so far. I'm sure that there are some generators that can be put to legitimate library-related use. But this 20 Things project is supposed to be fun so I looked -- mostly -- at the generators that made me smile. Of course, as an English major, I did like the Shakesperean Insulter generator, especially for those insults that were actually taken from Shakespeare's work.

Thing #9 -- Feeds

Because I'm always trying to make work as much fun as possible I choose to search for posts on library humor. That strategy didn't work out as well as I'd hoped. I found some blogs but not as much as I'd expected, or hoped. I know that working in libraries can be a hoot so where are all of the funny library blogs? Maybe people who work in libraries are just to discrete to write about the humorous things that happen there. So instead I just searched for library related blogs. This time I founds lots of sites. I prefer using the search functions in Bloglines and Technorati for one very simple reason: they look nicer. Syndic8 was just unappealing to look at and Topix wasn't much better. I found some interesting blogs but I didn't subscribe to anything else. It's good to know that these search tools are available if I need to find blogs on a specific topic.