Infodoodads has a write up about retrivr, a search engine that allows you to draw what you are looking for, and pulls results from flickr based on your drawing. Here is an example of a search I did:
The second picture from the top in the first column is pretty close!
For this exercise, we were supposed to explore YouTube and “find a video worth adding as an entry in your blog.” I don’t know about the worthiness of this, but one thing I use YouTube for all the time is catching things that I’ve missed on Lost. Things like this:
For this exercise, we were supposed to log into the PLCMClearning wiki and add our blog to the list of favorite blogs, and add another favorite to one of the other lists, which I did. I added Atonement, by Ian McEwan to the wiki page for favorite books. I just finished it and thought it totally lived up to the hype. Now I can see the movie.
For this exercise we were asked to look at how wikis were being used in libraries. The Library Success Wiki has become part of my lit review when I’m researching a new service, or beginning a new project. I first started consulting it while I was in school, and have seen it grow into a pretty robust community in the last two years. I think it’s a great way for librarians from all corners of the library world to pool resources, and allow others to benefit from the great work they do. Meredith Farkas, the wiki’s creator, has a great blog where you can find out more about wikis and other technology implementations in libraries.
I also liked Princeton Public Library’s Booklover’s Wiki. Participants in a summer reading program read books and wrote reviews on the wiki. Seems like a great way to reach users remotely.
Our library recently started using a wiki for our reference log, and we are in the process of opening the wiki to other departments in the library to use as they see fit. So far, response from the reference staff has been overwhelmingly positive. I’ll be writing more about our wiki implementation here in the future.
One thing I will say from my own experience is that a wiki is only as good as its content, which is totally determined by the user community who is in charge of the wiki. In order for it to work, content needs to be created and constantly updated, or else it’s not usefull.
For this exercise, we were asked to read several perspectives on Web and Library 2.0 and offer our thoughts. I was struck with what Rick Anderson, Director of Acqusitions at UNR) had to say about how we educate (or don’t) our patrons:
Libraries are poorly equipped and insufficiently staffed for teaching. Ask yourself what your patron-to-librarian ratio is (at the University of Nevada it’s about 680 to 1) and then ask yourself how you’re going to train all those patrons. We need to focus our efforts not on teaching research skills but on eliminating the barriers that exist between patrons and the information they need, so they can spend as little time as possible wrestling with lousy search interfaces and as much time as possible actually reading and learning.
I think Mr. Anderson is right here. The only people who enjoy searching for information are librarians. Everyone esle only enjoys finding information. But I also wonder how we are to “eliminate the barriers” between patrons and information. While I think it’s true that our students are coming to us with a strong awareness of and competence in some technologies, often it is not a technological skill set that is academically useful. They are great at Facebook, online gaming, text messaging, etc. But these are not, as such, skill that are going to help them write their papers. Librarians, I’m finding, are often way ahead of the curve when it comes to “useful” technologies. As we found in our Freshman technology survey this year, RSS feeds and social bookmarking are not things that are on our student’s radar, but these are tools (as these 23 things attest to) that librarians are using in very creative ways to try make content more accessible. But, if we cannot expect our patrons to learn new technologies such as RSS feeds, what are we to do? Mr. Anderson suggest we use “one-button commands, such as Flickr’s ‘Blog This,’” as a model for the types of services we should be offering, but creating those types of techonologies is not a skill set that most libraries have access to. And the more libraies need to create new techonologies to deliver services, the more we are going to be needing skills that are not taught in library school. I wonder if there will be a time in the not so distant future where library staffs will need in house web programers and usability specialists.
Rollyo could be a great tool if you do a lot of web research, particularly if you search the same sites all the time. I made a box that searched several of the sports sites that I (too) frequently look at, and, by adding several blogs that are specifically related to Cleveland sports, was able to get search results that really are tailored to my interests.
One thing that I thought, though, was that often, when I go to these sites, I find other stories I’m interested in as well. It seems that relying on something like Rollyo might take away some of the serendipity of goigng to a site and finding something else that is relevant. This is the same problem we are facing with e-books in the reference collection: if you use the e-book, you miss out on what you might find by browsing on the shelf for the print copy.
This was my first time playing with image generators. I was surprised at just how many there are out there. One that I particularly liked was the Bart Simpson Chalk Board generator. I don’t know how long it will be up, but here is one of my attempts.
This also reminded me of a text generator that I had seen before, which is modeled after Williams S. Burroughs cut up techniques. The idea is that you put any block of text in the cut up machine, and it generates a cut up version of that text, giving preference to different wrods or sentence structure depending on what filters you are using. Here’s what I got back when I put the first couple of paragraphs of our collection development policy in the generator:
Ultimately with the university librarian. a liaison intensive, specialized research is limited primarily to graduate students, and faculty. library support for program links a librarian with a representative in each participation in selection. the collection development needs of its primary users: undergraduate students, superseded materials.
goals. library resources materials selection and budget allocation rests selection of materials for purchase and the addition of mission. collection management includes not only the interlibrary loan.
responsibility. authority for management activities. librarian administers and coordinates collection materials and the systematic weeding of obsolete and gifts, but also the replacement or disposal of should serve the general research and informational program, department, and school to facilitate faculty
Though I had heard lots of people talk about Librarything in the blogosphere, this was my first time actually playing with it. I was pretty impressed with how easy it was to add content, and then manipulate that content. Here is a link to a Librarything that we are going to use for digital display for Black History Month.
One source I consult when I’m looking for new websites on a topic I’m unfamiliar with is DMOZ.org, the Open Directory Project. They bill themselves as “the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a passionate, global community of volunteer editors.” It’s like the old school version of delicious, created in a pre-tag world wehre people actually had to annotate stuff the found on the web if they wanted to share things with others.
I have found some pretty good blogs there, just by typing “weblogs” into the search box. It comes back with categories, and you can drill down from tehre. Of particular interest to those in Libraryland may be the Library Science category. I like this as a source because the entries have a one or two line annotation that can sometimes provide more information than a collection of tags.
When I first started using a feed aggregator a couple of years ago, I started out with Bloglines. But, I have since migrated to the Google version of Bloglines: Google Reader. I like the interface better, and I like how it’s integrated with other Google products. Matt Cutts has a nice comparisson of Bloglines and Google Reader on his blog, if you want to know more about what the differences are. You can also take a look at my feeds here, or grab the feed here.
I find that, when I find a blog that I really like, I usually put it in Google Reader, but I also put it in my Firefox feeds. Most of the time, I actually access my feeds via Firefox, because I quickly skim the headlines from the browser window I already have open, without having to stop what I’m doing. (The disadvantage to this is that you can only skim headlines in Firefox–if you want the whole article, you have to go to the page.) But I also add the blogs I read all the time to Google Reader, so I can have them on the go.
