Week 8 - Thing #19 continued

I was just looking through some of the other award-winning sites on the seomoz.org 2007 Web 2.0 Awards, and I realized that craigslist (first prize winner for Classifieds and Directories) has a lost and found category. Sadly, I read of lost dogs in the Baltimore metropolitan area, but do keep in mind that this is a terrific place to look if you've lost an animal companion. I had not known craigslist included this. Just good to know...

Week 8 - Thing #19 - Web 2.0 award winners

I've been playing around with Citysearch, an Honorable Mention under the City Guides and Reviews category. If you want to include your own city, you may. I entered Belcamp, because I'm trying to keep my stuff related to work. But the real value is looking around your area for places to eat or explore or have fun. I haven't decided if it is as good as some of the other winners. I think it's a bit clunky and not as clearly explained in its purpose as the winners, so I guess that is why it's gotten an honorable mention and not a ribbon. It also has lots of ads. Still, I am enjoying searching these winning sites.
See www.citysearch.com.

Week 8 - Thing #18 - Online Applications

Hello, out there.

I just want to experiment a bit with this document-creation application. I have used Writely (when it was called "Writely," that is) before for online collaboration, but Zoho Writer is new to me. So I think I'll play around, with colors and with typefaces as well.
Let's try some characters, like the British £. OK, now for something irrelevant and silly: .

Let's try something else - Background Color. Oooh...very cool.

I wonder if I can export this to my blog. Well, let's try.

Oh, very cool - I just published this from my Zoho Writer account. And my little experiments showed up just fine: my background color, my colored text, my smiley face, all that good stuff.

Now maybe I'll go play around with Google Docs (or Writely, as I remember it).

Week 7 - Thing #17 Playing in the Sandbox

I glanced at some of the other blogs yesterday, and I realized that everyone else seems to be having a lot more fun with this. I'm diligently and studiously working through my 23 Things, and each one is an interesting task, but the keyword here is "task," as in work. So I'm going to have fun from now on, following the very good example of my library pals who are just having some fun.

So of course, the first thing I do is get very serious about which Favorite Books to include in the Maryland Libraries Sandbox, and instead of saying "any Nancy Drew book," I say something about Heinrich Boll, who writes about Catholic existentialism and war and turmoil of the soul, all that heavy German stuff. I need to tell myself, "Lighten up!!"

I've added my blog to the blog place and all that.

So what is this for? Well, I have the information at hand now to create a wiki for, let's say, planning our big trip this summer to be part of my son's wedding. (I'll keep it private, of course.) Or maybe we members of the Public Services Division steering committee of MLA could set up a wiki for our next program scheduled for the fall. Hmmm...that might work. Or maybe I could use a wiki to plan my annual end-of-the-summer party for my friends, when we can hang out in my backyard and drink cosmopolitans. Yes, the possibilities are endless.

Just for fun, this is what a cosmopolitan looks like:

Week 7 - Thing #16 - Wikis

Wikis could have lots of uses for us in the library and the larger library community of users. For one, I think people, and I don't mean just library staff, creating their own subject categories for materials makes a lot of sense. I can also see group collaboration in many areas for library staff - planning for meetings and training workshops, organizing committee projects, preparing for conferences, the list goes on.

I particularly liked the Book Lovers Wiki fromPrincton Public Library, and thought it was a terrific idea. We already have Readers Place, which provides lots of opportunities for readers to submit their reviews of books, but our Readers Place coordinator has a certain amount of (necessary) editorial control over what is posted. I see the need for some control on a site such as that. But suppose beyond Readers Place, we also provided for an Amazon-like opportunity for people to write brief reviews, kind of snippets about books that they particularly liked. OK, so the reviews might not be masterpieces of writing, but neither are Amazon's user reviews. Readers can give honest impressions of books and maybe drum up some conversations about our materials.

I wonder if HCPL could use a wiki to provide users with an opportunity to add community information. Is that animal rescue organization holding a fundraiser in Forest Hill? Hey, HCPL has the community wiki resource available to post information about where and when. Is the town of Bel Air holding a community concert next Wednesday night? Great, post that information on our community wiki information board and get the word out. Maybe other entities could provide wikis as well - Harford County government, the towns of Havre de Grace, Aberdeen, and Bel Air, and other community groups - and we could all link from one to another. One world indeed! Linked from one to another...

Didn't we have a community resource guide once? (Maybe we still do, but I don't think I've used it for years - don't even know where it is.) Well, what if we have a wiki that allows community groups - non-profits, government agencies, and so on - to post information about the organizations - name, contact persons, addresses, telephone numbers, links to Web sites, purpose statement, and so on. Let the community keep the information up to date. And yes, occasionally, we or someone will need to clean up the wiki, to clear out entries for groups that no longer exist, but each group would be responsible for keeping information accurate and up to date. Just some ideas on using wikis...

Week 6 - Thing #15 - Whew! Web 2.0 and beyond

I'm reeling a bit from our readings, with all sorts of heady thoughts. Consider Rick Anderson's "Away from the 'Icebergs'" and the various icebergs we are encountering in our workplaces, and then consider Web 3D and by extension Library 3D in Dr. Wendy Schultz's "To a Temporary Place in Time." Do we want to start thinking about that paperless library, that collection of monitors and computers but not books? This is very, very exciting - a library as an Internet cafe and more, where people can come for their Web and Internet needs, interacting with one another in virtual space, meeting, gathering information, sharing ideas in blogs, consulting wikis for information, and on and on.

But where are we in this? I think we have a very large part to play in just providing that space and that access to information. Yes, I know Anderson questions the entire notion of a book-filled collection, and so here I am, a selector of materials, that is, hold-it-in-your-hands content and not virtual content, and I'm thinking, "Oops, there goes my job." But wait...what of virtual content? People will still need information and will still want to have access to dependable, good, solid, accurate content. Might we continue then to play a part in delivering all that?

I think as Michael Stephens points out, we must continue to sharpen our Web 2.0 skills and at the same time open our minds to collaboration. Why not allow users to create subject tags for materials? If that makes it easier for them to access that resource the next time they use the library, fine. The tags worked. Why not collaborate with other library systems to generate our own ILS through open source software? Then when the Dynixes of the future go away, we won't have to worry about disruption in our systems.

This is a very exciting time to be in library work. We needn't fear losing our jobs or even losing that traditional sense of "library" for now, at least, since plenty of people will still want us to give them readers' advice on mysteries and to facilitate book discussion groups and to point them to the appropriate reference source for information on that odd insect that is eating their rhododendrons, but as the years pass (and they are passing swiftly), more and more of our users will be shifting to Web 2.0 applications and, hey, Web 3D applications as well. But you know, I'm really looking forward to our future training in...Library 3D.

Week 6, Thing #14 - Technorati

I've set up a Technorati account to claim my blog, so now I'm part of that scene. I looked up "Learning 2.0" as instructed in our Thing #14, and I got lots of blogging on Web 2.0. Lots of buzz on that one. I can see Technorati as something that grows more useful as I read blogs more. Like, keeping track of favorites and all that. But until then, I'm not sure how much I will use it. I think as the 2008 election year approaches, I'll be reading more and more of what people are saying about the various races, and I then will need to use my Learning 2.0 experiences with these 23 Things to keep track of what's what.