#17 Playing Around with Wikis

This was a fun exercise. I didn't really know what I was an expert on so read the entry on my hometown Springville, NY in wikipedia. I noticed that the Catholic Elementary School was not listed in the schools section so I added it. It took me a little while to figure out how to link to the school's web page from wikipedia, but I got it eventually.

#16 Wiki me this

I thought that the Book Lovers Wiki was a nice idea for their summer reading club. Maybe we could use something like that for our summer reading program. We already have the teens and kids write reviews of their books and put them online, but I think that there are too many steps for a lot of the teens I worked with to really want to be involved. I think they need that visual connection between the review they are writing and where it will appear online. But of course it is problematic because we would have to incorporate the librarians approving the reviews somehow.

I had mixed views about the SJCPL Subject Guides. I thought that it was an improvement over the way that most libraries do this, because it would be easier for all library staff to add websites and create content. But I still don't know how much it would be used by customers. Most of the customers I meet pretty much believe they can and should be able to find everything from google, and don't really understand why I tell them to try a different site.

I am a fan of the Library Success Wiki. I've used it before and I think it is a nice alternative to listservs for getting advice from lots of other librarians.

As far as implementing wikis into libraries, I think that maybe our own QL Chat could also work as a wiki. Right now I get kind of lost trying to keep up with all the posts. Maybe having it as a wiki would make it easier to navigate? Like the Library Success Wiki? Just a thought.

#15 Library 2.0 and Web 2.0

The selection of readings about Library 2.0 was interesting but also confusing. As the Annoyed Librarian and the Cool Librarian point out, there are some librarians who are very Library 2.0 happy and have a deprecating attitude towards librarians who are doubtful. It seems to me that there are a lot of librarians who are really discouraged that librarianship doesn't seem to be changing fast enough to keep up with the way people gather their information. And we compensate by hyping Library 2.0 as the wave of the future or something. So I'm a little confused about the whole debate and I'm not exactly sure where I stand personally.

I was impressed by Michael Stevens' statement about the 2.o librarian: "This librarian understands that the future of libraries will be guided by how users access, consume and create content." I like the concept of "content" and I think that librarians should really incorporate it into the way we think. So much of the time when a customer needs a piece of information they ask us "where are your books on..." and sometimes I find myself thinking after they leave that it would have been so much easier for them to use an online resource. For example I think it is hands down always easier to access journal articles electronically than in print. I think it would be good for us to get more in the habit of thinking of all possible ways to answer a question. That is easier said than done of course.

In Away from the "icebergs" I agreed with the author's assertion that patrons expect to find everything at the library. For example a customer was very shocked one day that I couldn't snap my fingers and give the financial records for a certain nonprofit organization. Library 2.0 does seem like it is quick to provide answers, you just have to know how to navigate it and to judge its authority.

I laughed a lot at the post by the Annoyed Librarian. It was very cynical but I liked it because I think it put a little bit of perspective on the whole Library 2.0 issue. To me, Library 2.o is exciting and I'm happy to be learning about it. I think there is a lot of potential to implement it into the way we do things, but we should be careful to design tools that will actually help the people we are trying to reach and not just do it because it's new or fun.

#14 Technorati

I searched for "Learning 2.0" in blog posts and got 3,226 results. In tags I got results. In the blog directory I got 451 results. The most useful would probably be the blog directory results. It seemed like the results from the blog directory search were blogs entirely devoted to the topic of "learning 2.0", whereas the results from the other 2 searches were not really relevant. The tag search was sort of useful, but the first couple matches on the tag search were kind of minor posts that had a million tags, one of which was "learning 2.0." It was kind of hard to understand them out of context and then the search in blog posts was all over the place. It's basically like the difference between subject and keyword searching I suppose.

I explored the popular blogs on technorati. They ranked them 2 ways: by most favorited and most linked to. I found that a lot of the most popular blogs were about technology or about blogging. I guess that is not surprising when you think about it, but it's not exactly what I was expecting. The most favorited blog on the day I checked was boing boing. It is a blog about cultural curiousities like a giant shoe that is actually a piece of furniture for a child.

#13 Tagging and del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is definitely a useful tool for keeping track of individual bookmarks. It's nice to be able to create your own tags and to play around with the different ways of organizing them for yourself. It strikes me that so many of the tools we're learning about in this QL learning are about making the web more manageable and in a way smaller. I think that one of the biggest challenges facing librarians today that maybe wasn't such a big deal in the past is the absolute glut of information out there. We have to find ways to wade through it so that we (and customers) can find what we need and not get lost. I think that del.icio.us is a good tool for paring down our options to quality sites as we look for information.

Before this exercise I hadn't used del.icio.us for much beyond keeping track of my personal bookmarks, but now I can see that it is useful to check out sites that many, many people have bookmarked. Chances are that it's worth looking at. It's also good to kind of get lost in del.icio.us to find some new sites you haven't come across yet. I also liked being able to check out other users' descriptions of their bookmarks. It was interesting to scan down the list of comments to get more of an idea about the site quickly.

I think that libraries could use this tool to make topic specific collections of links. Maybe for a class visit that is researching a specific topic? It's kind of like the pathfinders we all had to make in library school.

#12 Rollyo

This is the link to the rollyo search engine I created:

Comic Book Reviews

I really love rollyo! This is something that I've always wanted to be able to do, but never knew there was a way to do it. I've always use the "search within a website" feature on google, but Rollyo lets you do it for many websites at once, so it can save a lot of time. The search that I created was for "comic book reviews." When I first started as a YA librarian several years ago, I was frustrated with the lack of reviews for new graphic novels. I would have to search all over the web to find out if something was any good to decide if I wanted to order it for the library. After a few years of this, I'd developed a pretty good list of websites that reviewed graphic novels that didn't usually make it into the traditional book review sources: booklist, School Library Journal, etc. But even though I knew all these websites, I had to search each one separately to see where a certain book had been reviewed. But now with this search tool that I created on rollyo, I can search all of my selected websites at once and not worry about getting all the extra crap that a normal google search would give me. I think this is simply fabulous.

#11 library thing

Library Thing is really really great. I liked being able to add whatever subjects i wanted to books and to have complete control over the library catalog! I used the widget to post 5 random books from my library thing into this blog.