Week 9 - Thing 23 - Summary

Although I wouldn't reccomend someone go through this at the pace I did, I found this to be an interesting journey of discovery. Left to my own devices, I would probably not explore half the items we looked at. I have a better appreciation of what is out there in the internet and the web.
I was skeptical that there would be anything that I would use personally. However, I found myself getting into bloglines and podcasts. I think that it also opened my eyes to what libraries can really do to reach out to there patrons with these new tools. I still like what Menasha Public Library with widgets and blogs and Del.icio.us. It showed how you can combine a number of these different tools to make yourself attractive to your patron. It is nice to be aware of all these tools that are available and not have a blank look on my face when they are discussed.
I would definitely be interested in participating a program like this in the future. I would hope that I could spread my own experience with it over a longer time frame, which is not the program's fault but how I manage my workload.

Week 7 - Thing 17 - Sandbox

It was fun playing in the sandbox! I added a couple of movies to favorite movie and a web link to a good resource about great films. I also added my blog address to Favorite Blogs. I noticed only three URLs for Frederick. I don't know what may have happened to others. Staff here did register. A mystery? That is what you get when you let others edit!

Week 7 - Thing 16 - Wikis

I feel Wikis can serve a number purposes in a library setting. Princeton's use of it as a community book review location sounds like a great idea to provide patrons with another resource to use in reader's advisory. Even more important is that the resource is the community. I liked St. Joseph's subject guide which integrates a number of community resources,interesting websites with selected library catalog searches and databases. A good way to use a number of different resources with a fairly easy subject layout. Training and internal communications are obvious uses. Taking the message board to a higher level.

Week 6 - Thing 15 - Perspectives

The mountain isn't coming to the library, so the library has to go to the mountain.As much as I am a "hold the item in my hand" kind of guy, I understand that, in this day and age, it is not about my preferences. The focus should always doing the best by our patrons. I believe that this is the focus of both Rick Anderson and Michael Stephens. We need to serve our patrons needs and use the delivery systems that are most relevant to them. We need to make sure that these systems are organized and updated to provide the best information in a constantly changing world. I spent fifteen years in retail, mostly in catalog shworooms. They offered good product at reasonable price by having customers order items which were stored in a warehouse. Everything was organized and relatively efficient. In an age of increasing instant gratification, customers did not want to wait. Whereas, catalog showrooms in many ways pioneered several of the innovations that all retailers use now to satisfy customer needs, they still insisted to focus on a delivery system that did not meet the customers needs. They are gone now. I do not think that is the way that libraries are going as this course indicates. We just need to keep reminding ourselves of our purpose.

Week 6 - Thing 14 - Technorati

It was interesting to see what different approaches showed for Learning 2.0. A search for blog posts brought up 25,615 posts. However, if you went in advanced search and used exact phrase it narrowed it down to 3,838 posts. Searching by tags brought up 21,156 posts, 509 blogs, 20 videos and 319 photos. Good if you are trying to separate out particular items of interest. Blog directory yielded 545 blogs.
I looked at top favorited, searches and blogs. I found it to be mostly tech related or social. I did not find that surprising at all. Boing Boing was about the only thing that sparked any interest. I could see an advantage to using advanced search if I was really interested to find relevant blogs to something I was working on.

Week 6 - Thing 13 - Del.icio.us

Not warming up to all the social network aspects of this site, I wasn't sure how this would be of any good use until I saw the San Mateo and Menasha Library sites (by the way, look at Menasha's whole website for a good use of a lot of the things we have covered). I can see a real use for Del.icio.us in organizing all the many items different librarians run across in their work with patrons. Menasha used a very nice organizational approach, and San Mateo - what a radical thought of using Dewey! If you look at some of the other libraries, you can see that how you organize the tags is key.

Week 8 - Thing 19 - Web 2.0

I dropped in on a few sites, but spent most of my time on Medstory. I found it fairly easy to navigate. I liked that it gave you search suggestions when you were in the Information that Matters section. I felt that it was too commercial though. Most of the information in "Information that Matters" seemed to be short abstracts from Wall Street Journal articles. Great if you are in the library to get the info, but a pain otherwise. The main listings for a topic below this defaults to the web and I could not see that there was any sense of importance to the order of the listings with commercial sites in many cases listed above reputable medical sites. Also, along the side were ads that I felt were not appopriate for a site offering medical advice. You can easily narrow your search, but I would advice people using a great deal of care when evaluating information from this site.