Monday, December 21, 2009

Wrapping Up

My favorite parts of the OCL Web Challenge were using LibraryThing, getting a better understanding of "tagging", and learning about new resources.

My least favorite part of the Web Challenge was Twitter. I do not like to share information about myself, let alone pictures! I am never sure what to write (that would be of interest to someone else). I am glad to have an understanding of Twitter and Facebook, but do not see myself truly using them at this time.

I can see Wikis being used at Lakewood for community dinners, etc. I would like to use Picnik for flyers. I have used the Google dictionary feature with patrons. WorldCat is an excellent resource for patrons and staff.

I would like to share Picnik with my family.

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

ListenNJ

ListenNJ is great. This is a wonderful service to provide. It was easy to use. I only wish more of the titles were able to be burned to a CD. I usually do audio books in the car. Until books are IPod compatible, I don't know how much I will use it. This could be really great if a student has a book to read, is under a time crunch, and the library is closed.

Podcasts

Podcasting is fun, although I prefer audio to video. The delays in buffering can be quite irritating sometimes. I watched a travel vodcast? about the Grand Canyon, where they were talking about the Mountain Lion. (I do have to say the buffering time was much better than the "Wedding Dance" video on YouTube). The podcast itself was OK; however, it was very fast to load, the sound was good, and was free!

I have listened to a Rick Steves podcast from an IPod on the way to Canada with my nephew. This was great, as we have very different tastes in music. I did try to find one of his podcasts on podcast.com, but got no results.

It is really cool to have so many options at your fingertips without delays.

Delicious

Tagging is very interesting. I searched "Delicious" for Hawaii. I got travel information, as well as a Hawaiian newspaper. I then added travel to my search to refine it. I sometimes find with tagging, I get some unusual hits, some of which are good, that I may not have thought of for a tag. I like the idea of free form tagging.

Delicious could be useful to keep booklists. These could be divided by genre. We would have to agree on tags, so that everyone would be able to find "our" lists. This could also be useful for craft projects. It could be tagged by ages, etc.

I did a search for "series “and found a nice site of juvenile series and sequels. (www.mcpl.lib.mo.us/readers/series/juv/).

Saturday, December 12, 2009

Tagging

On LibraryThing I looked up several books. For "The Invention of Hugo Cabret", there was a tag for picture book. I can understand why they added this, but as a librarian, I would not consider this a true picture book. I was surprised that there was no tag for "drawings", however illustrated was included. Freeform can have its drawbacks, but you can also be helpful, as tags can be creative For example, in "The Maze of Bones", one of the tags is puzzles. I would not have thought of that.

Wikis (part 2)

Sandbox would be very useful for Lakewood's Thanksgiving dinner for the community. It would help to avoid duplication of items, and not put the responsibility of compiling the list into one person's hands.

Wikis (part 1)

I found the Library Success wiki to be helpful. I especially liked the ideas of where to donate discarded books.

I use wikipedia somewhat often. I use it when people need a series order, as well as for looking for information about a certain town, etc.

I like how when something is inaccurate, it is usually corrected (as far as I know). I love that wikipedia has links within the article. It was interesting to look at the history tab. I never went into this. I did not know that you could contact the contributor. I never thought about it.

Somewhere in the history tab I saw a something posted by vampireken about TR being haunted.

Interesting.

Picnik

Picnik is really fun. It would be fun to display posters and flyers in the library. Kids would get a kick out of seeing a photo of themselves at a program that is all doctored up.

As for using Picnik with customers, I don't know how much we would use it in the children's area. They may enjoy using Picnik themselves, if online games do not take priority.

I thought it was really cool to see the photo from different angles.

Picnik would be a lot of fun to use to manipulate photos for a family photo card!

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Google Docs

Google docs is really cool. I know how frustrating it can be to have many versions of the same document. I can see this being a big time saver.

This may be useful for preparing my monthly narrative for the juvenile department. Co-workers can add any program details that I could pick from to prepare the final report. This could be useful as details can be added immediatley. I'm afraid that if everyone added to it for the final report, it could get far too long.

Twitter

I dion't like Twitter. I don't find it to be particularly "user friendly". I tried to search some people (without much luck), so I decided to try Johnny Depp (aka-My Johnny). A lot of hits came up, and I was not quite sure which one was "his", if he has one!