Thing 22 - Mashups

Some fun stuff here! I really liked Mappr. It’s fun to be able to look at photos and see where they might have been taken. It’s a little like taking a vacation in your easy chair!

And the spell with flickr was really fun too! Not sure what I would use this for, but typing in various names, changing the letters you don’t like, and so on, was so much fun for the creative side of me!

Thing 21 - Tagging

In its most simple form, tagging allows for easy labeling and searching of photos you might find interesting. So if I’m interested in temari, I can search for photos of temari and have a fun time browsing the results.

Although I do quite a bit of photography, I don’t have a Flickr account – mostly because I don’t trust people to not abuse the copyright or Creative Commons license that I might select. I have some really good photographs that I wouldn’t want abused that way. I suppose if I was just taking snapshots I’d feel differently, but maybe not. Apparently there are some different photo sharing sites which allow you to watermark your photos – maybe I’d feel better with that.

Ideally, tagging allows users with similar interests to connect. While I understand the logic of that, I don’t personally find that appealing. Just because I have one thing in common with a stranger, an interest in temari, doesn’t mean we would connect in any other way. I guess I’m picky in “real” life about who I connect with, and that carries over to any online relationships or associations I might make.

Thing 20 - Flickr

I found a wonderful group of photographs of the State Library of Victoria, Australia. It’s a beautiful building, completed around 1913, with all the elegance of the times. The large dome in the middle is 35m x 35m, which was the largest concrete dome in the world at the time it was built. If you’re a library person, you can’t help but wonder and imagine what it would be like to work in such a huge, beautiful facility! Here is one photo of the dome. Enjoy!

Thing 19 - Web 2.0 Awards

This was fun – I looked at widgets. I think I knew about them a bit before many people because I use an Mac at home and I’ve had customizable widgets on there for a long time. There were some fun widgets on the awards site and I played some games.

From a library standpoint, there were some that could be helpful…maybe a clock for local time, weather, even a Quote of the Day could be fun and add an interactive element on a library website. Because Virginia Beach is a tourist destination, it could be helpful to have a map widget and a photo widget of popular destinations.

Thing 18 - Technorati

I had high hopes for this exercise, watched the YouTube video, explored Technorati’s explore and discover features, but when I went to try the searches, there was no option (no dropdowns) to search in the three ways the video explained. Very disappointing to say the least. My co-workers didn’t have any success either. Maybe Technorati has taken this feature away (temporarily?).

I like what Technorati can do, that is, some of the features of it and the layout they use. However, I’m not much into reading blogs, looking at photos online, etc., so I’m not likely to use this very much. I can see how it would be popular with a great many people, however.

Thing 17 – Tagging/Folksonomy/del.icio.us

I’m already familiar with tagging and some of the benefits after having used LibraryThing for a class at school. We used both class-specific tags and our own tags to identify various books we had to read for a literature class. It was helpful and easy to find the books that fellow classmates read merely by searching for our class-specific tag.

I went ahead and created my del.icio.us account, something I’d been meaning to get to for a while. I don’t bookmark a whole lot, generally speaking, but will see how useful I find this tool. Certainly at work it will be more helpful since we hop from one computer to another all day long!

Thing 16 - MySpace

I found the MySpace Help page quite confusing and felt that didn’t bode too well! I suspect if I did create a page it would be fairly easy. Yet again, I looked at my niece’s page and it’s so busy, so much stuff on there, she has lots of animation and so on, that I don’t think I’d ever be able to create something like that.

A bunch of people here at the library have been challenging each other to play Scrabble on Facebook. That sounds really neat and they are having lots of fun with it. I might someday be willing to create a profile just to be able to play Scrabble!

I think a lot of the attraction to MySpace for many people is that they can make it reflect who they are – limitless customization possibilities. But I also think those pages give people an inflated or maybe false sense of ego. Sorry, but I read about some person who had over 4,900 “friends” and I think that kind of thing is nonsense.

Thing 15 - Social Networking

Ok, I really wanted something positive to say about social networking sites since my gut reaction to these sites is a big “NO”!!! I did read one interesting article about these sites and their use in libraries and the one thing that did make sense was having information accessible to wherever the users are. So if they use these sites a lot, then having a portal there for them can be a valuable tool. But to have a presence JUST to have a presence makes absolutely no sense to me, and I suspect that is what many companies (libraries included) have done.

I also read that many kids use these sites for homework – I have a hard time believing it is for anything more than “Can you believe how much homework we got?” or “What did you put for question 4?” I don’t have kids in my life that would give me a more accurate picture of this so I may be way off base.

I was slightly alarmed at the presence of so many companies trying to imbed their product or name into the lives of the teens using these sites. Wow. We are bombarded in every way by merchandising so this shouldn’t have been a surprise, but it was, a little bit anyway.

I took a moment to look up my nieces and see if they had profiles on MySpace and facebook, and they did. I found it fascinating that my oldest niece, 19 years old, hasn’t been on one account for over 2 years! Maybe she uses the other account. It will be interesting to find out!

Thing 14 - VBPL Reader's Advisory wiki

This was an easy one! Fun, too, since I’m always excited to share my favorite book. (In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden, in case you were wondering!) The wiki was very easy to edit and it was interesting reading a few of peoples’ favorites.

Tags don’t really seem to have a place here since there isn’t a good search option, but I added them as instructed. Maybe this was to get people thinking about the process of selecting tags and which are appropriate? I've had to use LibraryThing extensively in my schoolwork and do find tags are helpful there.

Thing 13 - Wikis

I think wikis are a great idea and especially suited to a library. I particularly liked the BookLoversWiki created by the Princeton Public Library. It appears they used it for their Summer Reading Club, allowing customers to make entries about the books they read. This is a great tool for others to review various opinions of books and a great way for the public to participate!

Thing 12 - IM and Reference at the library

I found it very encouraging to read in one of the articles that 55% of teens have used IM for help with their homework. I doubt that is all IMing to libraries but that is still quite an encouraging figure.

VBPL has been pretty slow and careful about joining the bandwagon for IMing. Well, maybe it’s COMIT that has been slow and careful, I don’t know! But it’s good to see we are on board and finding our way. I don’t doubt that will begin to embrace other technologies as they become available and hope that we get on board a little sooner.

Thing 11 - IM and Libraries

Well, as we already know, libraries use IMimg to communicate with their customers. I’m part of the team who has been testing the IM project here at VBPL. It’s hard to know how successful that has been at this point – it’s early yet and we don’t seem to have a huge influx of questions thus far. I would expect the usage will pick up, however.

Now as to whether I think libraries and IM are a good fit, I’m not sure. For some reason I see more value at an academic library than a public library, but I can’t define why. Something to do with how much usage the website gets. I’m not sure how heavy the usage of the VBPL website is in general, thus am not sure how many people would stumble across or go looking for an IM option. Maybe it’s more than I imagine – I’d be happy to be wrong about this!