Testing LibraryThing..

I'm trying out LibraryThings new Bookcover service.

These are the intructions...

Take an ISBN, like 0545010225
Put your Developer Key and the ISBN into a URL, like so:
http://covers.librarything.com/devkey/KEY
/medium/isbn/0545010225
Put that in an image tag, like so:

And your website, library catalog or bookstore has a cover.

And this is the one I did:



Hey it works! This was pretty easy. Thanks LibraryThing!

Here's the link to the instruction page...you also need to set up a Developers Key with librarything...it's not so easy to find

Linking to LibraryThing bookcovers

It's been a while...

but I just haven't had much to say. Sadly no real progress on implementing any web 2.0 strategies in the library, but in updating the website, I've discovered an issue I'd like to throw open.

We discussed the need for adding web 2.0 to our presence, but what about the old stuff? How much of that do we need to keep? Most of us have lists of useful websites and search engines on our websites, but do we really need to?

One thing I'm really wondering about are the directories, like the Librarians Internet Index and the Open Directory Project. Is anyone still using these with Wikipedia around? I never really found them all that useful before, but I think they must be quite out of date now. Is it a bit daggy to have these on your website? Do I need to go out and get a whole new wardrobe? Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Finito!

Well, this certainly has been an interesting trip. I've tried a lot of new things, some I'd heard of, some I hadn't.

The best thing I've discovered personally on this journey is Flickr. I'm so glad that Learning 2.0 inspired me to take the plunge and join up on some of these sites. I love Flickr, and I love that it has resparked my interest in photography. I've also enjoyed blogging more than I thought I would. I always thought that I never really had a reason to do it. This has shown me that you don't really need to have a reason, a blog can just be for yourself.

I'm also very glad I finally had a good look at the tagging type thingy's. I've seen all those little buttons all over the place, but never really took the time to understand how it worked. I like Del.icio.us, and I'm still using it now, so I can see myself continuing with that.

On a professional level, I think the most important thing I'll take away is the need to play, and keep up with things as they develop. I'll be taking my 15 minutes a day from now on! I don't want to miss out on any great new tools.

I've go no plans to stop blogging now, so I'm keeping this blog open, perhaps I'll post on our progress with using these technologies in our library. I am hoping we will have some to show you!

I'd also like to thank everyone on the Learning 2.0 team. It must have been a massive job, and I've greatly appreciated the opportunity. Thank you!

Downloadable audio

Ok, I've failed step 1 of this exercise. I searched, I clicked, I got a password screen. So, I've gotten kind of bogged on this one. Needless to say I've found these pages bit difficult to navigate. I went to the Gutenberg page, but I ended up with text files, not audio.

In the past I've used a site called Librivox, which I found pretty easy to use.

So if you're a bit thick like me, maybe you could try that.

Podcasts

I'm used to using iTunes, which I really like, but it does have one drawback in comparison to the other search options I looked at which were Podcastalley and Podcast.net. That is, that the search results are displayed by episode, rather than by podcast program, but on the plus side its easy to browse by genres, so it's good if you're not really looking for anything in particular. The other two displayed lists of programs, but I found the searching a bit hit and miss. Podcast.net found 9 results for "libraries" and podcast alley found 29.

There would certainly be uses for this technology in libraries, like this one which I heard about at the Spun Conference I attended last week, from Coffs Harbour City Library

Voice Of Time Project

Like all of these things, its a matter of having useful product to offer.

Cookies please

What's not to like?

YouTube is one thing I'm already pretty familiar with. I don't have a TV, so I tend to find a few bits and pieces on Youtube instead. Most of the videos are short, so you never get stuck for long like you do with TV.

As for using it in libraries, I'd be afraid of doing it for the sake of doing it, not because it really needed to be done. As a form of user interaction, or an art project it might be fun, as we saw in some of the examples from Helen Blowers presentation at the State Library, but I'd want to be sure there was a good reason.

There's certainly lots of handy tutorial material already on Youtube, which could be used to help people with common computer problems. I thought the one we watched about wikis was really helpful.

And why did I choose this video? I was a seventies baby. Cookie monster was my friend. I was also avoiding more cat references, despite the fact that there are oodles of super funny cat videos on youtube....Ok, if you insist I'll just link to a couple (tee hee).

Cat does dog tricks

Mean kitty song

Kitty capers accompanied by sunshine happy song in Japanese

Picnik

This exercise has been just the cure for my wiki weariness, and my document dilemmas.

Some good clean photo fun!

I'm very glad I clicked on the Photography and digital images section of the Web 2.0 awards list.

No 1. Flickr - yep, got it covered, love it!

No 2. Picasa - got it, it's handy

No 3. Picnik - Aha!

I knew more of these type of things had to be out there, but I'd had no luck finding anything useful on my own, and now, here is Picnik. Where have you been all my life?



Picasa is good for basic editing of photos, and it's probably still better than this for doing serious stuff like changing colour temperatures, adding gradients, stuff like that, but you can't add text in Picasa. Enter Picnik, it's definitely designed to do the fun stuff like adding speech bubbles and text, shapes, zombie heads, that kind of stuff you want to do all the time.





But you can still do most of the stuff you can do in Picasa, colour temp, contrast, exposure, saturation, but another real plus is an easy resize option:




If you can resize a photo in Picasa, I'm yet to figure out how.

I was suprised to see it had only recieved four stars for interface and design, when Picasa got 5. I think this application has one of the best interfaces I've seen for while, it even tells you its "sprinkling seeds" and "planting trees" while the page is loading. I love the grass, I love the dandelions. This was a breath of fresh air and fun too! See?



Try it here

Warning, danger Will Robinson!!

I'd never heard of Zoho before, so I signed up and created a document. I quickly found the little delays in pulling down menus and backspacing over typos a bit annoying, and the features are more limited than in your regular word processor, so I don't think this will be replacing Office for a while yet. Like the other things we've looked at, it might have a place in sharing documents at a distance, or if you were travelling, but otherwise I think I'll stick with the status quo for now.

And then I uploaded my document to my blog, and look what happened! Disaster!

Note the big orange rectangle floating on top of my blog banner. Argggh!!

And then I tried adding another post to see if the orange blob would move, and behold!



And now even as I enter this, all I can see before me is a HTML string, not a picture, I've cut and paste the Html, I hope I've got the right bits!

So if you're going to attempt this make sure you don't have any fancy bits in your document, this seemed to be the result of adding a layer.

So, me and online apps? Methinks not.

Valuable training

Last week I attended a training course with a colleage which I found extremely worthwhile, and I'd like to recommend to everybody.

It was a 2 day Mental Health First Aid training course, which is aimed primarily at recognising when people are in times of crisis, and what to do when you recognise or suspect that someone is in crisis, or is developing a mental health problem. It was very practical information, mainly as regards awareness, but also in courses of action. I think it well worth a look!

Below is a link to the website:

http://www.mhfa.com.au/

Uuummm....What was the question again?

Ok, so I didn't go and read a book. I'm off to the SPUN conference next week, then I've got a weeks leave,(Yay!) and I won't have much time for homework, so here I am. I had a look at PBWiki, and I left my blog in the sandbox.

Wikis seem to be more about content than pretty templates and wigets (doh!), so I found it hard to really play, without having a raison d'etre, so to speak. But there was certainly some good examples in the material of how they can be used. Again, I feel like this is just a small taste, and I'd really have to do some heavy research and practice with how you add pages and link them etc. before I could really attempt to set something up for library purposes.

Maybe after my holiday...

Wiki, that's a good name for a cat...

Well, well well.. what did I think of wikis?

I think these applications would be amongst the most useful for us. A wiki would be great for a book group, or to keep lists of subject links. I read a comment in one of these articles that the use of a wiki was great for these type of pages as it allows users access to fix dead links, and add things they thought were useful. I think this is a big advantage for libraries, as there are so many demands on our time, it's hard to keep up with updating webpages, checking links etc. We can get help with adding and updating information, and most importantly, users get involved, and ensure that the content is what they're interested in. They also get the opportunity to interact with staff and with each other.

It would also be great for sharing of information amongst staff. Email can be a bit clunky. People often get email which isn't really relevant to them. With a wiki staff could share ideas and information freely, without impinging on other's time unecessarily.

Once I started looking at places to make Wikis, I ended up at Wikipedia (...yeah, I know), which listed, at a rough count, 86 places to go! At this point I freaked out a bit and scurried back to the video on the Learning 2.0 page, which ended with a nice tidy list of 3 places. Ahhhh.

I think I'm getting a bit stretched at this point. I'm starting to forget which feature I saw on which bit of software. Now that I've been through these exercises, I have a Delicious account, a Bloglines account, a technorati account, plus all the other stuff. I don't think I could keep using them all. Some of them seem to do similar things, but in different ways, and it seems to me you need to use them quite often to really understand how they work and get the most out of them. Oh boy. I think I'll go and read a book.

The future of libraries

Hmmm....

Well,

It seems to me that Libraries 2.0 is about connecting with our patrons online the way have done in our library buildings. If libraries 2.0 is the means, then the end would be a harmonious and fully engaged library community, both online and off. So the technologies here are a means to an end, not an end in themselves.

I'm not sure whether our borrowers here are screaming out for this kind of online community at the moment, maybe I'm wrong and they reading this right now! If you are please leave a comment. But I do think people who use our websites now, expect a certain level of dynamism in the content. There's nothing more boring than a completely static site is there? This is a great way to achieve that dynamism. I also think that if people are looking for that kind of community hub, then libraries are in a good position to provide it.

So, here we all are, what's next?

Yes, I have a cat

What did I find interesting on the "popular" page of Technorati...this funny cat cartoon of course!

Technorati

I've had a bit of a look at this Technorati business. I tried the search term "learning 2.0" - as a phrase and I got 317 results in blogs, and 315 under directory. The results looked pretty similar there to me. I got 543 under posts, I thought this would be more, and only 125 in tags. I'm not sure what all that means, except that it's a good idea to try a few different methods of searching in these sites with "user generated" content and tagging, as people will tag things by what is meaningful to them.


[kirstenstaggingtest]


The above is my failed mission to manually add a technorati tag to this post. The good news is that technorati seems to pick up the labels from blogger to use as tags. I searched for my first post which I labelled "silly greetings", and it came up in the results. Obviously some time is required for blogs to be "pinged" for results to appear. I guess I'll try searching for my test above in a couple of days to see if it gets picked up.

A tip on this front, make sure when you search in tags you select "any authority" (it defaults to "some authority" as I guess most of our blogs won't be bookmarked much, and therefore won't be in the authority ratings yet.

A note on Librarything

A little note for my colleagues who for some reason are actually reading this stuff!

If you'd like to try the LibraryThing website, you can click here, or look for the small print under the book pictures on my sidebar over yonder. If you click on the book pictures you'll probably find yourself at Amazon, and if you want to look at my library, click on the underlined "my library" on the sidebar yonder.

I've also discovered that if you click to peep into someone else's library while your logged in, it will tell you if you have any of the same books in your collections! Ooooo...

Del.icio.us

I managed to set up a Del.icio.us account a couple of weeks ago, and tag a couple of articles I found while doing the Bloglines exercise. That bit was easy enough, but I think I must be missing something here. I was just looking at the PCLMC2 delicious site, but I couldn't see any comments on the links. Perhaps I'm looking in the wrong spot?

I like the sharing aspect of these tools. Yes you can bookmark a page just the same and keep it for yourself, but with this tool, you can share your bookmark with others. And unlike Google etc, these articles are here to be seen because someone has read it and wants to recommend it to others. The amount of people linking to pages is a good indication of usefulness, and once you find someone with simliar interests, you may find a lot of stuff you may not have necessarily have been looking for.

The tags also add an extra bit of oopmh to the average bookmark, in that they allow bookmarks to be categorised with a number of tags, instead of living hidden away in a folder. This should make the easier to find, especially where there are a number of people using them, like at the reference desk.

Rollyo - a work in progress

I can see how this could be useful for certain things, but I think you'd have to spend a bit of time fiddling with it to really take advantage of it, more time than I just have. I've created a searchroll:

http://rollyo.com/kirstentheblogger/this_and_that/

but the searchroll I would really like to create would search within databases, and I'm not sure if that is possible. I think I need to experiment more with this one.

Library Thing

This seems like a nifty thing. But it seems like it would take a while to get used to the navigation of it. It's not always obvious what it's doing. The recommendations are good. It was recommending things I already know I like. I couldn't help wishing it had an option for tagging books I want to read next. If I missed that could somebody please leave a comment for me? it would be much appreciated.

Good Ol' Bloglines!

Look what I just found. This is a really interesting idea. Maine State Library has created a "Library Use Calculator", which calculates the value of the items and services you (and patrons) use at the library each month. What a fantastic idea! My figure was $387 - in US Dollars of course. But it explains how the figures are calclulated, and has instructions for customising to your own library's needs. One for the to-do list!

http://www.maine.gov/msl/services/calculator.htm

South Park Me!

I think this is a pretty good likeness actually. I've seen people using these South Park pictures of themselves, and wondered how they were doing it. But I must admit it's not something I would have gone out looking for unless I really wanted it for something. So here's my excuse! Click on the picture to go to the webpage and try it out. Do you think I could pass for Kyle's older sister?