Week 23: the Finale!

I felt like a naysayer on a few of the exercises, but never really meant to be one. I think that this is a great training tool and really should be required for all entering staff so that they can have a basic knowledge of what advances are happening in the tech world. the majority of topics that we went over will end up being a fad or will not last long as something new will come along that is bigger and better. (example: goodbye Evercrack, hello World of Warcrack).

Even with this knowledge that most of the topics will be short lived, they are still very important to know about. It is even better to be able to use them, which is what this exercise is about. Kudos to HCPL for doing this. When do we start to build the learning tools for Library 3.0:)?

Let’s answer a few of the questions provided.

What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?
Probably the RSS feeds. I am tech savvy, but never used this function before. I read my rss feeds every day now. I choose to do it straight from the browser rather than an online site as there are less steps this way.

What ideas do you have for using these technologies at Harris County Public Library?
I kind of talked about this one with the topic. I would like there to be an encouragement for our staff to use the topics included as my guess is that most who took the IHCPL original training have not kept up with it and are now unsure about the technology again.

Biggest concern:
In watching the library video that was included in the Youtube exercise (the training video from the 1940's) one comment stated that, a lot of what was included in the video is still relevant today. I personally don't think that this is such a good thing. How many other professions would feel good about not changing that much in 60 years. I would love to see a graphical interface to the catalog. The online catalog, while easier to use, is still just a newer version of the card catalog. Is there a way to make ot more visually appealing (not by HCPL but by the companies that develop the catalogs). Do these companies make the online catalogs so that it is easy for the librarian to find something or for the patron? Why not showcase a library’s newest popular titles in the front of the catalog (visually)? We (the library field, not HCPL) should make it as easy as possible to find the most popular titles. Give the people what they want in an as easy to get way as possible. My 2cents for the future, anyways.

Week #22: Overdrive

I feel kind of guilty doing this one. I would hope that I have a bit of Overdrive knowledge by now as I am the one who orders for it:) But let’s run with this anyway.

First lets compare Overdrive with librivox.
No comparison here. Overdrive has the titles people want to read, while Librivox has public domain titles. Overdrive is also more browsable, has images, and is updated to be more user friendly on a constant basis (but I am not bias).

Next let’s compare Overdrive with Wowio.
Wowio is great looking and has titles not available on Overdrive. they have a great library of comics that you can read for free online, though most you have to purchase if you want to download to your computer. This is ok as, again, you can still read them online for free. I think Wowio and Overdrive can complement each other. However if Overdrive would have those comics, there would again be no comparison (but I am not biased).

Titles to recommend on Overdrive.
I recommend the Percy Jackson downloads. I highly recommend the Bloody jack books also. The reader, katherine Kellgren, does a superb job.

Week 21: Podcasts

I have been listening to podcasts for a few years now. I started through Itunes, but now just listen to the same groups when new ones are released. the only ones I listen to are gaming related and I think I would fall asleep if I ever listed to a library related podcast... no offense. For time sake, I have not listened to a podcast in a while, but I do feel that they are very benificial.

I think that if the library wanted to do one, it could be very popular. Topics would include new releases, programs, teens rating books, movies, video games, announcements by the library. Some could be on a branch level and others on a library system wide level. Would take some work and dedication to keep it going, though.

I hope it is ok to keep this short, but I am already really familiar with Podcasts. I have never created one yet, but have no reason unless I have something to say and people that need to hear what I have to say. I am not one to talk just to talk. I would end up boring myself:)

Week 20# Youtube.

We are officially into the stuff I know plenty about. Did you know that with certain devices (xbox 360 and PS3) you can watch Youtube on your tv?

Youtube is easy enough to navigate and find what you are looking for. It also has a nice see also feature on each video that you click to watch. I have noticed that advertisments are starting to appear over the bottom of the videos at times.

I chose to embed a video by Wierd Al called White and Nerdy. I felt it was relavant with the theme of this blog plus it is a great parady!

Week# 19 - Web-based Apps.

Online programs like Zoho are great in that they are free, but I am of the mindset that it should not be used for work purposes.

You should not rely on internet based technology. It will always fail to work when you need to use it for presentations or deadlines.

It is always better to have it on a flash drive or burned to CD if it is for an important presentation.

For home use it is ok I guess. Office is expensive so this is a free alternative. While it is a nice feature of saving the documents online so you can access them anywhere, I have rarely needed this feature. It is just as easy to carry a flash drive or e-mail the document to yourself. This way you are not at the mercy of the internet connection.

I personally like Open Office more than Zoho. You have to download it, but then you are not at the mercy of the internet gods anymore.

I think that in the future, more and more word apps will be web based. Microsoft has already announced that they are developing Office as a web application. With most computers in the libraries having Office on them, I don't see web applications such as Zoho being all that necessary. HOWEVER, programs such as Open Office could one day be a cost effective solution to having to purchase so many licenses for Microsoft Office. Who wants to be the first IT person to say no to Office in the library, though.

Week# 18 - Social Networking

I tried a few social networking sites but after the first month, I was already bored with them. I never liked Myspace as I felt it was to YA immatureish. I get enough of that when playing online video games.

Facebook is the only site I still have an account with, though I really never get on it. My wife maintains it more than I do.

It was fun at first, and it is always nice to catch up with old high school and college friends, but my time is so limited as it is, keeping up with Facebook takes away from other stuff that I would rather be doing, (IE parenting, husband stuff, gaming). My wife is on Facebook all the time doing a fishing game or chatting with friends.

Sites like these are a great possibility for libraries, though. A few things need to be in place for is to succeed, though.

1. The library staff monitoring the branches Facebook page should do so without the fear of the "you slacking off" from their supervisors.

2. They need to devote enough time to keep it going and to monitor it.

3. Target it to the audience. Talking with adults on the branch page would turn off teens as they would not feel as comfortable. There would need to be separate pages for each age group.

I had a forum for the teens at Pasadena for a while and it was pretty popular with my regular teens.

Week #17.

Talk about anything tech related? um.. ok.. lets see. I think this week I will talk about video games.

I personally do not watch that much TV. I have a few shows I like (chuck ftw), but I find gaming to be more mentally/emotionally involving than a TV show. I even got my flat screen for gaming, not for TV watching. I couldn’t see the people I was shooting in the fps (first person shooter)well enough.

But let me discuss some of the other benefits that I get from my 2 main gaming systems: the PS3 and the Xbox 360.

The PS3 is a great piece of hardware. It is quite and it keeps my place warm in the winter when on as it runs a bit hot. I have had some great gaming experiences with it. Some of my favorite games I have played on it were Valkaria Chronicles, Uncharted, Ratchet and Clank, Resistance 2 (multiplayer more than single player campaign), and Flower. It comes with a Blu-Ray player which is great, though I have yet to watch a blu-ray movie on it.

The Xbox 360 is also a great piece of equipment, though it has been known to crash on others. Some great games I have played on it were Lost Odyssey, Bioshock, Fallout 3, Call of Duty, and Mass Effect.

These systems are so much more than gaming systems, though. The 360 can play the Netflix Watch it now shows. I am no longer stuck watching them on the computer. I can also download an Overdrive titles to my computer and play it on the 360 via my wireless network. I can do this with songs and pictures as well.

You can use the 360 to have party chat with your friends as well. Another great benefit of both systems is that you can game with friends no matter where they are! You can also talk with them with a headset in most games so it is easier to stay in touch.

Besides this, I can watch youtube and Hulu.com titles on these machines as well. There is one feature of the PS3 that is not really advertised for some reason but is awesome. I can have a PS1 game in the PS3 at home, and using my PSP, I can play that game ANYWHERE that has an open wireless network (ie the library). How great is that? I am done now as I am just making me want to go home and play Fallout 3 some more.

Week #16.

Week 16 is about Wiki's. Wiki's, to me anyways, are kind of like a newer version of a forum in some sence.

Since I would rather be gaming, I really don't contribute to wiki's. I have used wikipedia to some success as a reference librarian (shame on me I know) and look at the Pathfinder role playing game wiki from time to time. http://pathfinder.wikia.com/wiki/Pathfinder_Roleplaying_Game

For libraries, I think that posting new titles, book ssuggestions and branch programs would be great. Even posting community events and teen afterschool activities would be great. A place where local teens could put up certain "wanted" topics up would be great as well. By this I mean need drummer for rock band. Need more players for playing in a role playing group" etc. Dangerous world though.

Again, I don't really follow wiki's as they are just not for me. Even wiki's like book lovers. It is great that it has a few reviews, but I can get more at Amazon, with a higher sampling for each title.

It would take a dediacted group to maintain and keep a wiki alive (ie used) and I am really not that dedicated myself.

Lesson #15

For this lesson, I am to read a few articles on Web 2.0 and discuss one.

The first article I read was called "Away from the “icebergs". While the article was written by a director of a University library, I think it applies to public libraries as well.

The first part of the article was about the "just in case" collection. This collection is comprised of the "we need this title just in case a patron needs it" items. I agree 100% with what he is saying, but the problem goes further than just to those who select the material. In school, we are trained to purchase the "just in case" collection. As far as I can remember, librarians were always considering what's best for the patron, instead of what the patron wants. Examples throughout history are with the reluctance of librarians to include items like paperbacks, romance, graphic novels, and video games. All of these were considered of low value to libraries at one point or another as they were not what the patron should be reading or doing. This is finally slowly changing for the better, but it still really takes way to long for libraries to embrace what is popular.

The second part of the article was about relying on educating the user. Again I agree with this section of the article. My favorite line out of this section was "But if our services can’t be used without training, then it’s the services that need to be fixed—not our patrons." We make things too complicated.

The "Come to us" section of the article is what I found to be the squishiest. I think libraries have been doing away with mentality for a while now. Libraries first embraced this idea with its online databases that can be accessed from home; Then with services such as Overdrive.

I read a few other articles, but I felt a lot goes back to the idea of it sometimes takes libraries to long to jump on board with what is popular. I am now starting to see discussions of Library 3.0. What happened to 2.0? Most libraries (a guess on my part) toyed around with 2.0, but never really did anything with it. It takes money and manpower to incorporate the concepts of library 2.0 into practice. The entire branch also needs to be involved, not just a few people in it. Each person needs to advertise what the branch is doing with library 2.o. If they don't, chances are that the patrons we are trying to socialize with won't hear us. Also in my experience, we can talk about 2.0 all day long, but unless a person is allowed to spend a few hours a week minimum working on it, without the fear of looking like they are goofing of or talking to much, library 2.0 will not work.

My 2 cents.

Lesson #14

For this lesson we need to play around with Technorati. The first excercise is about typing "learning 2.0" in the advanced search feature in blog posts. I got 2,626 results. The next part of the exercise whas to search "learning 2.0" in the advanced tag area and compare it withthe othe rsearch. This time I recieved 752 results.

I was unable to search using the blog directory, as I did not see a search function for this area.

I messed around with the popular feature but came away unimpressed. It claims the site boingboing.net is the most popular blog in the world according to technorati, but I highly doubt that. Most popular with those who use technorati, but not the world. I also limited the popular feature to games (of course) and the results were pathetic. The discription for this area is "The video games people are talking about right now, ordered by new links to Amazon in the last 48 hours". I would think they would use sales rank, but that is just me. Out of the 28 titles listed, only 2-3 were games. The rest were wires and game cases. Not much buzz surrounding those.

I also looked around at the popular videos and I decided I wouldn't watch any of them. Most of them seemes to be about Simon Cowell though.

In the popular movies area, these are listed by "The movies people are talking about right now, ordered by new links to the Internet Movie Database in the last 48 hours." Seeing as how IMDB is owned by Amazon, again, why not just use sales rank. the titles were new and decent, though.

# 13

I fiddled around with Del.icio.us over the weekend. It is a good concept and I may invest in it more, but I am wondering what happens when it disappears. Will they give a warning so you can tranfer everything? the best part about it is that you can access your bookmarks from any computer.

As a librarian, you would think that I have my bookmarks orginized already, but I don't. I find that this would be the most helpful to my son, though, as he has a ton of bookmarks, some on one computer, some on another. This could help him be more orginized about it.

Lesson# 12

Library elf is a handy tool, but it does not have a great benefit for myself. The times it would send an RSS or text, I would not be by the books and I would end up forgetting again. I also only use one account. For those who don't work in the library and have access to the catalog all day, or that use multiple cards, this could be an awesome tool.

The caons to this site, though, outweigh the Pros. the free version only lets you get email reminders of Predue and overdue items. Our system does this already, so this becomes redundant. To get the other options, it is $12 a year for one card and $20 a year for multiple. My overdue charges never amount to this in a given year (yet)...

Lesson# 11

I messed around with librarything today. It is a nice site, though I personally don't have much use for it. It was easy to use and had some titles I did not expect them to have on it. I Think that this could be of great benefit in the right hands. It is great that you can access it on a mobile device as now you don't have to keep a list with you when you go to the library or bookstore.

The URL to my catalog is http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Derekjr

Lesson #10

Here is the Avatar I created on Yahoo.

I have used a program called Heromachine in the past for teen programming.

http://www.ugo.com/channels/comics/heromachine2/heroMachine2.asp

I have not tried version 2.5, but have tried 2.0. The free version does not let you save what you make, but it was still pretty cool.

Lesson#9

The website feedster appears to be dead so that site was of no help. I tried the Topix site you provided and I thought the layout was horrid. I won't be visiting that site again. I found the website syndic8.com to be as useful as a bellybutton lint. It was about as visually appealing as well. Technorati was much better looking than the other two. The main problem I had was that when searching for blogs, the results were brought up by title. I would rather see the title of the blog and homepage. But that is just me.

I found the website search4rss.com to be the best. Its hompage is simple and the reults are listed by blog/rss title and the website, just the way I like it! I mostly searched for gaming of course. I do already have the best ones saved already (kotaku.com / ign.com / n4g.com / destructoid.com).

Lesson 8 - RSS Feeds

I added 10 RSS feeds to bloglines today. Took longer than expected as it was hard to come up with ten places I cared enough about to get an RSS feed for.

Most of them are gaming related of course, though I did manage to fit in 2 honost to goodnes non-game related news sites. I also had to add the best online comic there is - Order of the Stick.

I had most of them in Bloglines when I decided to just start adding them to my intenet explorer RSS feed links. I think it will be easier for me this way. Also, I can't yet tell the difference between the two methods, though I will check each to see which I find better.

Week#3

Part 5. Here is the uploaded image from Fliker. I thought i would keep it gaming related. This was when I was running an RPG game through a forum. I would create maps so the players would follow that battles easier.

Part 6. I thought the colorpicker app at http://www.krazydad.com/colrpickr/ was interesting for a few seconds. Since I was doing this at work I had to deal with popup blockers.

I have seen the trading card maker at http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/deck.php before. and have used it already. The examples of the library created ones are kinds lame IMHO. The Conan the Librarian one had so much potential. The text makes no sense though. Although I will throw out a recommendation to see the movie Conan the Librarian came from. "UHF" was just awesome!!! (Wheel of Fish...lol:)

Part 7. I edited the photo of myself on Harriet using Picnik http://www.picnik.com/ already. I cropped out parts of the picture and changed the file size. Other parts were edited using Adobe by my awesome wife! I prefer not to post personal pictures though!!

As a side not, I a running out of daytime games I can play that I feel comfortable letting the kids watch me play. Guess its back to Littlebigplanet for a while...

Well, this is the first post on my blog, but incase you have not figured it out yet, I would rather be gaming. Not just video games mind you, board games and RPG's as well. Some people say that I am competitive, I say they are poor loosers!

Since I don't have a lot of time to write, I thought I would just share a financial tip to those interested.

When you are about to make a purchase, compare the price of the oject in question with the price of a video game. Are you about to buy a new jacket, thats 2 Xbox or PS3 games. New belt, a used DS game. Going to buy food for the week, 2 xbox or PS3 games. I find when you think of your purchases this way, you spend less on the frivolous stuff (IE clothes and food) and are able to get more of what matters in life... Just saying.