I’m definitely glad I finished the 23 Things, even though I did half of them over the last 10 hours. Unfortunately my class this semester kept me pretty busy, but fortunately my class was on Library 2.0, so I was already familiar with a lot of the things I needed to work with. I plan to go back over the things and try some of the challenges over the next few months. I would be very interested in participating in another program like this in the future.

Thanks!

I don’t use these tools much. Because I am in school at St. Kate’s and work at the University of Minnesota, I have access to more databases and online resources than I know what to do with (which is a little frightening since I’m graduating in August.) I only just learned about ELM and resources for Minnesotan’s a few years ago. I think a lot of people don’t know that these resources exist. I’d hate to think people pay for access to this info when it’s freely available at their library. I’m definitely setting up an RSS feed for my next project.

I resolve to:

I recommend pacing yourself. Also, try things, but if they don’t suit you move on. Some of these things will surely enhance my life, but I can’t fully embrace all of them and there is nothing wrong with being a little selective.

I just joined Ning and was encouraged to see that there are others out there scrambling to finish as well. I replied to a post and added a photo to my profile.

I also have an account on Goodreads. I haven’t updated it for a while, but I’ve placed a widget on my FaceBook page and a link (WordPress won’t allow the widget) in the left column of my blog. Several of my friends are on Goodreads and I enjoy reading their reviews of books. Not so long ago, a handful of us bonded when we all admitted we’d never been able to finish A Confederacy of Dunces.

I’ve been a member of both MySpace and Facebook for a while now. I haven’t updated my MySpace page for months, but I use my Facebook page daily to keep up with friends. I’ve joined several library themed groups over the last few months but I haven’t really heard much from any of them, short of an invite to ALA in CA and National Library week in DC, neither of which are anywhere near me geographically. As a student in the St. Kate’s MLIS program, I joined their Facebook group, but I never get any info from them either. As far as I know, I don’t have any of the group notifications turned off. The grad students at the department where I work have adopted me and added me to their Facebook group. I get invites to their coffee hour and presentations 1-2 times per week and have watched them use Facebook and a blog to help their community grow. So, what I’ve taken away from my social networking experience so far is that it’s a great way to keep in touch with your friends, but if you want to use it to foster a community of like-minded people, you need to actively encourage it to grow.

Up until now, I’ve only listened to the MPR podcast “Musicheads.” I found it on The Current’s website and learned about it while listening to the radio. I subscribe to it with iTunes and listen to them on my iPod while I walk to work. Having explored the podcast directories, I think I like Podcast Alley the best. Not knowing what I was looking for when I started searching, I found something worth listening to the easiest on Podcast Alley. I liked the hierarchical nature of Podcast.net, but the podcast I chose there turned out to be dead, so playing the role of someone with a short attention span, I moved on. The results in Yahoo! seemed too random to sift through and there didn’t seem to be a way to browse.

I think I ended this experiment feeling pretty much the same as I started–I enjoy listening to podcasts more when I don’t have to search for them. I like that I can listen to them when I have time and they wait for me when I don’t.

Some of my classmates did a group project on podcasting, and I think their work was pretty great. I like the idea of podcasts of book & music reviews, interviews, and original children’s stories being available via my library.

I enjoy searching through videos on YouTube, though I find that it’s cluttered with a lot of duplicates. I have an account that I use to create playlists and save my favorites. This is one of them. I am also a big fan of the Erik the Librarian web series, posted on this blog previously. I think there is a good deal of use for YouTube in the library from improving the library’s image, to virtual tours, to screencasts and library database tutorials. For a recent class group project, I made a screencast tutorial on how to use Academic Search premier. Something like this could be useful to someone who stumbled upon it while browsing YouTube, or to patrons who find it embedded in a library website.

I am impressed with the assignment calculators. I am someone who tends to procrastinate and leave things to the last minute, and I suspect I am not alone. I think a resource like this could help alleviate a lot of the anxiety surrounding research papers and projects that leads to this procrastination. It also helps reinforce the research process which many students have not fully learned or have forgotten. When I came back to school, 8 years after completing my BA, it took me a while to relearn how to write and keep myself organized. I think this could be a good tool for anyone. I plan to use it and further explore it’s possibilities with my next project.

I have an iGoogle page that I use to keep myself organized. It keeps my email, RSS feeds and other info all in one place. I have search widgets for WorldCat and Hennepin County Library on my iGoogle page, as well as a search box for an online dictionary and a to-do list. I created a Google Calendar, but because I already have an online calendar at work that all my colleagues are on, I don’t think I’ll use the Google calendar at all. It was simple to set-up and use though, if I didn’t already have a calendar it would be a valuable tool. I like that I can check my schedule from anywhere and receive reminders about upcoming events or appointments. If a group of people share the same system, it is also easier to schedule meetings as you can use the calendar to find a time when you are all free.

I’ve never really looked at any of these sites until today. They seem to be more entertainment/culture oriented than I’d be interested in. For me they’d be more of a productivity detractor. They might be useful for keeping up on current events, but popular stories aren’t that hard to find in the first place.