Shush 2.0

I admit I don’t really understand the appeal of Second Life. I waste a lot of time in life, for sure, but I try to avoid things that don’t have an objective/point. I’d rather hang out in a real bar with real friends and buy real things. I’ve participated in other online communities, online forums and discussion boards, but they’ve all been asynchronous and secondary to my “first life.” Maybe I just don’t have time for a second life right now?

That said, there are obviously quite a few people who think differently than me, and it’s cool that libraries are trying to serve them. If it’s a service that gets used, it’s a worthwhile effort. One thing that is interesting to me is the idea of identity in this virtual world. I’d like to learn more about how people create their avatars and online personalities to represent themselves. Are they the same as they are in their first lives, or have they created someone new.

I have a Library Thing account, but I haven’t put many books into it yet. I previously had been using GoodReads and haven’t wanted to go to the trouble of moving everything over to LT yet. I enjoy getting reviews and recommendations from my friends on GoodReads, and it’s fun to find others who share your interests and see what books they are reading that I might not have heard of. Working full time and attending library school in the evenings doesn’t leave me a lot of time for leisure reading right now, so I want to make sure I pick a good book when I get the chance.

I have set up a LibraryThing account for my department at the University. So far I’ve used it to catalog all the books authored by professors in my department. I hoping to put a widget featuring those books on our web site. I may also enter key books in the discipline and books on the reading lists for the PhD oral exams.

I also like the LibraryThing local feature, it’s a good way to keep up with what is going on at my favorite libraries and bookstores. I hope more libraries start taking advantage of this to publicize their events.

LibraryThing for Libraries has potential for libraries wishing to enhance their catalogs but which might not have the resources to do so themselves. LTFL adds tags, recommendations, and reviews into an OPAC with just a small piece of code.

I just added my entry “April 15, 2008… only on Thing 10 and running out of time” to the 23 things wiki. I’m familiar with wikis, especially Wikipedia, but I only just created my first wiki about a month ago. A classmate and I created one to collaboratively write a script for a YouTube tutorial we made for a class project. I thought it worked really well. We had a page for the script and a page for technical recommendations we gathered for how to save the video file for YouTube.

I think Wikis could be a great resource for librarians to collaborate on projects, or to collect and share useful references with each other. I also have been reading lately about librarians who create and edit Wikipedia entries to point back to materials in their digital collections. They report that traffic to their collections has really increased. I think that is brilliant–it helps the library and contributes to the community as a whole.

I think Wikipedia is a good jumping off point for research. Personally, I’ve used Wikipedia to get a feel for a topic as I start researching it. There are often some great links to outside resources in Wikipedia. As far a citing Wikipedia, there are places for it, but not many. I wouldn’t really use any encyclopedias as a reference in a research paper, though I’m sure the temptation for K-12 students to use it is pretty great. Wikipedia is popular because it’s just so easy to use. I’m less worried that kids using Wikipedia will get bad information than I am they’re being lazy and are not learning good research skills.

I have a Google Docs account, but I can’t seem to figure out how to edit this document. By looking at the two docs in Zoho and Google, I’d wager that Google is easier to use.

I’ve used Google Docs to collaborate with a classmate on a project. The class only met three weekend, and we live in different parts of the state. Being able to work on the project together without actually getting together was invaluable. We created our “PowerPoint” presentation using Google Presenter. I also use Google Docs to store research I’m doing for projects so I can access it wherever I am. It’s a lot easier than emailing documents back and forth. I wouldn’t use Google Docs to actually write my paper though, as the formatting options aren’t robust enough to make it look the way I’d like it to. I think the founding fathers would like the collaborative nature of these tools–that they are of, by, and for the people. But, the online nature might be a bit modern for them. I fear they’d decide it was witchcraft and burn us at the stake.

http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=df9q3btw_5gz59mxgq

I made a Flickr badge (in the sidebar on the left). I’m a huge fan of Flickr, and the Flickr badge lets me add my photos to my other sites without actually adding them there. For example, I use a Flickr badge to put my photos in my MySpace and Facebook profiles, and on my blogs. It’s a fast and easy way to add my photos in multiple places without the effort of uploading them all multiple times. I think libraries could use Flickr badges to promote their events and user participation. Or perhaps to show off new acquisitions or features of the library.

I have used several email systems over the years. I’m a big fan of Gmail’s threaded emails. I like that it keeps my emails together as a conversation. The search function also works really well–I don’t miss folders at all. At work, I use Thunderbird to manage my emails. I’ll admit to having auto-check set to 5 minutes. Even though most of the emails I get are not that important, if I don’t respond to them right away the sender often comes into my office to ask me the question in person–which if something is important I’d prefer they do anyway.

I also try to throw away emails once I’m done with them. Once in a while I’ll need to refer back to an email, but 95% of the time I never need them again. The system works so much better/faster when I keep the numbers down that it’s not worth it to me to archive most things.

I’m not a big user of text messaging, but there are certain times and places where it definitely works better than a phone call. I’m also fairly new to IM. I signed up a few months ago to help a friend with an trivia contest. Since then I’ve used it to coordinate a project with a classmate. I think texting and IM library reference are great ideas. It’s fast, easy, and effective. When you’re in the library studying, you may have a question but don’t want to pack up all your things to physically walk to the reference desk. It would be important to make sure patrons know when you are available for these services however, since they would be expecting an instant or fast response.

I didn’t view any webinars, as there don’t seem to be any offered today and I’m running out of time. I have participated in webinars in the past, and I do like them. I’ve been to presentations where others were joining via the web, and where I was at a remote location. It’s definitely harder for the presenter to keep track of everyone and to keep the technology working. But, I’ve been able to attend things I normally wouldn’t have been able to.

Throughout the course of the class / 23 Things, I’ve used both Netvibes and Google Reader as an RSS aggregator. I liked Netvibes, but it got a little messy. When I created an iGoogle portal for myself, I decided to try using Google Reader for a while. I like the linear structure of Google and I find it’s easier to subscribe to feeds. I’ll probably try BlogLines too. I’m also planning to explore the public sides of the aggregators.

I think RSS is valuable for librarians to keep current by subscribing to feeds by others. I’ve subscribed to several library bloggers’ feeds as well as those of my classmates. I’ve learned about a lot of issues I would have otherwise missed. RSS can also be a great resource for librarians to create feeds that can be subscribed to by others. Libraries could produce feeds for everything from podcasts to new acquisitions. Patrons could subscribe to these feeds, or the libraries could use them to push the information to the users where they use it–for example, a library could work with an academic department to create a feed of new acquisitions in a specific subject area could populate an area on a departmental web or course site.