Thing 18: On-Line Video

One of my specialties at work is sound and visual collections, including moving images. When I started working with the collections, it was mostly film and some 3/4-inch u-matic videotape. I love how technology in terms of cameras, editing software, and collections of online moving image clips has advanced, allowing almost anyone to be a creator and presenter of video.

This spring I attended the Midwest Library Technology Conference at Macalester College. One of my favorite sessions had the participants shooting and editing video. One of the presenters had produced the video featured on this blog, The Library Uncataloged, which featured both the library fairy, who was a fellow library school student, and a recent intern.

I think that there is tremendous potential with videos to prepare prospective researchers, especially groups of students, for a visit to the library. I also see the value in creating screencasts. One of my resolutions is to create a presentation using Jing.

Thing 17: ELM Productivity Tools

After about eight attempts and numerous readings of instructions and helps I was finally able to set up an alert on Ebsco for women photographers, one of my interests, and get Bloglines to recognize it as a feed. Victory at last! I'm glad that I persisted as I had a chance to contemplate the value of such alerts for myself and researchers who use our library. I like that my alert is integrated with other feeds, mostly blogs, that I view fairly regularly on Bloglines.

I have found several ELM resources to be very valuable personally and for researchers at my library. We regularly use ProQuest newspaper database, especially for access to articles in the Minneapolis StarTribune. I also appreciate access to a variety of academic and professional journals. I tend to forget about the resources for K-12 students, but there are some impressive ones.

I want to explore e-books more as I daily observe the fragile condition of many of our older titles and want to find alternative ways to provide access to the information for researchers both in the library and those who contact us via other means.

Thing 16: Student 2.0 Tools

My first thought is that I wish I had known about these tools when I was younger and doing research papers. Other than 3x5 cards and outlines, my teachers offered little assistance and guidance. Well, I can't go back and improve my old papers, but I can use these tools to help the next generation of students. I looked at The University of Minnesota Assignment Calculator. It contains an impressive but not overwhelming 12 steps. I appreciated that step 5 and 6 have students reviewing books and articles before looking at websites. Good luck with that one, teachers! Each step contains links to other resources. I did find that the first link in step 12 was a 404 (couldn't be found).

Research Project Calculator is a 5-step research calculator for secondary students. It is funded by Minitex and MnLink. One nice feature of this tool is that you can choose your assignment format. I decided to try it for myself as a slide presentation, thinking that it might help me think about a PowerPoint presentation for an upcoming conference. I'm looking forward to getting e-mails reminding me of what I should be doing. The teacher guide emphasizes the teacher's role as information literacy coach, a role that librarians perform on an individual basis daily. There was even an instructional planning guide for library media specialists.

I can see the value of these tools, especially as we think about junior and senior high school students coming to our library to do their History Day projects. Now if they only had a guide for parents. Step one: drive your student to the library. Step two: let the student ask the questions and perform the research. I almost choke when eager parents come to the desk, standing in front of their children, and telling me "We have an assignment." I want so badly to ask about their boss. Instead, I try to get eye level with the student and direct my questions and responses to them. Sometimes it takes a while for the parents to catch on that this truly is in the best interests of their child.

Thing 15: Online Games and Libraries

This thing was tough for me. I can see that many libraries are embracing games as a way to bring in young people, and that games can be educational. However, I don't work in a public library. Frankly, when young people visit us they're either with a school group, working on History Day projects, or doing other research for school. Our main clientele is older, quieter, and fairly serious. That doesn't mix well with games.

I took a brief look at Puzzle Pirates but declined to play. I really don't have the time or interest in navigating the pirate world. The puzzles I enjoy are crosswords, sudoku, trivia quizes, and so on.

My exploration of Second Life at first seemed to be more promising. I'm mostly struggling to live my first life and don't have a lot of time or interest in building a second one. I took the video tour, which was not thrilling for me. I registered and then started to download the software for Second Life and then had Second Thoughts. Do I really want this on my home computer? Will I use it? I stopped and deleted all files. When I tried to get on Second Life it recognized my username Medora Sorbet (very nice, don't you think?), but the password I thought I had used didn't work. I requested help and got an e-mail that was less than helpful. The second time I did that it directed me to call a phone number and mentioned Linden dollars. In the interests in preserving my shrinking but real American dollars and my sanity, I exited the site.

There may be a role for Second Life in libraries. I suppose if that's where a lot of people went, then we could have a presence to answer reference questions as some librarians already do. However, given the special nature of the materials in our library and limited time, I don't think this is the best use of our resources. We're thinking about making a lot of links in Wikipedia topics to our library collections. I think that will give us a bigger bang for our buck or effort.

Thing 14: LibraryThing

I really enjoyed this thing, perhaps because it was more focused that Thing 13 -- fewer sites and tools to explore. I've had the LibraryThing blog among the rss feeds in my Bloglines account but didn't quite get how big and popular LibraryThing was until touring it a bit. As I get older I find that it's difficult sometimes to remember the titles and authors of books I've read. LibraryThing can keep track of them, especially the ones I want to remember.

I set up an account on LibraryThing, completed my profile with some favorite authors and a historical photograph of a woman reading a book. I then added six books, including tags and ratings. I love seeing the covers for so many of the recently published books. Being a visual person, the covers are an important reminder of the books and are an attraction for books read by others that I'd like to explore. I joined two groups, Librarians Who LibraryThing and Minnesota Things. I can see the value for readers in discovering other books and authors to read. I put the LibraryThing search box widget on the blog.

This seemed to be a perfect time to look at Good Reads, a site a retired colleague actively uses. I've sometimes looked at the books she has shared but haven't entered many of my own. Realistically, I'll probably only use one of these sites for my recreational reading and may choose Good Reads because I have a real live friend there. LibraryThing, however, fits libraries better and could be used as a promotional tool and source of images of book covers for new books listing on our intranet and public blogs.

Thing 13: Productivity Tools

Well, there were certainly a lot of things to look at in this thing. My initial reaction is that I spent quite a bit of time perusing possibile productivity tools. If I use one or more, my productivity could be increased. Meanwhile, it feels like I spent a lot of time looking at many tools I'll probably never use.


For the start page I chose NetVibes, not one of the choices mentioned. I learned about NetVibes from Michael Stephens in his spring 2008 presentation to Minnesota Health Science Libraries. I like the ability to choose and arrange elements, including e-mail, rss feeds, web searches, image searches, local weather, to do lists, and other highly useful tools on one page. I may use it as my start page at home. At work I use our library inhouse page which contains many databases and resources most relevant to my work. During the course of exploring thing 13 I also updated my iGoogle page, too.


While I found some of the calendar pages interesting and full of possibilities, I'm already managing an electronic calendar at work where I keep my meetings, appointments, and desk time up to date as well as a small datebook where I write my personal appointments. Right now it doesn't seem efficient to add another calendar to the mix. I think I might consider Google calendar when I retire. One tool I'm going to try is a list, Remember the Milk. I did get the countdown calendar to work and added it to the blog.

I took a look at Backpack and was impressed with the possiblities. My next step is to identify a project, either at work or at home, that I want to manage and give it a whirl.

Thing 12: Now I Digg and have Reddit

Like my animal friends, I've been having a good time digging in the garden. Time to get back to the 23 things. I spent a bit of time with all four tools and have concluded that they could be very useful to me at home but seem less relevant at work. Much of the emphasis is on the popular and sometimes wierd but interesting stories. My work is much less sensational and newsworthy. Since many researchers who come into our library are interested in genealogy, I thought that genealogy would be a good search term for these tools. One of the things I discovered was that genealogy, heritage, and family history are frequently used as terms for such things as computer programs.

On Digg I got four hits for genealogy. The first and best was an article on Geni.com about Genealogy for Web 2.0. The Second was about Windows Vista inheriting the sins of the father. Don't get me started on Vista.

Reddit yielded more results for my search on genealogy, about 50. Some were relevant to my interests and others not.

Newsvine was the most graphically appealing of the sites and represents what the world is talking about. Unfortunately, those are not the conversations in my library where researchers are focused on very specific topics, most of them in the past.

Mixx includes stories, photos, and videos submitted by users. I enjoyed looking at the popular photos, which were a diversion from work.

In conclusion, I could see spending time on these sites on vacation or in retirement. My acid test for Library 2.0 things is whether it saves me time and enlarges my understanding of my work and our clients' needs or if it wastes time and distracts. These sites fall into the second category.