Week 9: Instant Messaging

Unlike many of the library professionals recently out of school, I had not experienced the wonder of IMing, except thru my teenage children.  Since I already had a yahoo account established it was really easy to get on Meebo and start chatting.  I find it difficult sometimes to keep up with the thread of a conversation, as I am still trying to type everything out in full with the appropriate capital letters and punctuation.  I believe with practice this will be easier.  I am not certain that this technology will help me much in my day-to-day job requirements, but can see where it would be useful for staying in touch with personal friends and family around the world.  If I were handling more  reference questions on a daily basis I could see where being able to IM other experts quickly would be very handy.

Week 8: Cloud Computing

I wasn’t familiar with this term, but the concept was not new.  I set up a calendar in 30Boxes in order to list library programs.  I invited other librarians to add their events to the calendar.  I think this is a very helpful tool for professionals to be able to easily share knowledge with one another.  It certainly is a timesaver when compared with emailing documents back and forth.  It took me a little while to figure out the details of 30Boxes, but the light bulb finally went on and I believe I can use it in an efficient manner now!

Week 7: Microblogging

I set up a Twitter account.  I found it fairly easy to set up, although a little time consuming to set my prefrerences at first.  I elected to follow the Johnson County Library, Kansas Library Association and 23 Things Kansas.  I decided to follow these organizations because they all directly affect my job and I thought the information they give might be most helpful to me.  However, with hindsight, I think I may have gotten the opportunity for more back and forth sharing had I chosen some individuals as well.  Also, I think if I can figure out how to use my cell phone to access my tweets this would be more useful.  It is time-consuming to sign on to the account and then browse all of the tweets.  By the time I get finished looking at them all I am no longer that interested in replying.  My biggest dilemma with all of these technological advances seems to be the amount of time it takes to keep up with them all!

Week 6: Tagging and Social Bookmarking

Until this week, I wasn’t even aware that there was such a thing as “Social Bookmarking”!  I set up a Delicious account using a Yahoo account I created with my Reading Nut alias, as I was concerned about using my personal yahoo account.  I think I maybe too concerned (frightened) about having too much of my personal information just floating around the internet.  This probably holds me back from fully utilizing many of these new technical tools.  Anyway, I set up my Delicious account without any difficulties and pulled and tagged three sites that would assist with readers advisory.  I shared a couple of these sites with Rebecca Brown.  I can understand how social bookmarking would be particularly helpful to those doing reference and/or research on a daily basis, but do not feel it is all that helpful to someone in my position.  Since I work at a small library branch as an Information Specialist, I spend a good majority of my day multi-tasking between circing, shelving, and handling all patron questions.  I do not have the time to refer to Delicious.com when helping a patron.  If the patrons question is so in depth that I cannot readily assist them then I need to be referring them to one of the speciality reference librarians who has the time to help.  Of course, as a librarian I definitely appreciate the need to “tag” items!  This is just another great way to catalog/organize as much information as possible.

Week 5: RSS Feeds

I created a Blogline account, as I was not interested in overloading either my professional or personal email accounts.  I found it very simple to create the accounts and find interesting feeds regarding the two subjects I was most interested:  libraries and food.  Out of the suggested feeds on the two subjects I set up my account for 9 of them.  I am a little concerned that I will not be able to keep up with the amount of information they display, but enjoyed perusing all of the feeds throughout the week.  My favorite two feeds of the nine are “Simply Recipes” and “Library Stuff”.  “Simply Recipes” is a family cooking and food blog that gives lots of yummy ideas for healthy family meals. “Library Stuff” is a weblog dedicated to keeping librarians up to date on professional developments.

Week 4: Photo Sharing

I created my Flickr account and went through the steps of personalizing and uploading photos to my account.  It was fairly straightforward.  I did a search for books and received over 2 million options!  I was looking for photos that only included books and did not have people or other objects in them, but found that almost impossible.  I tried narrowing my search several different ways without any luck.  I did end up finding this really neat photo of a bookstore by Lochaven.  Unfortunately, so far I have been unsuccessful in adding it to my blog.  I will keep trying!

Week 3: Online Meetings

I watched an archived webinar thru OPAL entitled “Get a Second Life: Virtual Worlds and Interactive Media in Libraries” presented on 3/8/07 by Kelly Czarnecki and Matt Gullett of the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County.  It was very interesting information regarding the increasing necessity for libraries to be present in the virtual world.  The presenters discussed the emergence of online games like World of Warcraft as the new “golf for the business world” and how libraries can use gaming to attract youth to the library.  Both of the presenters have been involved in setting up a virtual library on the Second Life interface developed by Linden Lab out of San Francisco and they talked about how they have around 3000 teens that visit the virtual library every day.  While this is a different concept of a library I can certainly see where it would be quite relevant to the many youth who have access to a computer, but may never have the opportunity to physically visit a library (latchkey kids, rural youth, etc.).  The presenters gave the following quote which I think explains overall where public libraries are headed in the future for patrons:  ”A focus on developing our environments as places to interact and create rather than just as storehouses of stuff that they come to consume.”

I enjoyed viewing this webinar and can see where this technology gives much more flexibility to the instructor and instructee.  Because it was an archived webinar, I missed the ability to interact with all of the participants and the learning experience was certainly much more isolated than being in a traditional classroom.  However, since I have participated in ongoing live webinars in the past, I know for a fact that this is not the case with a live webinar.  As peoples lives continue to get busier and we focus on a more sustainable way of living , I believe we will see almost exclusively online meetings and the traditional onsite meeting will become a thing of the past.