Fun in the Sandbox: Week 7 / Thing 17

It took me a couple of days to figure how to post my "contributions" below to MD Libraries Sandbox. Use Edit (duh!). Then I thought (ah!) that's the power of this type of program--everyone who signs up has equal weight in adding or deleting to the site.

This could be problematic--I heard on the news today that big companies like the voting machine maker Debold have edited out bad news on themselves at wikipedia.com. But I wouldn't think wikis would be used for anything proprietarial or of national security.

This is the link to my Favorites page:
http://marylandlibrariessandbox.pbwiki.com/Favorite+Magazines

This is the link to my blog allnewtechie at the Sandbox, under PG County's section:

http://marylandlibrariessandbox.pbwiki.com/Favorite+Blogs

Wikis: Week 7 / Thing 16

I have been using wikipedia.com for several years for information on pop culture items, etc. I explored several of the wiki tutorials and found out a lot of information about their setup that I didn't know. One site had a great suggestion to connect people who are on a waiting list for a popular book so that they can talk to each about that title.

I also explored the BookLovers Wiki of the Princeton Public Library. I like how it's just a simple website with brief reviews of all kinds of books. Customers send in their thoughts and give books the number of stars the book deserves. I also like how the site has pictures of the books' covers and a link to the library's catalog to see if a copy is on the shelf. We have something similar at PGCMLS' catalog website but it is links to book reviews from publishing magazines. It might be good to add a customer review feature to our website.

Library 2.0: Week 6 / Thing 15

The YouTube video "The Machine is Us/ing Us" was awesome! I must watch it again with the sound up.

After reading the "Away from Icebergs" essay, I found a lot of good nuggets to chew on and digest. I do think some parts of a "just-in-case" print collection are unnecessary and it would be good to learn how to steer customers better to our online collections.

After reading the Wikipedia article, this Library 2.0 concept seems to focus on technology/computers, but at least 40 percent of what public librarians work with and of what customers want are books. Plus don't these Library 2.0 proponents think customers care about interacting with people face-to-face? (I don't think most people, especially women, do most of their socializing online; but boys--maybe so.) And what about reading in this Library 2.0 equation? Where's that in their new-fangled ideas?

Tagging: Week 6 / Thing 14

In my brief exploration of Technorati, it seems to be a website of techie blogs. I browsed a long time to find any interesting blogs in the Top Favorites--alth0ugh I did explore The Unofficial Apple Weblog. This blog had so much information one could spend days exploring it. I like how the Top Favorites page has so many features like a snapshot of the webblog, its URL, recent posts, and of course all that blog's relevant tags.

Regarding the Learning 2.0 search, I definitely had to put the phrase in quotes to find related blogs/posts. There were 187 blogs--it seems like people had just give their blogs that phrase name. There were 25, 489 posts about Learning 2.0.

I found a great blog dictionary under Support/Site Guide.

Del.icio.us : Week 6 / Thing 13

I've been working with Del.icio.us for a few days and I think I finally have a basic understanding of its purpose and how it works.

I can see the value of using this site for bookmarking, in the similar way that Rollyo is used, but with less work. I set up my own login and I like how you can just type in your URL (http://del.icio.us/allnewtechie), and boom! you're there. No password necessary, etc.

Maybe this site would be useful if one is exploring a topic and wanted to see what other people think are interesting sites related to your topic. This would be good for 'lite' research, but not for any topic one would need to explore in depth.

Rollyo: Week 5 / Thing 12

I'm not sure I understand the ultimate benefit of Rollyo--you find websites on a specific topic that you can do searches within? Why waste time loading in all these websites into a searchroll? Just use Google!

But here's a link to a searchroll I made up:
http://rollyo.com/allnewtechie/shopping_for_organic_food

LibraryThing: Week 5 / Thing 11

I thought the LibraryThing website was very interesting. It's always fascinating to see what books are recommended for certain titles. I found it a great way to explore additional aspects of a topic or to find new authors.

The following are other interesting aspects of LibraryThing to me:
- you can join one of the many different book groups. I joined Reading Globally Fiction.
- that I can have my own RSS feed of my books or my reviews.
- that you can automatically find out the Chicago, APA, etc. citations of any book in the catalog.

This is my online library.