Star Wars Storm Troopers!

Minimalist Library Video

Week 9: Thing 20, 21, 22, & 23

Thing 20: YouTube. My favorite video was Library Dominos, which was very succinct and minimalist in its modernity. The site was great for finding other videos, like The Anthem of Bilbo Baggins, which was sung by Leonard Nimoy under the 1960's music videos search term. Didn't know he was a LOTR fan, but it kinda makes sense. Also, enjoyed the Conan the Librarian video, which had great shock value and really made me laugh because of it!!! :0) Limitations of the site are the manner in which videos are organized. They are not in Dewey Decimal order when they come up on the screen!!! LOL :)

Thing 21: Podcasting. I checked out Podcast.net and found casts using the terms, library and book reviews. I came up with the Library News podcast, which is located at Arizona University (I believe). That podcast was popular and I also found it to be located in Yahoo Podcasts. I decided I like Podcast.net better than Yahoo since it had RRS links available for me to link to my blog. Ended up linking Library News and Sunnyvale Public Library (which is close to our system).

Thing22: E-books. I enjoyed playing around on the sjlibrary ebooks site (this is not my first time on this site). I looked for Lord of the Rings (of course! :0) ) and found numerous e-books available for free to customers, including CliffNotes of the book! I really feel that sjlibrary offers a lot to its customers-and it is entirely free!!! No annual memberships and there is a lot of literature available, so in terms of quality, it is outstanding!!! I also checked out WorldEBook Fair to do a comparison level analysis, but found that there is an annual fee (about $9.00 p/year) for full access. I also checked out the Gutenberg Project: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page , which is an excellent project, and should be utilized. It has a large number of free books available; however they are limited to books that are out of copyright. So, when I tried to conduct a search on the Lord of the Rings (of course!), there were no copies available! I tried again with both the author name and title, but there were still no copies available! So, since the books copyright is not up, the Gutenberg Project does not have it in their collection. So, for books out of copyright, I would use this website. In the final analysis, I have really grown to fully appreciate SJPL's Ebook site for the books being free, a lot of titles form which to choose, and it is very easy to use!!! :0)*SJPL Rocks for Ebooks!!! go to: sjlibrary.org

Thing 23: Summary!!! Yeah-- I made it through the program!

1. My favorite discoveries were e-Blogger, Bloglines, and LibraryThing. Blogging was actually a much more useful skill than I had previously believed. I previously knew about RSS feeds, but having all the good ones in one place was very good thing as I can get to my favorite news stories easily (without bookmarking everything in my browser) . I also enjoyed learning about Rollyo and Del.icio.us. !!!

2. Librarylearning 2.0 has helped me see the "big picture" in staying technologically in-tune with society. For example, social bookmarking is an interesting way of being connected with people, ideas, and books (as in LibraryThing !). I also appreciate learning skills that have helped increase my tech-ability and also my self-efficacy concerning tech-ability (which can always be increased for everyone in this fast-paced society!).

Also, I love Rollyo!!! :0) I learned from using my Rollyo that I can find a lot of really good information by delimiting the search engines to the ones I am most interested in retrieving information from. A Google search is known as a first-tier search, so that search may bring up more useless information, but a Rollyo searchtool brings searching to another level! Now, I can find useful information from the reputable sources I am interested in. I also enjoy becomming familiar with Web 2.0, which has great ways to search for local events, such as theater.

3. Suprisingly, I enjoy using my blog. Search engines and tools that I prefer to use are in one place-- so I can get to my Bloglines, Flickr, LibraryThing, and favorite You Tube movies all in one shot. It makes it more convenient to have everything you need for social web-browsing in one easily accessible area: the blog!

4. Learning 2.0 is valuable for individual staff to experience in order to become familiar with various search methods (Web 2.0), as well as for SJPL as a whole in general (think Grants). I do believe that staff should be encouraged to spend more time on the web and completing these excercises. We are typically allowed one hour a week to accomplish these excercises (so we have to do them mostly at home if we do not finish). If you offered another program in the future, I would chose to participate! :0)

To Virtual Services Team: Thing 11

Hi Virtual Services Team. Thanks for your encouragement! You all are a great team!

Thing 11 is posted on an older post under Week 5. In Web2.0, I checked out eventful.com and LibraryThing (among others) at that time and thought it was fabulous! At that time, I did not know that it would eventually be an excercise in which we would actually set up an account. I plan on doing that this week! Let me know if I need to do anything else to complete the exercise for thing #11. Thanks for your feedback!!! :0)

Week 8: Thing 18 & 19

Thing 18: First, I created an account with Zoho Writer. This was doable since I am getting good at making new accounts! Then, I explored the site and created a word document with favorite LOTR Quotes. Now, I am creating a blog post about my discoveries. Finally, I completed the Optional exercise by posting the document to my blog (you will find it below: LOTR Quotes). The first time I tried this was not that easy as the window requiring my blog information did not come up. Later, it did come up, though, and I was able to publish my Zoho Writer document to my blog!!! :0)

Thing 19: LibraryThing is really cool! I created an account and added some psychology and classic books to my library. I also put a LibraryThing widget on my blog so that you can look at my books collection. Then, I put a Library Thingie (a "chicklet") above my link list so you can get into my profile and from there, go to my library catalogue. I found that a lot of other people also selected the books that I had--for Darwin a little over 1K people, and for the Hobbit over 3K!!!. Now, I also have included more academic books also. I like LibraryThing!!! :0)

LOTR_Quotes

Here are some great LOTR quotes, from thetolkienwiki, which I found through a great rollyo search tool called Ainulindale, which is also linked to my Psychology rollyo.

 

Boromir says, "Valour needs first strength, and then a weapon."

Eowyn: "Where will wants not, a way opens."

 

Faramir: "War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend."

 

Galadrial: "Do not trouble your hearts overmuch with thought of the road tonight. Maybe the paths that you each shall tread are already laid before your feet, though you do not see them."

Week 7: Thing 16 & 17

Thing 16: Wiki's. Book Lovers Wiki by Princeton Public library is totally cool. Links on the side include 5 star book reviews and classics. Found a great book, Hubble: The Mirror on the Universe, by Ronin Kerrod, which has pics of stars, galaxies, and star nurseries that are phenomenal. Checked out the Albany County Public Library Staff wiki, http://albystaff.pbwiki.com/ , which has information on library procedures. It also allows people to add to their wiki and edit information. Found http://learning.libraryu.org/home/ from the Illionois State Library, which has relevant information for library trustees. Also looked at other wiki examples and created a link on wikis with library success, which included procedural information which could be useful. Loved the Library Success: A best practices wiki, which is now in my link list!!! :0)

Thing 17: Added deblearning to the SJLibraryLearning 2.0 Favorites wiki. Found it to be a doable process. I just wanted to change the title of my blog though, but am not sure if I can do it, since I registered with Virtual Services w. this blog title and it is in the Participants list. Also completed the optional excercise in order to put a favorite book on the wiki: Pride and Prejudice and Lord of the Rings. I used my display name, kepola, to wiki my favorite books. Tough choice to pick only one book-just see if you can do it!!! :0)

Week 6: Thing 13, 14, & 15

Thing 13: Exploring del.icio.us was fun. I viewed the 12 minute tutorial on del.icio.us and found it helpful. I completed the Optional exercise in setting up a delicious account with three bookmarks and three tags (at that time) linking SJSU academic and sjlibrary together. Seems very helpful to have bookmarks in one place. But, I have a question. Now I have a del.icio.us account, a rollyo account, a bloglines account, a flickr account, and a blog, so in order to find all this streamlined information, I now have more places to go to get it!!! Seems like more work than necessary. Where are the days when we just checked our email and surfed the web?

* In order to deal with the issue listed above, I started adding more links to my blog so that a lot of the same information could be easier to access from any computer. I think it helps!

Exercise 2 & 3: Looked in del.icio.us SJLibraryLearning2 and found that the first bookmark was saved by 21 people and was very cool since it was concerning LibraryThing, which is a great social bookmarking tool for booklovers and their collections and favorites. I guess I need another account! :0) Also, there were 12 tags under the heading Education, some of them library-related.

Thing 14: Discovery exercise #1 was fun! keyword searchs in Technorati were different depending on how you limited them. Searches for Learning 2.0 in blogposts yielded 34,258 results. Searching in tags yielded 223 blog tags. Searching in the blog directory only yielded 1 blog, "2 Cents Worth." Discovery exercise #2: apparently BoingBoing is the most popular blog w. 1,455 members making it their Favorite! Discovery excercise #3: doing it now-blog post. Discovery exercise #4: thoughts about tagging. It seems useful. I still need to learn how to tag the LibraryThing post in the Technorati as one of my favorite's. May need a Technorati account...

Thing 15: I read one of the five perspectives in the OCLC Next Space Newsletter, and found the Away from the Iceberg post, by Rick Anderson, very intriguing. The notion of the "just in case" collection made sense (except for very difficult to obtain books that people would like to see in hard copy-these are rare and not in the "just in case" collection anyway). The "come to us" model of library services is just what Library 2.0 is about and it means "integrating our services into their daily patterns of work, study and play."