Wikis

So I'm reading this article by Meredith Farkas (http://www.webjunction.org/social-software/articles/content/438229) about wikis and their potential use in libraries. It's overall not bad, except I don't think she was careful enough about hiding either her bias or the bias she assumes her audience has. From what I'm reading, she's clearly writing for librarians who are A) older and/or B) not comfortable with technology. For example:

"It can be difficult for people to get used to the idea of a website that anyone is allowed to add to or edit. The notion of private property is so deeply embedded in our society that it’s difficult to imagine going onto someone else’s website and changing things, even when they want us to. "

Um, no? Not for me and my generation, at any rate. The idea of popping in to a website and adding content is pretty much run-of-the-mill for us. Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, a wide variety of message boards, even things like fanfic sites (http://www.fanfiction.net/) or original fiction sites (http://www.fictionpress.com/) or video creating sites (http://www.animoto.com/ - and I really recommend this site, it's awesome) are a part of our normal lives.

All that to say, I wish she would have stayed away from assuming that all of her readers are uncomfortable with this.

Because we're not.

The wide majority of the article, though, is really good. I enjoyed her suggestions for how libraries can use wikis; I especially liked the idea of subject guides as wikis. I can see CML using wikis for things like organizing when different branches have tech trainings or FOL booksales, and also for lists of specialty DVDs or books, like Triple Crown books or horror movies.

Also posted a few things on the CML wiki sandbox. Fun, except I kind of wish the formatting was different. This seems more like a many-paged message board. Not as clean or streamlined as I'd wish, but then again, I'm kind of picky about that.

Library 2.0 stuff

As someone who uses "open" technology quite a bit, there's a lot about Web 2.0 and consequently Library 2.0 that I like. I like user-directed stuff, and I like that users can share content. I also have to add some caution in there, though. Open content means, of course, it is also open to abuse, and there are still people on the web that are not wise to that and seem to be surprised when some sort of abuse happens. There's a balance that needs to be struck between enjoying the variety and diversity of user content and understanding that with that enjoyment comes the possibility of seeing something that maybe you don't enjoy so much.

I think that balance is something that needs to be taken into consideration when implementing user-driven features in our libraries. Many people don't understand that balance or aren't willing to strike that balance, and even though we as librarians love new technology and are always ready to jump on the technology bandwagon, I think we need to keep these people in mind, as well. I'm afraid that we'll go too fast; that we'll lose our "lifelong" customers while we try to court the fickle young minds that adore this technology.

Yummy

Checked out Delicious today and set up some bookmarks. With a lot of these learn & play activities, it seems like they would be very useful on my home PC but not so much at work for various reasons. With Delicious, I think the problem is that our work PCs reset every time we restart them. Since I don't have a dedicated user PC, all that stuff about putting a tab button in the toolbar etc doesn't work for me. So if I want to bookmark stuff, I still have to copy the URL, head to Delicious, sign in, and then set up a bookmark for it. I guess it is handier than having to search for the website every time, though.

I do like how they show you how many people also have the website bookmarked. This "social" part of social bookmarking makes it kind of neat to check out those people's bookmarks and see what else you might have in common.

Anyway, here are my bookmarks: http://www.delicious.com/hhcmeg

Speaking of play, we get to go bowling next week! Yay!

Twittering away

http://www.twitter.com/hhcmeg

Half of the libraries are closed today because of the power outages. The other half are open, and I know that here, at least, none of us are very happy about being here. But what do you do?

I was trying to get Twitter to consecutively post with, say, Blogger or my Livejournal, but it wasn't working. As far as I could figure out, you can only have it download tweets in lump sums at a set time during the day from LoudTwitter. Not really what I wanted. But I'm pretty sure some of my flist can get it to work on LJ, so I'm not sure what I'm missing. I'm sure I'll keep playing around with it and will probably figure it out, but that on top of my terrible horrible no good very bad day already today, I'm not very positively inclined towards Twitter right now.

LibraryThing

Clearly I'm using today to catch up on my Learn & Play tasks, haha. Although I was lucky on this one: I already had a LibraryThing account. I didn't do much on it for like a year, but today I logged back in again and added a few more books. Take a look: http://www.librarything.com/profile/tahmthelame

Photo Phun

I kind of hate myself for using that "ph as f" thing in the post title. Oh well.

I love messing around with images, so I really enjoyed this challenge for the Learn & Play.

I messed around with making a picture cube from Big Huge Labs: http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/cube.php. I still have to cut it out and put the tabs together, but it's a little bit of awesome. And it was nice because it could link right up with my Flickr account.

And because it's fun, I also messed around with Cool Text (http://www.cooltext.com/) and embossed my name.

Library RSS feeds

Here are some interesting library-related RSS feed sites I found:

http://www.libraryjournal.com/learnrss (A whole list from Library Journal - all look pretty good!)

http://www.ala.org/apps/xml/alonline.xml (American Libraries Online RSS top stories feed)

http://www.loc.gov/rss/ (A bunch of RSS feeds from the Library of Congress)

RSS feeds

I've never really dealt much with RSS feeds. They're a little bit intimidating, since people like professional online comics stars and famous authors have them. But, since that's the newest task for CML Learn & Play, I've given it a try.

And I kind of like it...

It looks like it might be a neat way to keep all my most-visited websites together, which I suspect is probably one of the points of the whole thing. It was also kind of a winnowing exercise deciding what to put on my feed and what to leave off. Sort of a "I go here often but is it really THAT often?" discussion in my head.

ETA: FINALLY got my bloglines website thing to show. You can find my blogroll here: http://www.bloglines.com/blog/barigrl. (A note about the name "barigrl:" While it is often misread as BAR girl, it is actually BARI girl. In high school, I had the distinction of being the only girl in the whole county who played bari sax in marching band. Obviously I'm reaching far back to pull out very old usernames for this projects, haha.)